Don’t Wait for Iran to Get Nukes It’s time to use the “mailed fist.” by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/dont-wait-for-iran-to-get-nukes/
Donald Trump has twice issued ultimatums to Hamas: If the hostages held by Hamas are not returned by his Inauguration, “there’ll be hell to pay.”
It may not take that long, since last week a deal was announced for a cease-fire and 33 of the Israeli hostages returned in exchange for nearly 1000 Palestinian Arab prisoners in Israeli custody. Once again, Trump’s foreign policy realism shames the Biden administration’s prissy foreign policy crew and its “rules-based international order” naïve idealism that for decades has ended in dangerous appeasement and shameful retreat.
But this deal is very questionable, fraught as it is with the same moral hazards that have always accompanied decades of such agreements: the Palestinian Arabs’ habit of not keeping their word, and serially violating the terms of every deal; the disproportionate number of prisoners to be released; Israel’s withdrawal from territories that Hamas has used for launching attacks; and the strong possibility that those released prisoners will help Hamas regroup and resume the war.
A much more strategically important goal should be destroying Iran’s theocratic regime, given that it’s mere months from having the wherewithal to make several nuclear weapons. More negotiations, “parchment barriers,” or “deals” piled on top of those that have been going on for ten years, are not viable, and have only provided time and billions of dollars for the mullahs’ nefarious purposes. What we need, as First Lord of the Admiralty Duff Cooper said during the doomed Munich talks, is not “the language of sweet reasonableness” but the “language of the mailed fist.” And we need it stat.
Moreover, it’s not just about the nukes. The bipartisan appeasement of the Islamic Republic of Iran for nearly half a century has been one of the most destructive assaults on our power of deterrence and national prestige, ranking with our retreats from Saigon and, for al Qaeda and other terrorists, from Mogadishu in 1993, and especially Beirut ten years earlier, when 241 American servicemen, mostly Marines, were bombed by an Iranian proxy gang of jihadists that became Hezbollah. Nor did the Reagan administration punish Iran, not even bombing its training camps in the Bekaa Valley, as France (sic!) and Israel did.
The wages of appeasing Iran include proving to the mullahs that Americans––for all their wealth and power––are corrupt infidels enslaved to pleasure and comfort. This perception has not weakened, despite the current setbacks inflicted on Iran by Israel. After all, during the Trump administration Tehran faced challenges like “maximum pressure” on its economy, further infuriating the regime’s already angry citizens. But given the mullahs’ passionate belief in their divine mission, and the continuing civilizational failure of nerve in Western nations, the Iranian theocrats still believe they will achieve the aims enjoined on them by their faith.
The many other maleficent effects of our feckless Iran policies quickly became obvious in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, which was transformed into “Little Tehran,” filled with Iranian money, weapons, terrorist training of proxies like Hezbollah, and Quds Force troops, the revolution’s expeditionary military wing.
Moreover, as historian Robin Wright said of Iran’s presence in the Bekaa Valley, Iran started “systematically mobilizing the Shiite community and establishing small cells of activists under the leadership of radical local clergy for possible action.” Later, a National Security Council staff member commented, “We had no idea that this action would inevitably lead to the radicalization of large elements of the Lebanese Shiite community, the widespread taking of hostages, a dramatic upsurge in international terrorism and the Iran-Contra Affair.”
But our closest ally in the region, Israel, has borne the brunt of Iran’s efforts in Lebanon that established a genocidal jihadist force armed with over 100,000 missiles sitting on Israel’s northern border, until Israel neutralized Hezbollah during the war with Hamas––an object-lesson in not suffering a threat to continue existing and growing more and more lethal.
The Iran-Contra scandal during 1985-86 reminds us that the creation of the Iran threat by appeasement was not just a Democrat show. This feckless scheme that was predicated on “diplomatic engagement” and paying off kidnappers, which it was believed could change the behavior of Iran and its terrorist proxies. The plan was to sell to Iran, through an Israeli cutout, over 2000 advanced weapons including TOW anti-tank missiles and HAWK anti-aircraft missiles, in order to persuade the regime to pressure its Islamist proxy to release four American hostages.
Worse, so deluded was one of the American emissaries that he brought to Tehran a cake in the shape of a key symbolizing the deal as the “key” to Iranian-American friendship.” The astonishing failure to understand Islam and the revolution’s deep credal hatred of the West, especially the U.S., seems to have carried over into Reagan’s defense agencies. In the end, the remaining three hostages were released––the fourth, CIA station chief William Buckley, was tortured to death by Imad Mughniyeh, the architect of the bomb attack on the Beirut barracks. The terrorists quickly kidnapped four replacements.
No surprise, then, that before the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden saw this failure to exact vengeance on the murderers of Americans––along with Bill Clinton’s seeming disregard for other Americans killed in al Qaeda’s terrorist bombings of our soldiers, military residences, and embassies in Saudi Arabi and East Africa, and a Navy destroyer in Yemen––demonstrated that the U.S. was a “weak horse,” a nation with “foundations of straw.”
And despite disclaimers, Iran was complicit in those attacks. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, “[T]here is strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transition of al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were future 9/11 hijackers.” After that atrocity, Iran aided the 2008 attack on our embassy in Yemen, and during our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran’s Quds Force supplied insurgents with Russian missiles and IEDs designed to penetrate armored vehicles, which murdered and severely maimed hundreds of our soldiers
Iran has given the U.S. a plethora of casus belli. It has joined up with Russia and China to attack America and other Western nations, as a means of achieving the imperialist dreams of traditional Muslims to fulfill through jihad, which the leader of the Iranian Revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini announced when he said, “We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry ‘there is no god but Allah’ resounds over the whole world, there will be jihad.”
As Middle East historian Efraim Karsh has shown, this statement is not “heretical” or “fundamentalist” or “radicalized,” but consistent with fourteen centuries of Islamic tradition, doctrine, practice, and its “unwavering feeling of supremacy and buoyant conviction of its ultimate triumph imbued the early believers with the necessary sense of purpose, self-confidence, and revolutionary zeal to take on the region’s established empires.”
In short––as the Economist said during the embassy hostage crisis and the feeble sanctions and threats to embargo Iranian oil sales to Europe––“The denial of material things is unlikely to have much effect on minds suffused with immaterial things.” Khomeini agreed: “Victory is it not achieved by swords; it can be achieved only by blood. Victory is not achieved by large populations; it is achieved by strength of faith.”
Yet half a century later, the secularized, Christophobic West has not learned that lesson. Consider the recent UN Security Council’s proposal to renew the original resolution that spurred the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or “nuclear deal” with Iran, despite its manifest failures to stop Iran’s nuclear program, and the mullahs’ serial violation of its terms. This Security Council statement was joined by France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, who are content to allow Iran the breathing space it needs to achieve nuclear weapon capability, as long as Iran can sell oil to European nations that have degraded their economies by pursuing “net-zero carbon” and “renewable energy” schemes that have weakened their industrial sector.
We cannot continue to indulge the shibboleths of “diplomatic engagement” and multinational and Security Council “parchment barriers” like the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action “nuclear deal” with Iran. We must act now, while Iran’s missile batteries protecting its nuclear facilities have been destroyed by Israel, the mullahs’ army of proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria have been rocked back on their heels, and the long-suffering people of Iran are eager for liberation from the mullah’s tyranny.
It’s time to use the “mailed fist” and end our long war with the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism.
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