How Democrats continue to betray their country.

Democrats and their progressive allies, including in the establishment media, are continuing their “Great Betrayal” of the United States. They tried to sabotage efforts by President George W. Bush’s administration to support the U.S. forces fighting in Iraq against Saddam Hussein and Islamic terrorists. Now, we are witnessing Democrats, both in Congress and vying to run against President Trump in this year’s presidential election, treacherously helping the Iranian regime advance its 40-year war against Americans. The leftist media is right by their side.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is readying her Democrat-controlled House of Representatives to vote this week on legislation to tie President Trump’s hands in dealing with the blood-thirsty Iranian regime. Speaker Pelosi is peeved that she and her Democrat congressional colleagues were not consulted first before President Trump ordered the killing of Iranian terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani late last week. Too bad. She should run for president if she wants to become the commander-in-chief. In any case, she is a hypocrite.

As David Greenfield noted,

The same Democrats who are suddenly rereading the War Powers Act had no objection when Obama illegally decided to launch a regime change invasion of Libya under false pretenses while repeatedly lying about it being a war, lying about UN authorization, and lying about intervening to stop a genocide.

Pelosi said at the time that Obama had all the authority he needed to conduct attacks against Libya without having to go first to Congress for such authority. That’s curious since Obama’s action had no self-defense justification. It resulted in regime change and then a failed state. Four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, lost their lives in the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack unleashed as a result of the power vacuum that the Obama-Biden administration helped to create. No problem, according to Pelosi.

Yet President Trump’s decision to order a precise strike to take out a known terrorist with American blood on his hands, who was planning more murders of Americans, has Pelosi and her Democrat colleagues in a lather. They are writing another chapter in their disgusting saga of Great Betrayal.

Qasem Soleimani was the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)-Quds Force, a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. He directed the activities of various Iranian-backed Iraqi terrorist groups, including Kata’ib Hezbollah. This is the terrorist militia group that reportedly launched the rocket attack against an Iraqi base, which killed one American and wounded others. Kata’ib Hezbollah then led the assault on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Soleimani was met by this terrorist group’s leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis at the Baghdad International Airport last Friday. President Trump took advantage of the opportunity to stop them in their tracks from carrying out any imminent plans they were harboring to kill many more Americans.

Major media outlets and Democrats hesitated to call Soleimani out for the brutal terrorist that he was. Indeed, after Senator Elizabeth Warren received blowback from her supporters on the left for initially referring to Soleimani as a “murderer,” she backtracked and described him blandly as “a government official, a high-ranking official for the government of Iran."

Speaker Pelosi sent a letter addressed solely to each “Dear Democratic Colleague," recklessly characterizing the Trump administration’s defensive strike against Soleimani and his terrorist henchmen as “a provocative and disproportionate military airstrike targeting high-level Iranian military officials.” She claimed that the airstrike, which was intended to save American lives from the threat of imminent attack planned by Soleimani along with al-Muhandis," endangered our service members, diplomats and others by risking a serious escalation of tensions with Iran."

Pelosi advised her Democrat Trump-hating colleagues that "The House will introduce and vote on a War Powers Resolution" in order "to limit the President's military actions regarding Iran." Just like the impeachment articles against President Trump that Pelosi rushed through the House but has delayed sending over to the Senate, Pelosi is not even pretending to be bipartisan. Democrat Senator Tim Kaine introduced a War Powers resolution in the Senate similar to the one that Pelosi will be pushing through the House.

Pelosi complained in a tweet that the notification to Congress that President Trump filed as required under the War Powers Act “raises more questions than it answers about the timing, manner and justification of the decision to engage in hostilities against Iran.”

The Iranian regime has been engaging in unprovoked “hostilities” against the United States in one form or the other since its thugs took 52 Americans hostage in 1979. President Trump finally drew a red line in the sand and enforced it. The speaker’s partisan obsession with bringing down President Trump by hook or by crook has led her to deliberately misrepresent the context leading up to President Trump’s patriotic decision.

While Congress was on vacation, President Trump fulfilled his constitutional duty as commander in chief to protect the lives of American troops deployed in Iraq, who are there with congressional approval, from the threat of an imminent attack. Pelosi and her cohorts have treacherously given the benefit of the doubt to the Iranian regime’s warlords, most notably Qasem Soleimani.

Rather than celebrating the death of the Iranian regime’s terrorist mastermind who has many Americans’ blood on his hands, the leading Democrat presidential candidates are politicizing Soleimani’s killing as another excuse to demonize President Trump.

Senator Bernie Sanders, for example, declared that "I believe the first course of action is for the congress to take immediate steps to restrain President Trump from plunging our nation into yet another endless war." At least he has remained consistent. Sanders opposed the congressional resolution authorizing the 2003 Iraq war. He also criticized the Obama-Biden administration’s decision to forcibly remove Moammar Gadhafi from power in Libya.

Joe Biden said that while Soleimani’s death is not being mourned in America, President Trump’s decision to bring it about was “a hugely escalatory move.” Biden added that the president has “tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox.” Mind you, this is the man who boasted at the 2012 Democratic National Convention that "Bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive," even though he had advised Barack Obama against taking out Bin Laden.

The Democratic Party of the last two decades is a far cry from the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. It has become a party willing to place its partisan interests over the security of the United States, even if it means helping to advance the enemy’s talking points.

As David Horowitz wrote back in 2014, "progressives and Democrats sought successfully to demonize America’s commander-in-chief and demoralize the nation as it went to war to take down the terrorist-supporting monster regime of Saddam Hussein and eventually defeat Ansar-al-Islam and al-Qaeda in Iraq.” He explained that Democrats concocted their false claim that George W. Bush had lied about the reasons for launching the war in Iraq “to justify their defection from a war they had just authorized betraying their country in time of war along with the young men and women they had sent into the battlefield."

The Democrats continued to sabotage President Bush's ability to bring the war to a successful conclusion. President Bush sought to reverse the situation on the ground in Iraq by proposing a temporary surge of additional U.S. troops. After Nancy Pelosi became House Speaker for the first time in 2007, she spearheaded a largely partisan House vote on a resolution opposing President Bush’s successful surge policy in Iraq. The House also passed a bill in 2007 setting an early deadline for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Pelosi naively believed, as she said on 60 Minutes, that if America left Iraq the terrorists would leave too. News flash to Pelosi: Iranian-backed terrorists, led until last Friday by Soleimani, are still in Iraq.

Joe Biden, who as a senator voted originally to authorize the Iraq war, said in 2006 that “I totally oppose this surging of additional American troops into Baghdad.”

As Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden helped make the situation in Iraq even worse. Indeed, Biden helped open the door for Soleimani to increase his already strong influence in Iraq. In a New Yorker profile of Soleimani in 2013, the magazine reported how Biden persuaded Ayad Allawi, “a pro-American secular politician whose party had won the most parliamentary seats in the elections,” to step aside in his bid to become Iraq’s prime minister. This move allowed Soleimani’s choice, Nuri al-Maliki, to assume the leadership post. True to form, Soleimani had insisted that all American troops leave the country. President Obama obliged, deciding against military advice to remove all American troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Two disastrous consequences followed Obama’s precipitous decision, which Biden had fully supported. ISIS re-emerged from the ashes and extended its territorial reach throughout Iraq and Syria. And, to quote Allawi, Iraq itself became “an Iranian colony.”

The Obama-Biden administration helped the Iranian regime solidify its control of Iraq. Indeed, as a result of the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama-Biden administration helped fund Soleimani’s terror campaign not only in Iraq but also in Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere in the region. The administration became in effect the Iranian regime’s banker. The administration paid a ransom of more than a billion dollars to get some of our hostages back. Many more billions of dollars were made available to the Iranian regime as relief was granted upfront from the harsh sanctions that had helped to constrain the Iranian regime’s terrorist funding. Former Secretary of State John Kerry admitted in 2016 that it was likely that some of the billions of dollars in sanctions relief negotiated as part of the nuclear deal “will end up in the hands of the IRGC or other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists."

In short, ISIS grew into a global threat on Obama’s watch. The Iranian regime became more emboldened, with plenty of new sources of funds, to spread its fanatical brand of Islamic jihad directly and through terrorist proxies. President Trump inherited this mess. He quickly eliminated ISIS’s territorial caliphate. He withdrew the United States from the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran and re-imposed crippling sanctions that curtailed the regime’s sources of funding for its terrorist-related activities.

Nevertheless, Qasem Soleimani, the second most powerful individual in Iran who reported directly to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would not give up. Despite repeated warnings by President Trump and the president’s restraint in not responding with military force after the Iranians’ downing of a U.S. drone, Soleimani dialed up his terrorist proxies’ violence against Americans in the region. No responsible commander-in-chief could let this continue. President Trump seized the opportunity to shut this murderer and his Iraqi terrorist comrade al-Muhandis down permanently.

President Trump has made clear that he is not looking for war. He is looking to defend Americans from non-state actors and rogue regimes that mean to do Americans harm. The Iranian regime is the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism. Evidently, the regime has now decided to move out of the shadow of its proxies and launch direct attacks.

As this article was being written, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Tuesday night upped the ante with an announcement that “The fierce revenge by the Revolutionary Guards has begun.” Multiple missiles have reportedly been fired from inside Iran on the Ain al-Assad air base in Iraq where U.S. soldiers are located as well as least one other base. The Pentagon has confirmed that Iran launched more than a dozen ballistic missiles against U.S. forces in Iraq. An assessment of damage and possible casualties is underway.

If their track record is any indication, Democrats and their leftist friends will blame President Trump and say in effect "I told you so." As usual, they would be drawing the wrong lesson. Appeasing aggressors only invites more aggression. If the latest Iranian attacks end up costing more American lives, President Trump can be expected to deliver a more crushing below in response. The Iranian missile sites from which the missiles were launched would make likely targets, along with Iranian oil infrastructure facilities. The Iranian regime cannot win this conflict at the end of the day unless we defeat ourselves, aided by a fifth column betraying our nation from within.