Pentagon targets Iran-linked militias in Iraq as Hegseth vows ‘we will finish this’ for fallen US troops
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine said the U.S. military is striking “Iranian-aligned militia groups” in Iraq as Secretary of War Pete Hegseth vowed Thursday to “honor” the sacrifice of six U.S. service members killed in a plane crash there last week.
President Donald Trump, Hegseth and Caine on Wednesday attended the dignified transfer of the six fallen soldiers at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The Pentagon said last week that the U.S. forces were killed when a KC-135 refueling aircraft crashed in western Iraq during a combat mission in support of Operation Epic Fury.
Caine said Thursday that in Iraq, AH-64 helicopters “have been striking against Iranian-aligned militia groups to make sure that we suppress any threat in Iraq against U.S. forces or U.S. interests.”
“And we remain focused on pursuit of any platform that Iran could field to harm Americans or our partners,” he added.
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Reflecting on the fallen U.S. service members, Hegseth said, “Yesterday at Dover Air Force Base, President Trump, the chairman, and I stood in solemn silence as heroes came home.”
“Flag-draped caskets. We honored them. We grieved with their families, and we listened. What I heard through tears, through hugs, through strength and through unbreakable resolve was the same from family after family. They said, ‘finish this. Honor their sacrifice. Do not waver. Do not stop until the job is done.’ My response, along with that of the president, was simple — of course, we will finish this. We will honor their sacrifice,” Hegseth said.
“Yesterday’s ceremony reminded us why we fight. Not for nation building or democracy promotion, but to crush direct threats to America, Americans, and our interests. We fight to win, and we are winning, on our terms, following our objectives,” he continued.
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“My 13-year-old son popped into my office last night while I was editing these remarks. He asked about the war and the families I met at Dover, and I looked at him and I said, ‘They died for you, son, so that your generation doesn’t have to deal with a nuclear Iran’,” Hegseth also said. “It’s the truth. And they did. So to the families who said, ‘finish this,’ we will. And I say the same to every American who wants peace through strength. May Almighty God continue to bless our troops in this fight. And again to the American people, please pray for them, every day, on bended knee, with your family, in your schools, in your churches, in the name of Jesus Christ. To the troops, keep going and Godspeed.”
Those killed were Maj. John “Alex” Klinner, 33; Maj. Ariana Savino, 31; Tech. Sgt. Ashley Pruitt, 34; Capt. Seth Koval, 38; Capt. Curtis Angst, 30; and Master. Sgt. Tyler Simmons, 28.
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Caine said at the Pentagon Thursday that, “Our nation will never forget their sacrifice, and we will never forget their names,” and, “Our entire joint force mourns with you today.”
Trump threatens key Iranian gas field after Israeli strike
President Donald Trump warned in a Truth Social post that the U.S. will powerfully attack Iran’s South Pars natural gas field if the Islamic Republic targets a Qatari liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility again.
“Israel, out of anger for what has taken place in the Middle East, has violently lashed out at a major facility known as South Pars Gas Field in Iran. A relatively small section of the whole has been hit. The United States knew nothing about this particular attack, and the country of Qatar was in no way, shape, or form, involved with it, nor did it have any idea that it was going to happen. Unfortunately, Iran did not know this, or any of the pertinent facts pertaining to the South Pars attack, and unjustifiably and unfairly attacked a portion of Qatar’s LNG Gas facility,” Trump declared in the Truth Social post.
“NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars Field unless Iran unwisely decides to attack a very innocent, in this case, Qatar — In which instance the United States of America, with or without the help or consent of Israel, will massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before,” he continued.
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Trump warned that while he does not want to take such action, he would be willing to do so.
“I do not want to authorize this level of violence and destruction because of the long term implications that it will have on the future of Iran, but if Qatar’s LNG is again attacked, I will not hesitate to do so,” he declared in the post.
Trump’s threat comes as the U.S. and Israel are deep into the third week of their controversial war with Iran.
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Earlier this week, Joe Kent resigned from his position as National Counterterrorism Center director due to his opposition to the war.
“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent declared in his resignation letter.
FORMER COUNTERTERRORISM CHIEF JOE KENT UNDER FBI INVESTIGATION FOR ALLEGED CLASSIFIED LEAKS
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Trump pushed back on Tuesday, saying that “it’s a good thing that he’s out because he said that Iran was not a threat. Iran was a threat. Every country realized what a threat Iran was. The question is whether or not they wanted to do something about it.”
MORNING GLORY: Israel is America’s best ally — we must reject the evil of antisemitism
The stunning and ominous rise in antisemitism in the United States cannot be disputed, but can be resisted. It is particularly the obligation of genuine Christians to participate in the repression through education of the ancient evil. It is the particular obligation of Christian institutions — churches, colleges, publishers and more — to do their part in making this sin once again an obvious source of shame and to help cure those who suffer from it and, where it cannot be cured, to force it back by shaming and shunning into the deepest shadows where it belongs.
Christianity didn’t invent antisemitism. It existed before Christ and the empires of the ancient world would target Jews for many reasons. But, once Christianity rose to dominate Europe, antisemitism spread alongside and within a vast portion of the Church.
Some, but not enough, of the Church always spoke out against antisemitism and its costumed version of today — anti-Zionism — and continues to do so. Saint John Paul the Great and Pope Benedict were the most visible and outspoken opponents of antisemitism from within the Catholic Church of my lifetime, but many others have noted the obvious intractable hostility of real Christianity to the sin of hatred embedded in hatred of Jews or their country.
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When Colorado Christian University — originally founded in 1914 as Denver Bible College, but now a flourishing university in Lakewood, Colorado — invited me to a day of teaching, feasting and lectures, I chose as my topic the reasons why Americans of all faiths, or none at all, ought to support Israel. I included in those remarks the obvious: It is sinful for Christians to hate Jews or Israel.
That’s hardly a lightning bolt for even the “slightly churched.” But. I wanted primarily to stress that America is an ally of Israel for non-theological reasons — reasons with which Christians ought to be familiar. It is bad writing to reproduce speeches and brand them columns, but here in condensed form is the argument I made.
First, in a dangerous world, even the dominant superpower — the United States — needs allies, especially as the People’s Republic of China stretches to become a peer in military and intelligence matters as well as economic influence.
The State of Israel is, objectively, the most important ally of the United States. It is a nuclear power. It is the equal of any military on the globe in its ability to strike far and hard and to dominate its region. It’s an intelligence superpower and an engine of technological excellence and ever-increasing breakthroughs. If any country had to pick one strong ally not named the United States, it would pick Israel.
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Israel is also a reliable and fully-integrated-into-our-military ally. Israel takes what the United States makes and improves on it, as had been the case with the F-35 fighter. It sometimes takes the rudiments of a technology and develops them to scale and deploys them, as with Iron Dome and soon Iron Beam. Those advancements will return to America as the Golden Dome and the Golden Beam. Would that Israel got into the ship building business at scale, but we have allies in South Korea and Japan that are doing just that.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Israel shares America’s founding values of individual liberty and democratic governance. Israel is as politically fractious as the U.S., but freedom of speech is as robust there as it is here. Human rights are respected there as they are here. It is a “Western nation” in every respect, despite having to have fought for its very life since the state’s modern founding in 1948.
I also reminded the audience in quick fashion that, as a matter of American law, both constitutional, statutory and treaty-based law, that the United States recognizes Israel as a nation state with all the rights and responsibilities of a nation state.
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“Zionism” — the term that originated in the late 19th century movement to re-establish the Jewish homeland in the ancestral lands of the Jews — is not some ideological outlier, but very much a historical movement that culminated in the United Nations’ recognition of Israel as a nation state via actions of both that body’s General Assembly and Security Council. The United States participated in that process and voted for it. While theology might underlay some Americans’ support for Israel, belief in the rule of law is the best and enduring case for most Americans to stand by and with Israel because American law is pledged to respect Israeli nationhood.
After the invasion of Israel by Hamas from Gaza on October 7, 2023, and the massacre and kidnapping that followed, one would have predicted the death of much of antisemitism in the West, so awful was the cruelty of that day and so evil and hideous the unmasked face of Jew-hatred.
Instead, and to the shock of many, Israel’s just war to recover its captives and destroy the threat to the state posed by Hamas triggered not just more attacks on it from Hezbollah nested in Lebanon, the Houthis embedded in Yemen and the “head of the snake” in the Islamic Republic of Iran, but also a geyser of Jew-hatred in the United States.
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What had been marginal and a marginalized, weird, cultish and conspiracist belief system suddenly went mainstream and apparently became a much larger phenomenon than most Americans believed possible (or at least seemed that world in the fun house mirrors of the web.) Antisemitism and the subset of the ancient evil under the name of anti-Zionism is still very much an outlier in American public opinion, but the damage this loathsome ideology has wrought post 10/7 to the collective American psyche is significant as those possessed by this repugnant hatred feel free to express it in public.
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So it is long past time for Americans, and especially mainstream Christian Americans, to make the theological case against antisemitism — it is a grave sin, indeed, for Catholics, a “mortal sin” — and just as importantly if not more so, the secular case for being pro-Zionist laid out in brief above.
America needs a healthy polity, one free of all racial and religion-based hatred, and it needs allies as strong and reliable as Israel. The two arguments cannot be made often enough in too many places, but both ought to be made especially on and within any institution identifying itself as “Christian.” I thank Colorado Christian University for giving me the opportunity to do so.
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