WTH: On Iran

Sometimes war IS the only answer

©Israel Air Force

If you’re following the Israel-Iran war ongoing, and you want details about strikes in both Iran and in Israel, or you are keeping track of the growing roster of senior Iranian leaders eliminated, here’s your source: AEI Critical Threats Project.

If Donald Trump says Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon, and Israel says Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon, and despite that Iran was on the cusp of having a nuclear weapon and showed no sign of backing off, then war is the only option.

I have a news flash for you: War is hell. Somehow, in the process of defining deviancy down over the decades and fetishizing the notion that we must always “give peace a chance,” we have forgotten that sometimes stopping bad people from doing bad things requires the use of force, and in such cases there is always a steep price. Innocents die, the world is destabilized, and vast sums of money are expended. When we in America are lucky, we have allies that do the hard part: The suffering in prison, the decades of oppression, the dying. When we get off only having to foot part of the bill, we are not suckers, we are lucky.

In the wake of World War I, America and Europe internalized the idea that no fight was worth the cost paid 1914-1918. Because the Allied and Associated Powers were fixated on avoidance and not on pre-emption, Hitler was able to rise, rearm, and defeat his European neighbors. War against Germany in 1935 would have looked different than in 1939. But no one wanted war, and why would they?

The lesson we learn again and again is that sometimes you have to fight early in order to avoid the worst outcome. The problem is that false prophets of peace, be they Neville Chamberlain or Barack Obama or Tucker Carlson or Greta Thunberg, will never believe there is any worse outcome than war. Iran getting a nuclear weapon is a tolerable outcome. Ditto for North Korea and Pakistan. In their books, killing Osama bin Laden would have been less acceptable than 9/11. Because in their imagination, 9/11 never happens, or if it does, it’s really all our fault.

History has been unkind to this ilk of peacenik, whether wearing the garb of the isolationist, the environmentalist, the hippie, or the Free Palestine tent dweller. There are always Hitlers and Pol Pots and Saddams and Xi Jinpings to make them look bad, and belie their message of coexistence and world peace.

That’s not to say there is no room for diplomacy in this world; of course, there is, and there are problems that cannot be solved at the point of a gun. But to foreign ministries and their fellow travelers in academia and the mainstream media, diplomacy is an end in itself. Look at the trajectory of Iran diplomacy: The earliest demands were to deny Iran a peaceful nuclear program. That quickly changed to denying Iran the right to convert uranium into uranium hexafluoride, then denying the right to enrich beyond a certain percentage, then denying the right to assemble cascades of advanced centrifuges… and until last week, Iran was on the verge of having ten nuclear weapons.

That is not a story of the victory of diplomacy.

History makes heroes of leaders who are willing to take tough decisions. Often, they go through periods of profound rejection before the world can move beyond the false narratives of modern politics. Churchill was rejected before he was celebrated. Reagan was despised before he was worshiped. Benjamin Netanyahu has spent decades in power, and has always delayed a decision on confronting Iran. Thank him for making this decision. No one can accuse him of rushing into it. But ultimately he concluded that Israel was left with no choice.

As for Donald Trump, set aside for the moment the infuriating things about our Commander in Chief, and give him credit for understanding that at a certain moment, “go” is the only option.

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What will happen in Iran? I have no idea. Don’t believe anyone who tells you that revolution is imminent or that the region is on the brink of war. The Iranian people have paid a heavy price for their government’s obsession with Islamist extremism and antisemitism; for its bizarre conviction that the central goal of the Iranian nation needs to be the destruction of a small country so far away that it doesn’t even border a country that borders Iran. There is every chance the Iranian people will continue to pay that price, and that a low-grade war between Israel and Iran will continue for years to come.

As to the idea that anyone else in the region is going to join in on Iran’s side, these voices of doom need to get a grip. Is that what you’re seeing? I can parse the limp foreign ministry statements from Egypt and Saudi, and note that Israel seems to be using a lot of Arab airspace for its missions. I could add that no genuine tears will be shed in the Arab world over the shellacking Iran is now experiencing. But all of that is just obvious.

What should we want? The fall of the regime in Tehran. An end to Iran’s illicit nuclear weapons program. A slap in the face to Iran’s allies in Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang. Inshallah, as they say.