Laura is rage-baiting because the war that she and her benefactors advocated for is going terribly. One of the fundamental reasons the war in Iran is failing is a lack of basic understanding of both the country we started a war with and of the Middle East as a whole. Loomer displays this lack of understanding/inability to assess the threat environment, and the sad irony here is that because our leaders have listened to rhetoric like hers we’ve now successfully radicalized the Iranians—so not only are we taking our eye off the very legitimate threats still posed by ISIS and Al-Qaeda, we will almost certainly face blowback terrorism as a result of the Iran war here on U.S. soil. My late wife was killed by an ISIS suicide bomber. At the time of her death, the Iranian-backed Shia militias & the Assad regime were also actively fighting against ISIS. That is a fact. Iranians have targeted Americans, but only when we intervened in their region. That is not sympathizing with the enemy—that is also, simply, a fact. In Trump’s first administration, he exercised restraint—conducting a measured and effective retaliatory response via targeted strikes (Solmani), while having the discipline to not take the bait of a full-blown war with Iran, precisely because we knew it would result in the same disastrous outcome we’re dealing with today. Unfortunately, this time around POTUS opted to listen to the likes of Laura and the Israeli lobby instead of those who actually understand the region & the threat—and now that we are in this mess and public support has cratered, Loomer & her ilk are blindly screaming “Islam!” as a distraction. It’s the same tired Bush-era “with us or with the terrorists” binary that got us twenty years of failure. The American people deserve better.