“If you're damned if you do,” the late Wyoming U.S. Senator Al Simpson was known to say, “and damned if you don't...
“Then DO!”
I thought of that quote in recent weeks as our country has been split once again, this time by President Donald Trump's decision in February to unleash a devastating air, sea and land attack on Iran. In so doing, he took a bull by the horns like no president has done for the last 47 years, ever since the Iran hostage crisis.
(By the way, I'm no relation to Al Simpson, a point I think he would have appreciated my including here. He had little love for the Casper Star-Tribune newsroom, an outfit I worked for, here and elsewhere, for 22 years. He once called us “the boobs from Howard Publications.” Ouch.)
The thing about Al Simpson was that he could win over a crowd in just a few words. Folks compared him to Will Rogers. Simpson liked to say that when he was a student at the University of Wyoming, “I thought beer was food.” Always got a laugh.
Probably came by that gift naturally. I once heard his father, former Gov. Milward Simpson, tell a breakfast gathering at UW about an old cowboy who came upon a car pulled over by the Highway Patrol. Two men were leaning against their car, hands spread out on the roof, their legs spread apart. The cowboy asked the Trooper:
“What's makin' 'er LEAN?” Big laugh.
Predicting where Al Simpson would come down on President Trump's decision to unleash this attack on Iran could be dicey. He was open, in recent years, in his criticism of the bombastic Trump, saying he had voted for Trump “once,” but he would not make what he saw as that mistake again.
So the “damned if you do, damned if you don't” quote came to mind. It fits. For the last 47 years, American presidents have believed that aggressively addressing Iran and its progress toward developing nuclear bomb technology would be a “damned if you do” brier patch - boots on the ground, never-ending foreign war, potential quagmire, political suicide.
On the other side, you have the even worse “damned if you don't” option. At the very start of the most recent talks with the Iranians, negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were told that Iran already had enough enriched uranium for 11 nuclear weapons, enough to take out Israel, their longtime goal, and likely spark World War III.
For decades we heard they were on their way to building a nuclear bomb. The latest estimates were that we could have been mere weeks away from having another nuclear-armed nation on our hands, this one angry and unhinged.
So Trump, unlike his predecessors, acted. And in mere weeks our air attacks took out the top levels of Iranian leadership, their navy, their air force, countless missile launchers, arms factories, and pounded sites suspected of storing enriched uranium.
Predictably, Democrats here erupted like Vesuvius. Sen. Cory Booker called it “one of the greatest presidential blunders of our time,” adding, “There was no imminent threat.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries predicated failure, and said we should be focused on gasoline prices, not Iran's nuclear threat. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the war “reckless,” and Trump “a military moron.”
With characteristic overstatement, Trump threw gasoline on the fire, posting that “civilization will die” in Iran if the country continues to resist, and we take out their bridges, power plants and civilian targets. Then he backed off, announcing a temporary cease fire and negotiations.
I think Trump's handling of this crisis would no doubt confirm some of the frustration Al Simpson felt toward Trump. But I also think of the 35,000 to 40,000 Iranians who have been executed in recent weeks by their own malignant, bloodthirsty government.
Trump understood that not acting now to curb the nuclear intentions of Iran was a “damned if you don't” situation, in spades.
So Trump took the “DO” option.
And I bet Al Simpson - despite his differences with the president - would have agreed with our attack.
Dave Simpson can be contacted at DaveSimpson145@hotmail.com
