I really don’t give a damn what Donald Trump said about Carly Fiorina’s face. Nor do I much care about what he might have said before about Dr. Carson. Those, and a few other tidbits, seem to be what the media consider important and feed us. The only importance they seem to attach to dissent about the administration’s collaboration (and yes, that is what it is) with Iran is to discredit it.

Today we remember the impact of the terrible attacks of September 11, 2001. Those attacks were an important turning point. The impact of those events seems, to some, to have only lasted only a brief historical moment. Perhaps.

But make no mistake: On September 10, 2015 — yesterday — the world really did change forever.

The impact of what was done in the Senate to allow the Iranian deal to go through will have a more lasting, deadly effect than those early morning attacks a decade and half ago. The immediate result of 9/11 was a stronger and more resolved United States. It certainly led to long and costly wars that expended treasure and lives. But remember that the total American dead in those wars equalled a monthly toll in Vietnam in my generation. For my parents’ generation, that same death count was a morning at Omaha Beach. When those fights began, the civilians in the American homeland were left almost entirely untouched by the terrorist’s hands.

Our leaders and military commanders made terrible mistakes of planning and judgment in the war against the new Nazis of the 21st century. (No, that is not too strong a characterization.) But seven years ago, the leadership, the financial structure, and the membership of the combined Islamic terrorist network had been damaged greatly. The forces of civilization were in control.

Since then, we have suffered a reverse. The forces of disorder and savagery have grown stronger and stronger. And the greatest force for stability and, yes, good on the world stage has grown simultaneously weaker and weaker, less and less determined.

There are many details to discuss, but foremost is this. This administration has treated a deal with Iran as its priority and force-fed it on the American public. The deal ensures a nuclear weapon will presently be in the hands of the our culture’s greatest enemy. It provides billions of dollars that will be used directly to kill Americans, Christians, Sunnis, Kurds, Yazidis, and Jews. It makes certain a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, for the Sunni nations cannot abide a nuclear Shite Iran. It has placed Israel in grave danger. It has ensured that we will one day have to fight Iran if our nation, our culture, and our heritage are to continue as they have existed.

There is no mistake that the blood of yet-to-be-counted thousands (if not millions) are on the hands of those who gave birth to this deal. But sadly, there will be far too much blood to go around. The leadership of the Republican Party must also share the blood. They collaborated. They did it with the other politicos within the Administration and the Democratic Party. Yesterday’s Senate session was a prime example.

But the real sell-out by the GOP leadership took place long before, when Corker presented his Bill. It reversed the burden for approval and essentially abdicated the Senate’s treaty-making prerogatives. Even the amendments proposed for this flawed bill (by Republican Senators Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Jeff Sessions), which would have strengthened the Senate ability to regulate its contents, were undermined by the old bulls when eight of them voted with the Democrats to block the amendments.

As this took place yesterday, Cruz was providing clear paths to fighting this disaster that could work within the context of the Constitution and the Corker Bill alike. But none will be advanced by the leadership.

Because of this so-called agreement with Iran, our nation will face some of the most severe tests it has yet endured. If I am correct, many of our children and grandchildren will fight and sacrifice because of it. I hope that I am greatly overstating things. I hope that I am flat-out wrong. But history and reason indicate that I am not.

Two things must happen if we are to emerge from the coming changes in the world with the vision of the Founders alive. We must elect an administration and a congress with a clarity about what we face and a warrior’s determination to prevail against it. We must see a reborn Republican Party controlled from the grass roots. In each case, if the change does not occur, something different will replace it. That is true of both the nation and the party. Each vote cast that enables the Iranian deal to become reality is a vote for war. It will not be a war for territory or resources or even influence. It will be a war for survival. Frankly, my belief is that we are already in that war, but have refused to say so plainly.

Thursday’s events have put our worst enemy on a more equal footing and ensured their aggression. The civilization and culture we have placed in such severe danger is not ours alone. It was given to our grandfathers and by our fathers to us, through the struggles, hopes, dreams, blood, and bone of many generations who never lived to see it. They lived their lives in the hope passing on the liberty and opportunity we inherited from their dreams. They spent generation after generation toiling by mere inches and fractions of inches toward the America into which we were born.

We have been in a life-and-death struggle, but we haven’t called it what it is. We probably no longer have a choice. If we are to preserve their gift, we must prove to be, perhaps. the most clearly-focused and determined generation of all.

We must not just preserve the American Character, but grow it, strengthen it, then spread it to a world in bad need of it. We can accept leadership from no one who does not have it, but it should be clear after Thursday that it is for the United States to lead, to find leadership, and to create the path back to liberty and safety for future generations.