Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former Vice President Joe Biden, and Sen. Bernie Sanders stood on the debate stage last week, and they all dropped the ball. Astoundingly, all three questioned the necessity and legitimacy of killing Qassem Soleimani, a violent and notorious architect of terrorism.

The brutal Iranian commander of the Quds Force, the wing of a designated terrorist organization, was responsible for the murder of nearly 1,000 U.S. soldiers and thousands of civilians. Soleimani’s fingerprints are on Hamas’s brutal targeting of Israeli citizens. His personal and material support make possible the operations of Hezbollah, the group that killed 241 U.S. soldiers and Marines in the 1983 Beirut bombing. Also, he is responsible for the targeting of the USS Cole, which resulted in 17 U.S. Navy sailors killed.

Soleimani’s training and equipping of explosives in Iraq to support the Mahdi Army led a proxy militia to kill 600 U.S. troops and severely wound thousands more.

Soleimani also used the Popular Mobilization Forces, or Hashd Shaabi, proxy militia and the Badr Organization to cripple, extort, threaten, and hold hostage key members of the Iraqi government and parliament. This terrorist literally took Iraq’s sovereignty hostage, all the while poisoning the government with an Iranian brand of Islamofascism.

Buttigieg stated he would not have targeted this ruthless terrorist. He would “evaluate the entire intelligence.” The known open source intelligence is that thousands have died directly or indirectly by Soleimani’s hand, yet, Buttigieg wrings his hands and hides behind his own ignorance. There is more than enough widely known intelligence about Soleimani to act, and, yet, Buttigieg says no, he would not do it because he hasn’t seen the intelligence. Apparently, the death of nearly a thousand of Buttigieg’s fellow soldiers is not enough for him to want to take action. The next time Buttigieg waxes about his time in Iraq and wanting to protect those soldiers, keep in mind, he would not lift a finger to kill the only Islamic fanatic whose body count is close to that of Osama bin Laden.

Meanwhile, former Vice President Joe Biden answered that he would not do anything to alienate Iran. After all, he worked with President Barack Obama to give Iran billions of dollars in cash in return for a promise not to develop nuclear weapons. He is unbothered by the fact that, as the Mossad showed with photographic evidence, Iran was actively violating the deal.

The Obama-Biden administration empowered Iran with the billions they gave it, allowing it to use a combination of terrorism and economic coercion to infiltrate Iraq’s government and guarantee that it is run by Iranian puppets. Trump’s strike against Soleimani was the first sign to Iran in years that it cannot run roughshod over the region. It destabilized the Iranian influence in Iraq that Biden had helped fund and build.

Sanders repudiated the strike against Soleimani, saying the president is “opening the door to international anarchy.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Soleimani was strengthening proxies in the region to undermine U.S. interests and directly target the West through Iranian-backed and -funded paramilitary organizations such as Hezbollah, the Popular Mobilization Forces, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen, in addition to still other franchises of Iran’s state-sponsored terrorism. These proxy militias are responsible for thousands of murders and would have continued to spread under Soleimani’s leadership.

Three leading Democrats, then, would allow a ruthless terrorist to roam free and plan still more calculated attacks against U.S. personnel and U.S. interests abroad. This is not the kind of leadership America needs or wants. The Democrats’ inadequate responses are the sort of thing that guarantees Trump’s victory in 2020.

Having served my country honorably in times of peace and times of war, I can tell you that our armed forces are grateful to have a commander in chief who will actually have their back.

And, come election time, I suspect that most military voters will have the president’s back at the polls.

Cory Mills, a highly decorated U.S. Army combat veteran, is CEO of PACEM Solutions International and PACEM Defense LLC.