The calendar turns and a decade begins, but there is nothing new under the sun in Washington. Even the killing of an Iranian mass murderer is cause for more partisan strife.

In a sane country, which America used to be, there would be shared sober satisfaction over the elimination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Yet Democrats apparently outsourced their reactions to robots, whose script called for conceding that the departed was a very bad man but prohibited approval of President Trump’s decision to take him out.

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Instead, the quibblers’ chorus raised questions of timing and expressed fear of escalation and retaliation. In the context of Iran’s military aggression and Soleimani’s bloody hands, there is another word for that fear: appeasement.

Or, as defense specialist Michael Doran wrote in The New York Times, the fear of war “ignores the fact that Mr. Soleimani has been waging war on America and its allies for years.”

The latest example was the attack on our embassy in Baghdad, carried out by groups allied with Iran. That is the sort of dirty work Soleimani specialized in — getting Arab Muslim proxies to fight and die for Iran’s goal of regional dominance.

In addition to Iraq, where Iranian munitions he provided killed or maimed thousands of American soldiers, Soleimani forged terror groups in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. He was hailed as a martyr by Hamas in Gaza, leading Israel to warn it and another Iran-backed group, Islamic Jihad, against retaliation.

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The notion that Trump was wrong to act, if followed to its logical conclusion, means America should play only a tit-for-tat game with terrorists everywhere and all the time. This is the same screwy thinking that demands Israel hit its enemies only as hard as the enemies hit it.

What is the point of having a superior military force if it can’t be used to defend its homeland and citizens?

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