conflict
Trump’s election victory shows the American people want peace in Ukraine

From LifeSiteNews
By Bob Marshall
Americans resolutely rejected Kamala Harris’s war policies, electing Donald Trump on a platform of de-escalation. Joe Biden’s late delegation of missile control to President Zelensky and $24 billion funding serves only to deepen global conflict and risk elevation to WWIII
On November 5, 2024, American voters rendered their verdicts on several important questions where Donald Trump and Kamala Harris had polar opposite policies. The Russia-Ukraine war was one of them.
- In September, Trump said, “I want the war to stop. I want to save lives that are being uselessly killed by the millions…. It’s so much worse than the numbers that you’re getting.”
- Harris, after having opposed a peace agreement worked out between Ukraine and Russia in 2022, said in late September, “I will work to ensure Ukraine prevails in this war.”
- Harris, who reminded us constantly that “democracy [was] on the ballot” here in the United States, seemed to care not a bit that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had canceled Ukraine’s elections, perhaps in a bid to avoid his own voters. Further, in a Gallup poll of Ukraine, conducted in August and October 2024, “an average of 52% of Ukrainians would like to see their country negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible. Nearly four in 10 Ukrainians (38%) believe their country should keep fighting until victory.”
When many millions of Americans and Ukrainians clearly want peace, and neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris can define “victory,” what are we to make of Joe Biden’s two, giant, post-election steps toward expanding the war into Russia proper and central Europe?
- Step 1) Initiating unprecedented direct missile strikes on Russia: Biden took the first step on November 17, 2024, when he (or his handlers) delegated his authority over targeting U.S. ATACMS long-range missile batteries in Ukraine to Volodymyr Zelensky. Not only did Biden authorize Zelensky to select targets inside the Russian Federation, he also authorized Zelensky to have virtual command and control through U.S. military and civilian personnel who are the only military forces capable of firing these missiles and using NATO/U.S. satellites to guide them to the Russian and North Korean facilities, soldiers, and civilians Zelensky wanted destroyed or killed!
- Step 2) Asking Congress to write Biden another Ukraine war check: President Biden wants a Supplemental Appropriations of $24 billion for Ukraine before he leaves office on January 20, 2025. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) wisely refused to permit a lame-duck Congress to authorize Biden and Zelensky to continue the war into 2025 in an effort to box in or block Trump from ending it, because until noon on January 20, 2025, when Donald Trump takes office, he has no formal veto powers – all Trump has is the moral authority to call the nation to its senses.
With most of official Washington focused on the transition, the president-elect’s appointments, and the drama of confirmation battles in the Senate, now is a good time to reflect on some basic truths about the defense of our homeland against invasions and attacks by enemies, both foreign and domestic.
For good or for ill, significant portions of this struggle over whether officially Washington and London want a “hot” war with Russia will be played out in the congressional budget process during the deliberations of any future appropriations bills, made all the dicier because of the micrometer-slim Republican majority in the House, where, “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives” (U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 7, Clause 1).
And remember, Republican and Democratic House and Senate war hawks, as well as their civilian supporters, campaign donors, weapons’ manufacturers providing local jobs in 70-plus U.S. cities, leftist media harpies, and the legions of “Never Trumpers” have not disappeared. So, concern over Ukraine war funding still applies to any future appropriations for Ukraine after January 20, 2025.
- On November 19, following Biden’s delegation of authority to Zelensky to command U.S. troops to target Russian territory, “President Vladimir Putin … formally lowered the threshold for Russia’s use of its nuclear weapons … [that] allows for a potential nuclear response by Moscow even to a conventional attack on Russia by any nation that is supported by a nuclear power.”
- On November 29, Hungarian Defense Minister Kristof Szalay-Bobrovniczky stated, “Until the inauguration of the U.S. president on January 20, we will go through the most dangerous period in the Russia-Ukraine war that has been going on for nearly three years now.” Hungary is a NATO member.
In electing Trump, Americans also voted resoundingly for aggressive defense of the homeland. They will not tolerate continued invasions and attacks on our people and infrastructure by foreign nationals, organized criminal gangs, border jumpers, and terrorists. Russians and Ukrainians have the same rights to self-defense and self-determination. We know exactly what Americans would think if our homeland, territories, or military installations were threatened or attacked by Russia’s or any other hostile power’s missiles based in Cuba, Mexico, or overseas. We would either respond in kind or at least seriously and convincingly warn of equal repercussions.
Donald Trump Jr. “gets it.” Last month, the president-elect’s son posted on X:
The Military Industrial Complex seems to want to make sure they get World War 3 going before my father has a chance to create peace and save lives. Gotta lock in those $Trillions. Life be damned!!! Imbeciles!
And, right on cue to prove his point, some current NATO advisors are urging that President Biden give the Zelensky administration nuclear weapons. Several NATO officials “suggested that Mr. Biden could return nuclear weapons to Ukraine that were taken from it after the fall of the Soviet Union. That would be an instant and enormous deterrent. But such a step would be complicated and have serious implications.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov responded, “These are absolutely irresponsible arguments of people who have a poor understanding of reality and who do not feel a shred of responsibility when making such statements. We also note that all of these statements are anonymous.”
This article is reprinted with permission from the Family Research Council, publishers of The Washington Stand at washingtonstand.com.
conflict
US airstrike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Was it obliteration?

A satellite image of the Isfahan nuclear research center in Iran shows visible damage to structures and nearby tunnel entrances from recent US airstrikes. / Satellite image (c) 2025 Maxar Technologies.
Seymour Hersh
The US attack on Iran may not have wiped out its nuclear ambitions but it did set them back years
I started my career in journalism during the early 1960s as a reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago, a now long-gone local news agency that was set up by the Chicago newspapers in the 1890s to cover the police and fire departments, City Hall, the courts, the morgue, and so on. It was a training ground, and the essential message for its aspiring reporters was: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
It was a message I wish our cable networks would take to heart. CNN and MSNBC, basing their reporting on an alleged Defense Intelligence Agency analysis, have consistently reported that the Air Force raids in Iran on June 22 did not accomplish their primary goal: total destruction of Iran’s nuclear-weapons capacity. US newspapers also joined in, but it was the two nominally liberal cable channels, with their dislike—make that contempt—for President Donald Trump, that drove the early coverage.
There was no DIA analysis per se. All US units that engage in combat must file an “after-action report” to the DIA after a military engagement. In this case, the report would have come from the US Central Command, located at MacDill Air Force base in Tampa, Florida. CENTCOM is responsible for all US military operations in the Middle East, Egypt, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. One US official involved in the process told me that “the first thing out of the box is you have to tell your boss what happened.” It was that initial report of the bombing attack that was forwarded to DIA headquarters along the Potomac River in Washington and copied or summarized by someone not authorized to do so and sent to the various media outlets.
The view of many who were involved in the planning and execution of the mission is that the report was summarized and leaked “for political purposes”—to cast immediate doubt on the success of the mission. The early reports went so far as to suggest that Iran’s nuclear program has survived incapacitation by the attack. Seven US B-2 “Spirit” bombers, each carrying two deep-penetration “bunker-busters” weighing 30,000 pounds, had flown without challenge from their base in Missouri to the primary target: Iran’s Fordo nuclear facility, concealed deep inside a mountain twenty miles north of the city of Qom.
The planning for the attack began with the knowledge that the main target—the working area of the nuclear program—was buried at least 260 feet below the rocky surface at Fordo. The gas centrifuges spinning there were repeatedly enriching uranium, in what is known as a cascade, not to weapons-grade level—uranium-235 isotopes enriched to 90 percent—but to 60 percent. Further processing to create weapons grade uranium, if Iran chose to do so, could be done in a matter of weeks, or less. The Air Force planning group had also been informed before the bombing raid, most likely by the Israelis, who have a vast spy network in Iran, that more than 450 pounds of the enriched gas stored at Fordo had been shipped to safety at another vital Iranian nuclear site at Isfahan, 215 miles south of Tehran. Isfahan was the only known facility in Iran capable of converting the Fordo gas into a highly enriched metal—a critical early stage of building the bomb. Isfahan also was a separate target of the US attack on Fordo, and was pulverized by Tomahawk missiles fired by a U.S. submarine operating in the Gulf of Aden, off Yemen.
As a journalist who for decades has covered the nascent nuclear crisis in the Middle East, it seemed clear to me and to informed friends I have in Washington and Israel that if Fordo somehow survived its bunker-buster attack, as was initially suggested, and continued to enrich more uranium, Isfahan would not. No enrichment, no Iranian bomb.
I’ve been frustrated and angry at cable news coverage for years, and that includes Fox News, too, and decided to try and find the real story. If your mother says she loves you, check it out. And I checked out enough of it to share.
I was told that “the first question for the American planners was how big was the actual workspace at Fordo? Was it a structure? We had to find that out before we got rid of it.” Some of the planners estimated that the working space “was the size of two hockey rinks: 200 feet long and 85 feet wide.” It came to 34,000 square feet. The height of the underground working space was assumed to be ten-and-a-half feet—I was not told the genesis of that assumption—and the size of the target was determined to be 357,000 cubic feet.
The next step was to measure the power of the dozen or more bunker-busters that were planned to be “carefully spaced and dropped” by the US B-2 bombers, using the most advanced guidance systems. (During one high-level session in Washington, one of the Air Force planners was asked what would happen if the B-2’s guidance systems were corrupted by an outside signal. “We’d miss the target” was the answer.)
I was assured that even if the rough estimate of the working space at Fordo was far off, the bombers targeting Fordo each carried a 30,000-pound bomb with an explosive payload of as much as five thousand pounds, which was more than enough to pulverize the mythical hockey rinks, or even a much larger working space.
Some of the bombs were also outfitted with what is known as a hard target void sensing fuze, which enabled the bombs to penetrate multiple layers of a site like Fordo before detonating. This would maximize the destructive effect. Each bomb, dropped in sequence, would create a force of rubble that would cause increasing havoc in the working areas deep inside the mountain.
“The bombs made their own hole. We built a 30,000-pound steel bullet,” the official told me, referring with pride to the bunker-busters.
Most important, he said, was that there were no post-strike hints detected of radioactivity—more evidence that the 450 pounds of enriched uranium had been moved from Fordo to the reprocessing site at Isfahan prior to the US attack there, which was code-named “Midnight Hammer.” That operation included a third US strike at yet another nuclear facility at Natanz.
“The Air Force got everything on the hit list,” the official told me. “Even if Iran rebuilds some centrifuges, it will still need Isfahan. There is no conversion capability without it.”
Why not, I asked, tell the public about the success of the raid and the fact that Iran no longer has a potential nuclear weapon?
The answer: “There will be a top-secret report about all of this, but we don’t tell people how hard we work. We tell the public what we think it wants to hear.”
The US official, asked about the future of the Iranian nuclear program, quickly acknowledged that “there is a communication problem” when it comes to the fate of the program.
The intent of the strike planners, he said, “was to prevent the Iranians from building a nuclear weapon in the near term—a year or so—with the hope they would not try again. The clear understanding was that there was no expectation to ‘obliterate’ every aspect of their nuclear program. We don’t even know what that is.
“Obliteration means the glass—[eliminating] Iran’s nuclear program—is full. The planning and the results are the glass is half-full. For Trump critics, the results are the glass is half-empty—the centrifuges may have survived and four hundred pounds of 60 percent enriched uranium are missing. The bombs could not be assured to penetrate the centrifuge chamber . . . too deep, but they could cover them up [with rocks and other bomb debris] and in the process cause unknown damage to them.
“Whether the 60 percent [enriched uranium] was there or not is irrelevant because without centrifuges they cannot refine it to weapons grade. Add to this the research and refinement and conversion from gas to metal—required for a bomb—at Isfahan are also gone.
“Results? Glass is half-full . . . a couple of years of respite and uncertain future. So now Trump’s defense is Full Glass. Critics? Half-empty. Reality? Half-full. There you are.”
The immediate beneficiary of the use of US force in Iran will not be a more placid Middle East, but Israel, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli Air Force and army are still killing massive numbers of Palestinians in Gaza.
There remains no evidence that Iran was on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power. But as the world has known for decades, Israel maintains a significant nuclear arsenal that it officially claims does not exist.
This is a story not about the bigger picture, which is muddled, but about a successful US mission that was the subject of a lot of sloppy reporting because of a reviled president. It would have been a breakthrough had anyone in the mainstream press spoken or written about the double standard that benefits Israel and its nuclear umbrella, but in America that remains a taboo.
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conflict
Obama Dropped Over 26K Bombs Without Congressional Approval

@miss_stacey_ Biden, Clinton, Obama & Harris on Iran #biden #clinton #obama #harris #trump #iran #nuclear
Iran has been the target for decades. Biden, Harris, and Clinton—all the Democrats have said that they would attack Iran if given the opportunity. It appears that Donald Trump is attempting to mitigate a potentially irresolvable situation. As he bluntly told reporters: We basically — we have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f‑‑‑ they’re doing.”
A portion of the nation believes Trump acted like a dictator by attacking Iran without Congressional approval. I explained how former President Barack Obama decimated the War Powers Resolution Act when he decided Libya was overdue for a regime change. The War Powers Act, or War Powers Resolution of 1973, grants the POTUS the ability to send American troops into battle if Congress receives a 48-hour notice. The stipulation here is that troops cannot remain in battle for over 60 days unless Congress authorizes a declaration of war. Congress could also remove US forces at any time by passing a resolution.
Libya is one of seven nations that Obama bombed without Congressional approval, yet no one remembers him as a wartime president, as the United States was not technically at war. Over 26,000 bombs were deployed across 7 nations under his command in 2016 alone. Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Pakistan were attacked without a single vote. Donald Trump’s recent orders saw 36 bombs deployed in Iran.
The majority of those bombings happened in Syria, Libya, and Iraq under the premise of targeting extremist groups like ISIS. Drone strikes were carried out across Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan as the Obama Administration accused those nations of hosting al-Qaeda affiliated groups. Coincidentally, USAID was also providing funding to those groups.
The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) was initially implemented to hunt down the Taliban and al-Qaeda after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Obama broadened his interpretation of the AUMF and incorporated newly formed militant groups that were allegedly expanding across the entire Middle East. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism believes there were up to 1,100 civilian casualties in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Thousands of civilians died in Syria and Iraq but the death toll was never calculated. At least 100 innocent people died in the 2016 attacks in Afghanistan alone.
The government will always augment the law for their personal agenda. The War Powers Resolution was ignored and the AUMF was altered. Congress was, however, successful in preventing Obama from putting US troops on the ground and fighting a full-scale war. In 2013, Obama sought congressional approval for military action in Syria but was denied. Obama again attempted to deploy troops in 2015 but was denied. Congress has to redraft the AUMF to specifically prevent Obama from deploying troops in the Middle East. “The authorization… does not authorize the use of the United States Armed Forces on the ground in Syria for the purpose of combat operations.” Obama attempted to redraft the AUMF on his own by insisting he would prohibit “enduring offensive ground combat operations” or long-term deployment of troops. He was met with bipartisan disapproval as both sides believed he was attempting to drag the United States into another unnecessary war.
The United States should not be involved in any of these battles, but here we are. Those living in fear that Donald Trump is a dictator fail to recognize that past leadership had every intention of sending American men and women into battle unilaterally without a single vote cast.
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