Fischer Defends Trump's Iran Strikes as Lawful Self-Defense in Springfield Opinion Column

On the Opinion page of the Springfield News-Leader, Andy Fischer, a Springfield resident, has written a column defending President Trump's military action against Iran. It is an opinion piece, and the claims in it are his own, several of them without sources.

Fischer's column is a reply in an ongoing exchange. On March 1, the paper ran his article headlined "Trump is chalking up wins, like it or not." A critic, whom he calls his most ardent, answered on March 8 with a piece titled "Trump's peace-making and other things that didn't age well." That article, as Fischer describes it, accused Trump of lawlessness and called the attack on Iran illegal. Fischer's new column answers point by point.

On legality, he asks what the illegality would rest on, and guesses it is the president's failure to consult Congress first. His answer is that telling Congress would have been a mistake, because he believes Democrats would have leaked the plan to the media and the element of surprise would have been lost. He rejects the idea that Trump began an illegal war at all. In his account, Iran declared war on America 47 years ago, in 1979, and has been killing Americans and chanting "death to America" since. He calls Trump the only president with the courage to act. He describes Operation Epic Fury as a mission to shut down Iran's ability to wage war.

He also asserts that the Iranian government recently killed 35,000 of its own people for protesting, and says those people have been pleading for American help. The column offers no source for that figure.

The nuclear program is the center of his argument. Fischer notes that last June the U.S. military bombed Iran's nuclear facilities, which he calls one of the most impressive missions ever conducted. He says it succeeded but did not end Iran's ability or determination to resume its program, and that Iran is still enriching uranium. According to Fischer, the negotiators Iran sent before the operation offered no plan beyond keeping the right to enrich, which he says was aimed at weaponization. He adds that they bragged of having enough uranium for 10 nuclear bombs, enriched to 60 percent, which he describes as dangerously close to the 90 percent needed for a weapon. None of this is attributed to a named source in the column.

He rejects his critic's praise of the Obama-era nuclear deal. In Fischer's telling, Obama financed Iran's nuclear program by delivering billions of dollars in cash on pallets, and Iran cannot be trusted in any negotiation. To the objection that there was no imminent nuclear threat, he replies that waiting until a threat is imminent would be imprudent, even crazy, and that the right course is to stop it early.

Fischer closes by returning to a subject from his earlier column: strikes on drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. He says his critic called the strikes unfair to the boat operators and suggested the Navy or Coast Guard capture a vessel to produce evidence of a crime. Fischer counters that the boats are large and fast, carry several high-powered outboard motors, can approach 60 mph, and are loaded with cocaine and fentanyl. He says these drugs have killed hundreds of thousands of young Americans, another figure he does not source.

The exchange is likely to continue in the paper's opinion pages. Readers weighing the column should note that its numbers on Iranian deaths, uranium stockpiles and overdose deaths are the author's assertions rather than reported findings.