KURT SCHLICHTER: Just Bomb Iran Already.

Nor do I want to hear any crap about how “America started it.” It’s objectively false – we did not start this, except in the sense we refuse to embrace their brand of primitive fanaticism – but I don’t care if we did. You don’t ever get to threaten or kill Americans, two things these savages have been doing for nearly half a century. They took our people hostage in 1979, and eight of our men were killed trying to rescue them. They were behind the Beirut bombings that killed hundreds of American diplomats and Marines. They backed terrorists who slaughtered Americans around the world. They armed and led the Shia thugs who maimed or killed thousands of our troops in Iraq. Payback is in order.

We talk a lot about a Jacksonian foreign policy, where America doesn’t go looking for trouble. But there’s another side to that coin. And that side depicts us wiping out anybody who dares kill Americans. The fact that we’ve allowed these barbarians to murder our people without retaliation is not only a moral disgrace but an invitation for every psychopath with a religious vision and an IED to make some Americans dead.

This is intolerable. The proper state of the world is one in which the mere thought of harming an American never arises because of the certainty that to do so will bring death to the terrorists, to everybody around the terrorists, and to everybody who helped the terrorists.

Andrew Jackson wasn’t just a big talker. If you messed with him, you died. This is actually the peaceful way – you come down hard once, and you don’t have to do it again. To be weak is to invite more conflicts; we’ve had plenty because of our weakness. Many of America’s foreign policy disasters since World War II, when Harry Truman had the stones to nuke Japan until it begged to surrender, have been a direct result of our refusal to make attacking America or Americans something less than an automatic apocalypse.

True Jacksonian foreign policy is tough but fair. It’s tough because if you screw with us, you die. It’s fair because if you don’t screw with us, we leave you alone.

But it offers insufficient opportunities for graft to interest most of our leadership class.