Hello, and welcome to Wednesday, April 8, 2026. Thanks for being here. Today is National Empanada Day and National Zoo Lovers Day. As this is written, a woodpecker is hammering away outside my window. One of the perks of living near a large park is the wildlife.
1093: The new Winchester Cathedral is dedicated by Bishop Walkelin in Winchester, England.
1730: Congregation Shearith Israel opens the first North American synagogue in New York City, on Mill Street in Lower Manhattan.
1766: The first fire escape is patented: a wicker basket on a pulley and chain.
1838: The steamship Great Western makes her maiden voyage from Bristol, England, to New York.
1869: The American Museum of Natural History opens in New York City. (So, the Museum itself is actually a museum piece?)
1879: Milk is sold in glass bottles for the first time.
1935: Works Progress Administration approved by Congress.
1946: League of Nations assembles for the last time
1964: Unmanned Gemini 1 launched.
1966: Time publishes “Is God Dead?” issue, its first issue without an image
1971: The first legal off-track betting system begins (OTB-New York)
Birthdays today include: Juan Ponce de León, Spanish explorer and conquistador; William H. Welch, American pathologist who founded Johns Hopkins Hospital; silent film star Mary Pickford; Sonja Henie, Norwegian figure skater; former First Lady Betty Ford; Carmen McRae, American jazz singer and pianist; comedian Shecky Greene; Kofi Annan, 7th Secretary-General of the United Nations; Leon Huff of the record producer team of Gamble and Huff; baseball great Catfish Hunter; guitarist Steve Howe of Yes; and drummer Mel Schacher of Grand Funk Railroad.
If today is your day, hope it’s a good one for you.
* * *
This one may sound a little strange to you, but hear me out.
One of the features of the works of William Shakespeare is that they frequently spotlight great truths in the human condition. In watching the back-and-forth between Washington and Tehran the past several weeks, I am reminded of Shakespeare’s Henry V, Act Three, Scene Three.
Remember the context, here. It’s the year 1415. Henry and his army have arrived at the French town of Harfleur and decimated its defenses. Henry rides up to the now-opened and ruined town gate and says to the master of the town:
How yet resolves the Governor of the town?
This is the latest parle we will admit.
Therefore to our best mercy give yourselves
Or, like to men proud of destruction,
Defy us to our worst. For, as I am a soldier,
A name that in my thoughts becomes me best,
If I begin the batt’ry once again,
I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur
Till in her ashes she lie burièd.
The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,
And the fleshed soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand, shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh fair virgins and your flow’ring infants.
What is it then to me if impious war,
Arrayed in flames like to the prince of fiends,
Do with his smirched complexion all fell feats
Enlinked to waste and desolation?
What is ’t to me, when you yourselves are cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?
What rein can hold licentious wickedness
When down the hill he holds his fierce career?
We may as bootless spend our vain command
Upon th’ enragèd soldiers in their spoil
As send precepts to the Leviathan
To come ashore. Therefore, you men of Harfleur,
Take pity of your town and of your people
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command,
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O’erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil, and villainy.
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Desire the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters,
Your fathers taken by the silver beards
And their most reverend heads dashed to the walls,
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
What say you? Will you yield and this avoid
Or, guilty in defense, be thus destroyed?
Gee, that sounds pretty much like a threat to “end the civilization,” doesn’t it? Overly violent, I’m sure some would say. Unnecessarily bloody, some would say. War crimes, some would claim.
I won’t.
Everyone involved with the Hundred Years’ War, of which the Siege of Harfleur was a part, looked forward to the 16th century. As do the Mullahs of Iran and the IRGC, who demonstrably, to this day, possess the ruthless qualities expressed by Henry in his speech to Harfleur’s Governor. I suggest that this ruthlessly bloody and violent nature in the case of Iran required a similarly ruthless and violent threat to solve.
Steve Forbes this morning offered a column which I suspect was written a few days ago, in which he says:
The West has a bad habit of mistaking fanaticism for grievance and terror for “complexity.” It is a perverse mindset that can lead to deadly outcomes.
Nowhere has that delusion been more dangerous than with Iran. For nearly half a century, polite opinion has insisted that the regime in Tehran can somehow be moderated, accommodated or reasoned into good behavior. Nonsense. Iran’s rulers are not misunderstood pragmatists. They are revolutionary theocrats who have built their state on repression at home and terror abroad.
The nuclear threat alone should end the argument. In its February 2026 report, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran had nearly 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium that is but a small step from nuclear weapons-grade purity. That should have set off alarms in every capital of the free world. This is not fuel for peaceful commerce. Iran is the only non-nuclear-weapons state producing and stockpiling uranium at this level. That is not normal behavior. It is a giant warning siren.
And there it is. The President understands this, and he also understands the level of ruthlessness required to bring these mad dogs to heel. There is no “negotiated settlement” that will have the desired effect, absent the use of force and the overt threat of its further use. The difference is, he alone among our leaders of the last 50 years has the courage to actually DO it. It is telling that the left calls him a war criminal for it.
Like it or not, there are situations where violence, sometimes even what we would call extreme violence, or at least the threat of it, is required in that situation.
Before you start in on me, make no mistake about my comments and my comparison. It does credit to us that we are uncomfortable with this level of violence (or the threats of it), because discomfort would defeat us if we let it rule us in all cases. Trump didn’t do that here, and he should be praised for not allowing us to play that game with Iran any longer.
Forbes rightly says in that same column this morning:
The blood-soaked fanatics running Iran and their strange sympathizers know all too well Iran is getting crushed militarily. It is counting on political and media pressure to get the U.S. and Israel to stop operations before their mission is completed.
The choice is no longer between confrontation and calm. That choice disappeared years ago. The real choice now is between stopping Iran before it crosses the final thresholds of menace — or paying a vastly greater price later. Peace is not preserved by indulging a death cult. Peace is preserved by defeating one before it acquires the means to blackmail the world.
Indeed. Or, as I said on Easter Sunday:
…peace, real, lasting peace, is not a product of disavowing war, or of thinking peaceful thoughts. Nor is it the product of negotiated settlements. Peace, real peace is the product of winning the war brought against you, with sufficient force to prevent any ideas of trying it again.
[…]
To those who decry the violence being shown us at the moment in Iran as being “hateful,” I suggest this is backwards. The Islamic Republic, as I’ve written just recently, has been at war for its entire existence, a bit over 47 years.
It wasn’t reasoned diplomacy that brought us here. It was not a negotiated settlement. We’ve been playing that line for all of those 47 years, and it’s gotten us nowhere except ever closer to a nuclear-tipped Iran. It was our threat of total destruction that turned the tide.
Iran waited Donald Trump out, to see if he was actually going to make good on his threats of ending Iran outright. I was getting reports that the bombers were already in the air when the ceasefire was declared. My obvious guess would be, so was Iran. That was the point at which they capitulated. Essentially, Trump offered them a deal they simply couldn’t refuse.
I would urge you to read and digest the articles on this topic offered by Tim O’Brien, Scott Pinsker, Sarah Anderson, David Manney, Stephen Green, Bruce Bawer, and Matt Margolis. I’m quite sure there will be even more than these on the front page by the time this piece gets posted, so be on the lookout for the newer offerings by PJ Media’s excellent writers.
This is an ongoing situation. We’re not done there, and I’m quite sure this will not be the last column I’ll write on the topic. That said, the task now is to make sure Iran stays at heel. The only way to accomplish that is a sustained threat against those who would break that peace.
Meanwhile, the egg that the left is currently wiping off its face came as a direct result, as Matt suggests, of underestimating President Donald J Trump.
Related: The Islamic Immigrant Problem
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