Ben Shapiro

At the same time, the Reagan administration was engaging in the Iran-Contra affair.

Iran-Contra was essentially a desperate back-channel effort to free seven American hostages being held by Iranian terror proxies in Lebanon by selling anti-tank missiles to Iran and then taking the money from that and sending it to anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua to keep it off the books.

Their resistance to the Marxist Sandinista government would eventually result in 1990 elections where the Sandinistas were blown out of office.

All this sounds complicated because it was.

But none of it speaks to the idea that America was the bad guy here.

Iran was a theocratic Islamist tyranny promoting an apocalyptic vision.

Iraq was a brutal dictatorship.

Nicaragua was a communist authoritarian state.

We had to choose among a bunch of bad options.

So the decision was contain Iran.

Don't allow Iraq enough support to actually win.

Try to free hostages and support the anti-communists in Nicaragua at the same time.

Again, none of this makes America the bad guy with any of these players here.

Iran spent the Iran-Iraq War sending literal children into minefields to clear the minefields, and they put plastic keys to heaven around their necks to incentivize them.

That's not some sort of bizarre Hunger Games ripoff.

That's reality.

In 1983, a suicide car bomber killed 63 people, including 17 Americans, at the U.S.

Embassy in Beirut.

That bomber belonged to an early iteration of a terrorist group in Lebanon that would come to be known as Hezbollah.

A few months later, Hezbollah terrorists drove a truck packed with explosives into the U.S.