Confronting Iran

Confronting Iran

By Barry Leonard Werner

What's worse than fighting a war you don't need to fight is not fighting a war you do need to fight.

I remember when the West, or at least the Western media, sighed a great sigh of relief when they figured out how to rationalize not confronting Iran. Somebody said that they are rational players, and everybody else piled on in agreement. Well, they said that Iran is rational enough to rationally protect its core. And then, the West, or at least the Western media, took that idea to mean that we can make a rational deal with Iran instead of confronting them militarily.

The question is what to do about Iran. People often think in terms of models that they consider to be standards to judge new situations. My model is the appeasement of Hitler before WWII and the late entry into that war by the US. (Maybe the US would not have entered that war at all had it not been that Germany declared war on the US first.) The result of appeasement and non-participation by the US in the subsequent war was that Nazi Germany used the time and resources it thereby gained to construct "Fortress Europe." Every time I hear people lamenting the sacrifices we made on the beaches of Normandy when we were finally forced to invade Fortress Europe, I feel anger at the short-sighted policymakers who allowed Nazi Germany to get so strong. But today, a different model is commonly used. Some people think that the Vietnam war is the model by which to judge new situations. According to modern, "progressive" thinking, we can win no war at all ever, and there are no wars that we should ever fight. A long time ago, that sort of thinking was summarized in the phrase "better Red than dead" to argue that we should not defend ourselves against any possible hostile act by the USSR. 

So what did the US do to keep Iran from getting the bomb anytime soon? We sacrificed millions of human beings in the Middle East who suffered from the evil efforts of Iran to make Shia Islam dominant over Sunni Islam and to destroy Israel, which Iran considers to be an affront to Islam. Americans under president Obama sacrificed many (I don't know how many) of their fellow Americans and people around the world by interfering with the operation of US agents in South America to stop Hezbollah's drug trafficking and other criminal activities. We did that only to appease Iran so that we could get the JCPOA. 

Iran is using nuclear blackmail against us. We think we have to allow them to get away with everything they do so that we can have the JCPOA. Agreeing to that sort of blackmail is wrong. Iran has been given sufficient warning. Iran's intentions are clear. There was a time when we could have bombed the Iranian nuclear weapons and missile program. Perhaps we have given them enough time to harden their nuclear weapons and missile programs against our bombs. If we made that mistake, then the use of sanctions is all that is left unless we physically invade that country. 

Now that Iran has entered into an agreement with China, our situation is even worse. It's only going to get worse, not better. Polite diplomacy is not an option.

Using the JCPOA to keep Iran from getting the bomb anytime soon cost the lives of millions of people in the Middle East, allowed Hezbollah to build its criminal empire, and may have made it impossible for us to eliminate Iran's nuclear weapons facilities with surgical air strikes. And, it only delayed the inevitable confrontation with Iran. So, we should act now to shut down Iran's military ambitions before Iran comes under Chinese protection.