Iran consistently promoted and sponsored terror throughout the Middle East and the world. They’ve been chanting “Death to America” for half a century. They’ve been working on a nuclear bomb for decades. Their radical Islami-fascist theocracy repeatedly vowed to wipe Israel off the map, because they believed Allah willed it.

War with Iran was therefore inevitable. The only question was when.

We could have waited for Iran to attack us. America’s unspoken policy over the years, after all, has been not to attack an adversary until the adversary attacks us first.

That sounds noble, but might not be smart. Waiting for Japan to attack us at the outset of WWII almost cost us the war. If not for the lucky fact that America’s aircraft carriers were out at sea rather than at base in Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the entire Pacific Fleet might have been destroyed.

So, too, with Iran. We could have delayed this war for months and even years until after Iran restocked its weapons from the blows inflicted last summer by the Israelis and Americans.

By then, Iran would not only be restocked with replacement weapons, but might have a few new ones – such as nuclear bombs or at least a “dirty bomb” that is designed not to produce a nuclear explosion but to simply spread radioactive contamination over a large area such as Tel Aviv – or Washington, D.C.

President Trump was right to stop Iran now, before it regrouped and re-weaponized.

In doing so, Trump showed a level of maturity, discipline and vision that I’ve sometimes doubted he possessed. It would have been easy to just kick the Iran can down the road, down past the mid-terms, down past his presidency, to let some successor deal with the problem.

Yes, the problem would be bigger down the road, but it would be someone else’s problem, not Trump’s.

Trump’s predecessors did exactly that. Biden was of course half asleep, and paid little attention to anything. But I’m less forgiving of Obama, who consciously entered into his 2015 agreement with Iran to let them develop nuclear weapons after ten years – a ten-year period that expired last year.

If Trump hadn’t cancelled Obama’s Iranian deal and if the Israelis and Americans had not taken out Iran’s underground uranium enrichment facilities last summer, it’s quite likely that Iran would have nukes today.

Re-read that last sentencer. Under Obama’s approach, Iran would probably have nukes today. Some of the ballistic missiles they’re raining down on Israel, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere would probably bear nuclear warheads capable of killing millions.

So, when you read the “war-is-hell” headlines from CNN or the depictions of mass-murdering Ayatollah Khamenei as a kindly grandpa from Al Jazeera or the latest “Trump-is-Hitler whine from the hypocritical, pusillanimous Democrats, remember: This war was inevitable – in fact, the Iranians have been fighting it for many years. The only question was when we finally decided to fight back – now when they’re weak, or later when they’re armed with nukes.