Time to strike Iran is Now---interesting article
Time to strike Iran is Now---interesting article
Five Minutes to Midnight Aug 10
The War Is Coming, No Matter How Hard We Try to Evade It
by Robert Tracinski, from TIA-- "The Intellectual Activist,"
I have noticed a recent trend in war commentary, starting a few weeks after the
beginning of the current conflict in Lebanon. The trend began with a series of
analogies between recent events and the events of the 1930s, leading up to World
War II.
In the August 2 Washington Times, for example, Kenneth Timmerman referred to the
Lebanon War as "Islamofascism's 1936." Just as the Spanish Civil War that began
in that year was a preview of World War II---the 1937 bombing of Guernica was
Hermann Goering's test of the ability of aerial bombing to destroy cities?so
Timmerman argues that the Lebanon War is a preview of a larger conflict: "Iran...is
testing the international community's response, as it prepares for a future war."
(Jack Wakeland made a similar point in the July 19 edition of TIA Daily.)
For others on the pro-war right, the preferred analogy is 1938, the year in
which Western appeasement of Hitler emboldened him to further attacks. That year's
Munich Agreement---the "diplomatic solution" to a German-fomented crisis in
Czechoslovakia, abandoned Czechoslovakia to Hitler in exchange for promises that
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain claimed would guarantee "peace for
our time." On August 7, the headline of a Washington Times editorial asked: is
the Bush administration's proposed diplomatic solution for Lebanon an attempt to
secure "Peace in Our Time?"
Over at National Review Online, Jonah Goldberg picks 1939, wondering if Israel
will fall to a Sunni-Shiite pact, just as Poland fell to a Nazi-Soviet pact,
while John Batchelor, writing in the New York Sun, is more ecumenical, citing
analogies to 1936, 1938, 1939, and even America in 1941.
British commentator David Pryce-Jones, in his blog at National Review Online,
sums up the general sense of things:
I have often wondered what it would have been like to live through the Thirties.
How would I have reacted to the annual Nuremberg Party rallies, the rants
against the Jews, and Hitler's foreign adventures which the democracies did
nothing to oppose, the occupation of the Rhineland and Austria, Nazi support for
Franco in the Spanish civil war, and the rest of it. Appeasement was then
considered wise, and has only become a dirty word with hindsight....
Now Iran is embarked on foreign adventures in Iraq and Syria and Lebanon. It is
engaged on all-out armament programs, and is evidently hard at work developing
the nuclear weapon that will give it a dimension of power that Hitler did not
have..... Appeasement is again considered wise.
What these commentators are picking up is not an exact parallel to any one event
of the 1930s--hence their scattershot of historical analogies. Instead, what they
are picking up is a sense of the overall direction of world events: we are
clearly headed toward a much larger, bloodier conflict in the Middle East, but
no one in the West wants to acknowledge it, prepare for it, or begin to fight it.
The phrase that best captures this sense of foreboding struck me in a long and
interesting account of wartime Israel by Bernard-Henri Levy.
Zivit Seri is a tiny woman, a mother, who speaks with clumsy, defenseless
gestures as she guides me through the destroyed buildings of Bat Galim--literally
"daughter of the waves", the Haifa neighborhood that has suffered most from the
shellings. The problem, she explains, is not just the people killed: Israel is
used to that. It's not even the fact that here the enemy is aiming not at
military objectives but deliberately at civilian targets--that, too, is no
surprise. No, the problem, the real one, is that these incoming rockets make us
see what will happen on the day--not necessarily far off--when the rockets are
ones with new capabilities: first, they will become more accurate and be able to
threaten, for example, the petrochemical facilities you see there, on the harbor,
down below; second, they may come equipped with chemical weapons that can create
a desolation compared with which Chernobyl and Sept. 11 together will seem like
a mild prelude.
For that, in fact, is the situation. As seen from Haifa, this is what is at
stake in the operation in southern Lebanon. Israel did not go to war because its
borders had been violated. It did not send its planes over southern Lebanon for
the pleasure of punishing a country that permitted Hezbollah to construct its
state-within-a-state. It reacted with such vigor because the Iranian President
Ahmadinejad's call for Israel to be wiped off the map and his drive for a
nuclear weapon came simultaneously with the provocations of Hamas and Hezbollah.
The conjunction, for the first time, of a clearly annihilating will with the
weapons to go with it created a new situation. We should listen to the Israelis
when they tell us they had no other choice anymore. We should listen to Zivit
Seri tell us, in front of a crushed building whose concrete slabs are balancing
on tips of twisted metal, that, for Israel, it was five minutes to midnight.
It is, indeed, "five minutes to midnight"--not just for Israel, but for the West.
The time is very short now before we will have to confront Iran. The only
question is how long we let events spin out of our control, and how badly we let
the enemy hit us before we begin fighting back.
We can't avoid this war, because Iran won't let us avoid it. That is the real
analogy to the 1930s. Hitler came to power espousing the goal of German world
domination, openly promising to conquer neighboring nations through military
force and to persecute and murder Europe's Jews. He predicted that the free
nations of the world would be too weak--too morally weak--to stand up to him, and
European and American leaders spent the 1930s reinforcing that impression. So
Hitler kept advancing--the militarization of the Rhineland in 1936, the Spanish
bombing campaign in 1937, the annexation of Austria and the invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1938, the invasion of Poland in 1939--until the West finally,
belated decided there was no alternative but war.
That is what is playing out today. Iran's theocracy has chosen, as the nation's
new president, a religious fanatic who believes in the impending, apocalyptic
triumph of Islam over the infidels. He openly proclaims his desire to create an
Iranian-led Axis that will unite the Middle East in the battle against America,
and he proclaims his desire to "wipe Israel off the map," telling an audience of
Muslim leaders that "the main solution" to the conflict in Lebanon is "the
elimination of the Zionist regime." (Perhaps this would be better translated as
Ahmadinejad's "final solution" to the problem of Israel.)
Like Hitler, Ahmadinejad regards the free nations of the world as fading "sunset"
powers, too morally weak to resist his legions of Muslim fanatics. And when we
hesitate to kill Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq, when we pressure Israel to rein in its
attacks on Hezbollah, when we pander to the anti-Jewish bigotry of the "Muslim
street"--we reinforce his impression of our weakness.
The result has been and will be the same: Iran will press its advantage and
continue to attack our interests in the Middle East and beyond. The only
question is when we will finally decide that Iran's aggression has gone too far
and its theocratic regime needs to be destroyed.
But the delay has been and will be costly. When the wider war comes, Lebanon won't
be the only nation plunged into turmoil. Iraq will also get much worse, since
Sadr is almost certain to lead a Shiite uprising against American troops in
support of his masters in Tehran. And the terrorist plot uncovered today in
Britain should cause us to recollect that Iran has a long-standing global
terrorist network that it could use to strike in Europe and even in America.
Writers on the pro-war right (along with a very small number of pro-war liberals)
sense that this war cannot be avoided, and they are beginning to prepare
themselves--and their readers--to fight. Few of them are yet prepared to say that
we need to strike immediately at Iran, though a few are beginning to contemplate
this necessity. (See Joel Rosenberg in today's National Review Online.)
The left also senses the impending war, but they have a very different reaction.
Their favorite analogy is not the prelude to World War II, but the beginning of
World War I.
It is widely acknowledged that World War II was made far more horrible by the
years in which free nations appeased Hitler, allowing him to strengthen his
armies before he took over Europe. That analogy lends itself to one conclusion:
the sooner we attack Iran, the better.
World War I, by contrast, is largely regarded as the result of a giant, tragic
mistake, a failure of diplomacy in which the great powers of Europe, seeking a
network of alliances that would guarantee a "balance of power," instead trapped
themselves into a senseless war. This is the use made of the analogy by Henry
Porter in The Guardian.
