The second the first Apache attack helicopter appeared over the sovereign American territory that is the American Embassy in Baghdad, one knew that things would be different this time. We would see the difference between a President Obama resting for a fundraising trip to Las Vegas the next morning and a President Trump, having avenged the killing of an American contractor, dispatching Iran’s top general and commander of its Quds Force before he could kill any more Americans.

Instead of a Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ignoring repeated warnings from her ambassador and not answering his pleas for more security, we had a Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announcing that members of the 82nd Airborne and support forces were being dispatched to within striking distance. There would be Marines on the ground, not contractors fighting on a CIA-annex roof, waiting for in vain for their government to send aid to them and their dying ambassador. This time it would be different. There would be no “Benghazi.” At this point, what difference does it make to have a President Trump instead of a President Obama or, God help us, a President Hillary Rodham Clinton? A world of difference, as the drones flying overhead this time were not there to send back useless pictures of American carnage, but to target the missiles of America’s swift sword and end the life of the terrorist responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans in Iraq and the maiming of thousands with the precision explosives he provided Iran’s sock-puppet militias in Iraq.

President Trump’s crippling sanctions are rightfully intended to thwart Iran’s apocalyptic ambitions and are having a crippling effect on the Iranian economy and an Iranian state nearing collapse from the weight of its own oppression on its own people. Trump knows these madmen waiting for the 12th Imam can never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon and the panicked mullahs thought maybe once again, as with Bill Clinton in Somalia and Barack Obama at Benghazi, American will could be tested and found wanting, that we would retreat at the sight of the first body bag. So they attacked with their proxies only to find Donald Trump to be wide awake and not resting for a campaign trip. As Fox News reported:

The U.S. military carried out airstrikes in Iraq and Syria on Sunday -- days after a U.S. defense contractor was killed at a military compound in a rocket attack. Military jet fighters conducted "precision defensive strikes" on five sites of Kataeb Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Iraqi militia, Jonathan Hoffman, a spokesperson for the Pentagon told Fox News. Two defense officials added that Air Force F-15 jet fighters carried out the strikes… U.S. officials have blamed the militia for a rocket barrage Friday that killed a U.S. defense contractor, wounded four U.S. troops and two members of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) near Kirkuk, in northern Iraq…. Five locations -- including three Kataeb Hezbollah areas in Iraq and two in Syria -- were targeted, Hoffman said in a statement.

This time our U.N. ambassador would not be dispatched to the Sunday talk show circuit to repeat verbatim five times the obscene talking point that American deaths had resulted from an inflammatory video. This time Iran would not be rewarded for its state-sponsored terror and its nuclear threats with $150 billion and pallets of cash dropped on an Iranian tarmac in the middle of the night.

The murder of the U.S. contractor and the subsequent attack on our embassy in Baghdad were bought and paid for by the money President Barack Hussein Obama, who could not utter the phrase “Islamic terrorism,” and fresh from his “apology tour,” gave to Iran. The Iranians played Obama like a fiddle. President Trump marches to a different drummer.

Is it mere coincidence that Obama dismissed the Islamic State as the “JV team” and sat while it grew and expanded and festered in its caliphate which Trump destroyed? Trump killed al-Baghdadi. He never invited him to the White House for a photo-op while greenlighting nuclear weapons for Iran. Obama seemed to have a warm spot for terrorists. As the Washington Times: noted in 2011:

Louis J. Freeh, who served as FBI director in the Clinton administration and the early months of the George W. Bush administration, said it was shocking that Mr. al-Maliki would include Mr. al-Amiri in his visit to Washington. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has been involved in “countless acts of terrorism, which are acts of war against the United States,” Mr. Freeh said in an interview. Mr. al-Amiri served as a commander of the Revolutionary Guard’s Badr Corps, a battalion that was tasked with operations in Iraq. He remained active in the Badr Corps during the late 1980s and 1990s, when he was working on resistance efforts against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. The FBI linked the Revolutionary Guard to the attack on the Khobar Towers in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, on June 25, 1996. Nineteen U.S. servicemen were killed by a bomb blast at the towers, which were housing American military personnel. “As a senior leader, [Mr. al-Amiri] would have to have known about Khobar, and he would know Gen. [Ahmad] Sherifi, who was the IRGC general that conducted the operation,” Mr. Freeh said. He added that the “FBI would love to sit down and talk to him, show him photographs and ask him questions” about the fugitives named in the Khobar Towers indictment.

President Obama was not so curious apparently. President Obama was not so keen on capturing or killing terrorists and we may be thankful that President Trump has no such reservations and when he had the shot to kill Qassem Soleimani, he pulled the trigger. Soleimani is a real piece of work and a mortal threat to America and Americans, as noted by Fox News:

In April 2019, the State Department announced that Iranian and Iranian-backed forces led by Soleimani were responsible for killing 608 U.S. troops during the Iraq War. Soleimani, who took over the external operations wing of the IRGC in 1998, was known as one of the most powerful military leaders in the Middle East, and the State Department believes he was the masterminded behind the major military operations, bombings and assassinations that accounted for at least 17 percent of all U.S. personnel deaths in Iraq between 2003 and 2011… Soleimani was first designated a terrorist and sanctioned by the U.S. in 2005 for his role as a supporter of terrorism. In October 2011, the U.S. Treasury Department tied Soleimani to the failed Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States at a popular restaurant in Washington, D.C. Beyond militias in Iraq and the pariah government of Syria, Soleimani is considered to be chiefly responsible for propping up proxies ranging from Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Houthis in Yemen and even has a foothold with elements of the Maduro regime in Venezuela…. Under Soleimani’s vision and leadership, analysts say, he carefully purported to carve out a “Shi’a Crescent” in long-held Sunni territory throughout the ISIS battle. The crescent is essentially a land path that runs from Tehran through Baghdad to Damascus and then to Beirut -- where it is considered to be a direct threat on Israel’s doorstep.

And now he is dead, like al-Baghdadi. His attack on our embassy in Iraq was supposed to be Trump’s Benghazi. Instead it may prove to be Iran’s Waterloo.

Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.