My latest in PJ Media:

Demonstrating that it learned nothing from the backlash after it called ISIS top dog Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi an “austere religious scholar,” the Washington Post called Qasem Soleimani, who was killed today in a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad, Iran’s “most revered military leader.” If Soleimani, who as head of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Quds Force was responsible for aiding numerous jihad terror activities worldwide, was revered at all, it was more by the Obama foreign policy team that saw him and his government as a valid partner for negotiations than by anyone in Iran. And tonight, the Obama team and the entire U.S. foreign policy establishment sees all of its core claims and principles proven false, and its recommendations rightly disregarded.

Not that they’ve noticed. They’re still asserting those principles as valid, and as a rebuke to Trump’s action in ordering this strike. Obama’s foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes, who boasted about how the Obama administration lied to sell the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, was full of consternation and indignation after the news broke of Soleimani’s death. He tweeted that “this is a really frightening moment. Iran will respond and likely in various places.”

Kelly Magsamen, vice president for National Security and International Policy at the hard-left Center for American Progress and former Obama Defense Department official as well as a member of the National Security Council (NSC) staff under Obama and Bush, tweeted: “I worked the Iran account for years at the NSC under two Presidents. I’m honestly terrified right now that we don’t have a functioning national security process to evaluate options and prepare for contingencies. God help us.”

Senator Chris Murphy (D, of course, CT) himself tweeted: “The justification for the assasination [sic] is to ‘deter future Iranian attacks’. One reason we don’t generally assasinate [sic] foreign political officials is the belief that such action will get more, not less, Americans killed. That should be our real, pressing and grave worry tonight.”

Rhodes, Magsamen, Murphy and those who are saying similar things are working from the assumption that while Iran (and other countries) may strike at the United States with impunity, the U.S. must never strike back, or do so only in an extremely limited way, for fear of retaliation. If they had been in the Franklin Roosevelt administration on December 7, 1941, they would have advised FDR not to do anything about the Pearl Harbor attack: Rhodes would have told him, “This is a really frightening moment. Japan will respond.” Murphy would have told him that retaliating “will get more, not less, Americans killed.” Once we did strike back at the Japanese Empire, Magsamen would have added, “I’m honestly terrified right now.”

This is the thinking of the foreign policy establishment in general. On Tuesday, I asked here at PJ Media, “Do the Iranian Mullahs Think Donald Trump Will React Like Jimmy Carter?” They would have been entirely justified in thinking that he would: Carter’s hypercautious, passive, weak and inept response to the Iranian hostage crisis represented the wisdom of the most revered foreign policy “experts” of the time, but the Iranian mullahs correctly saw his response as a manifestation of weakness and pusillanimity.

There is much more. Read the rest here.