There are three things that ordinary Americans need (but often fail) to understand about the Middle East.

These three things are necessary parts of U.S. policy.

Team Trump, as well as our European allies, would do well by completely adopting all three.

1. The Iranian Kraken Must Be Defeated

President Trump ordered a series of airstrikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen this weekend. They’ve engaged in pitched battles directed at U.S. and allied shipping in the Red Sea area for years with missiles and drones. It's intensified in the last 16 months.

Access to the Suez Canal is vital to the entire world; the Houthis are trying to cut it off. Unarmed oil tankers are avoiding the area since a $1,000 drone can sink a billion-dollar oil tanker. That’s an exchange rate the Houthis and their Iranian sponsors can easily afford. It’s like destroying the World Trade Center on 9/11, starting with a few $2.00 box cutters.

The Houthis are just one tentacle of the Iranian Kraken. For all practical purposes, people who treasure liberty are faced with two great enemies besides China: the Star Trek Borg of the Democrat Party Deep State (DPDS), and the Kraken of Islamic radicalism.

Iran is the instigator of Islamic radicalism worldwide and is the head of the Kraken. It wages proxy wars throughout the world, using terrorist groups as its tentacles. Pick one tentacle, nail it down, chop it off, and incinerate it. Then move in with NATO peacekeepers from Europe; then do the same to the next tentacle.

Because our NATO allies are itching to fight a war and expand eastward (exhibited by their martial interests in Ukraine), and because peacekeepers from anywhere else bring a lot of problems with them, NATO allies can and should be relied upon to get the job done on the ground. They helped us in Afghanistan; they’ll help us now.

Iran needs to be defeated. Any nation that holds rallies with a million people in its capital chanting “Death to America,” sponsors terrorists who kill Americans, and is developing nuclear weapons needs very badly to be defeated. We’ve been hoping they’d become more moderate for 45 years. They keep doubling down on radicalism. It’s time.

We’ve started with the Houthis, and we need to finish them. Then we need to move on to Hezb'allah, which is responsible for the truck-bombing deaths of 241 U.S. servicemen in 1983, and which Israel has already gotten a good start on. If the Israelis haven’t already wiped Hezb'allah off the face of the planet, we take them out. And if Israel has not already finished off Hamas, we take them out, too.

Every member of all three factions, from their newest 12-year-old draftees to their commanders-in-chief, must be killed or captured. The 12-year-old draftees can probably be rehabilitated quickly and released — unless they’re from Gaza, where even 12-year-olds are thoroughly brainwashed into killing machines.

They believe their most glorious death would be a suicide mission, taking 1,000 Americans and/or Israelis with them. There are a million such children who need years of closely supervised therapy to become anything but lethal. Of course, their commanders-in-chief need to be in prison facilities like Guantanamo Bay for the rest of their lives.

All three — the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Hamas, in that order — need to be completely eradicated and should be by 2026. All three exist solely for the purpose of Iran waging war against the United States and its most valuable allies without directly involving Iran.

2. Muslim “Refugees” Need To Be Sent Home

More radical Islamic tentacles are reaching into Europe and North America as a tsunami of Muslim “refugees,” roughly 90% of whom are men of military age.

Muslims pour into the West, ostensibly to flee from wars in their homelands. But in the end, they become colonists and conquerors through their enormous birthrates.

They’ve already turned formerly placid European cities like Stockholm into the rape capitals of the West. To a radical Muslim, any woman out in public who isn't wearing a hijab and a long skirt is a whore, and is his for the taking (if he can get away with it).

When you invite the Third World in, you become the Third World. They want to make cities like Stockholm and Cologne just like their Third World homelands, but with constitutional rights and DEI for Third World criminals, and without the secret police or the draconian sentencings.

Ask any American in Minneapolis. During the 2020 BLM riots, Somali gangs (led by Somali warlords) were indistinguishable from native-born Vice Lords and Gangster Disciples. All three groups vigorously indulged in the looting and burning.

And both Ilhan Omar (who represents Somalis, not Americans) and Rashida Tlaib (who represents Palestinians, not Americans) thought it was wonderful. “A riot is the voice of those who aren’t being heard,” and all that.

Much like Latin Americans who are here illegally — far too many of them dealing fentanyl, raping and murdering women and children, and committing other violent felonies — these Muslim colonists need to simply be sent home.

Stockholm pays them $38,000 each to self-deport. That’s far too generous. They should just be loaded onto planes, and disembarked at the largest airports in their home countries. Whatever legal processes are necessary need to be expedited, as in the case of Mahmoud Khalil.

This has become a colonial war between the Third World and the First World. The Third World has infiltrated and colonized us long enough. Unlike the European immigrants who produced the majority of U.S. citizenry, Third Worlders refuse to assimilate.

First World languages are difficult for them to learn; First World values seem impossible. They want us to be the ones assimilating with them, on our own soil, such that every one of our urban neighborhoods is a clone of either Caracas or Mogadishu, with violent crime rates to match.

The 2015 attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, in retaliation for posting a satirical cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed, illustrates how they demand that we conform to their values, rather than conforming to ours. In this one respect, they’re more like the Borg than the Kraken.

We’d prefer our cities to be like Bedford Falls, in Jimmy Stewart’s It’s a Wonderful Life, or any city in any T.V. sitcom. But our cities have become stewpots rather than melting pots, with each component retaining its unique flavor, particularly if that flavor is unpalatable or even toxic.

There’s only one way to reverse that trend. We must start deporting them by the millions; we mustn’t stop until our cities become melting pots again.

3. Israel Deserves Our Support — And It’s A Bargain

Many Americans, on both left and right, wonder why support for Israel is so essential (and expensive). In the past 75 years, there were more than a few when we spent more on military aid for Israel than for the rest of the world combined.

And it’s most confusing when America’s lunatic left-wing fringe expresses its loathing for Israel and its embrace of Hamas. Israel is the only place in the Middle East that (a) allows LGBTQs (or Christians, for that matter) to come out of the closet without killing them or (b) cares even slightly about “global warming.”

Also, Israel is always being attacked or trying to prevent the next attack. Oct. 7, 2023, demonstrated what happens when Israel lets its guard down for even a day for a music festival close to the border with Gaza.

Every day of every year is either Pearl Harbor or 9/11 for them, or prevention of the next one and recovery from the last one. Israel is still trying to recover the last of its starved, beaten, and sexually enslaved hostages from Oct. 7, 2023 — if they’re still alive.

That day was the worst for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.

It’s appalling that such a thing could still happen in a civilized Western nation, but that’s the nature of radical Islam and Gaza. And it will happen again and again as long as radical Islam flourishes and Western leftists are foolish enough to invite these vipers into our homeland.

Image courtesy of Jim Davis.