EDITORIAL: Trump did what had to be done

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Prime Minister Mark Carney, among other world leaders, provided the reasons justifying U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to join with Israel in attacking three Iranian nuclear facilities.

“Iran can never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon,” Carney said, echoing Trump in the wake of the American military operation.

Carney noted Iran has pursued nuclear weapons for decades, while calling for the elimination of Israel and sponsoring terrorism through proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Iranian revolutionary guard and other groups, in violation of international law.

The idea that Iran’s fanatical dictators will ever abandon these goals through diplomacy alone is absurd.

What’s needed is diplomacy with teeth.

That’s what Israel, followed by Trump, provided when he ordered American B-2 bombers to deploy 13,600-kg “bunker buster” munitions against Iran’s heavily fortified Fordow nuclear facility, along with military strikes against its Isfahan and Natanz nuclear sites.

Assurances from Iranian leadership it intends to use enriched uranium for peaceful purposes are meaningless.

This coming from a regime built on lies, Jew hatred and murdering civilians, including 55 Canadians and 30 permanent residents of Canada, along with 91 other innocents, when Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps blew Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 out of the sky on Jan. 8, 2020.

Iran’s dictators are also engaged in perpetual warfare against their own people, imprisoning, blinding and murdering dissidents, especially women, for demanding the most basic human rights in courageous defiance of a regime with an ocean of blood on its hands.

We agree with diplomacy in the Mideast, but the idea that diplomacy alone will remove the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran posing an existential threat to Israel defies logic, which is why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the initial attack on Iran.

While Trump has been criticized by U.S. Democrats and some Republicans for not getting congressional approval for attacking Iran, Republican and Democratic presidents have been doing that for decades in the name of national security.

That said, seeking to impose a regime change on Iran would be a strategic blunder and we hope Trump is sincere in backing off that idea, after initially floating it.

That policy led to disaster in Iraq and demonstrates why only the Iranian people can free themselves from Iran’s dictators.

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