My Own Operation Midnight Hammer — Iran – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

My last job before starting college in the summer of ’76 was as a Waldenbooks clerk. I loved everything about the shop, the atmosphere, the books, the customers, and conversations. And I’ll never forget the mass market paperback title that came in stock in early September and was flying off the shelves when I left for the University of Maryland. It was Raid at Entebbe by Ira Peck. What made the phenomenon even more phenomenal was that the Israeli rescue mission described in the book, Operation Thunderbolt, had taken place only two months prior, between July 3 and 4.

Way back in the Seventies, publishers knew that a daring commando raid by a chief U.S. ally to save innocent passengers from a brutal African dictator would be instant gold, and the sales I rang up proved them right. Filmmakers wasted no time tapping the same goldmine. On television that December premiered Victory at Entebbe, directed by Marvin Chomsky (Roots). Huge stars Kirk Douglas, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Dreyfuss, Burt Lancaster, and Anthony Hopkins (as Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin) interrupted their full shooting schedules to join the impromptu production. Soon after followed Irvin Kerchner’s Raid on Entebbe starring Charles Bronson, John Saxon, Martin Balsam, Yaphet Koto as Idi Amin, and Peter Finch as Rabin. Both pictures got huge ratings.

How could they not? The Entebbe affair offered not only an exciting true story but better suspense, drama, thrills, and good guys winning over evil that most Hollywood productions of the time. Yet what took place last Saturday night in Iran makes Operation Thunderbolt seem like The Hobbit compared to Operation Midnight Hammer’s The Lord of the Rings. This was the U.S. military’s strategically brilliant destruction of the Iranian nuclear threat.

I’ll leave it to more technical journalists to chronicle the incredible feat. New details of it will be emerging for some time. Unlike the 1970s, thanks to the internet, we won’t have to wait even two months for a mass-market paperback to reveal them. Though books on the operation will appear soon enough, given the popularity of traditionalist authors who literally broke the leftist media hegemony.

But we will have to wait a long time for a Hollywood film version, probably forever. Because the man who authorized and achieved the historic triumph at enormous risk to himself and his country is despised by Hollywoke. Which also has little love for America. And conservative investment in the arts has been tragically absent. Thus, no independent producer today can afford the budget for the real-life Top Gun thriller that would make a fortune from a patriotic public. So, I’ll stick to my observations on the road to the Right that began with Iran 46 years ago.

As I wrote in a here last year, I was pretty apolitical my first three years at Maryland, focused on my English Lit studies. Until November 5, 1979. I came home that evening to my off-campus apartment and turned on the TV.  On the small screen, a mob of rabid men in robes were screaming hostilely outside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, threatening to kill the American hostages inside, as I soon found out. Then followed images of State Department officials also babbling incoherently.

Five months later, the robed men were still screaming, and the government goons still babbling, occasionally joined by a weenie President in a cardigan sweater blathering about patience. By then I knew he was responsible for the whole mess. That it was he who had forced out the Shah of Iran, enabling the Islamic fanatics to humiliate America. And the U.S. Cavalry I’d grown up admiring not only didn’t ride to the rescue, but lay burning in the Kavir Desert with eight dead men and a helicopter.

But there was a man running against this fool who I felt I could trust. I watched him answer a reporter’s suggestion that the Iranians were waiting for the election result to release the hostages, hoping for a better deal from him. “Well,” said Reagan. “That would be foolish.” The hostages were released minutes after his inauguration on January 20, 1981. By then I was a conservative, and I’ve never looked back.

Iran Through the Years

Not in 2015, when another anti-Israel Democratic President endorsed a horrible treaty putting Iran on the path to nuclear weaponry, then threw in 1.5 billion dollars.

Nor in 2015, when another tough yet flamboyant Republican presidential candidate said, “I will prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”

Nor in 2018, when the now President Trump withdrew America from the Iran nuclear deal and put crippling sanctions on Iran.

Nor in 2021, when the next Democratic president, a walking zombie, signaled his intent to rejoin the nuclear treaty with Iran.

Nor in August 2021, when the same Democratic President ordered an insane troop withdrawal from Afghanistan that got eight servicemembers blown to bits at Kabul Airport.

Nor in 2024, when the same President Biden gave Iran access to $10 billion in frozen funds, which it needed to expand terrorism and accelerate its nuclear program.

And definitely not on June 21, 2025 when the former and current Republican president ordered a precise strike of 44 bombs on three nuclear facilities in Iran, obliterating all of them. I waited 46 years for satisfaction for a national insult. Last Saturday, President Trump gave it to me and our country.

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