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| Faisal Abbas, Editor-in-Chief of Al Arabiya English |
It is understandable
that there is a blind spot to that because of the potential danger. Opposing war with a
country still at peace seems like a no brainer. When the danger is not immediate and in any case not at your doorstep, it doesn’t
seem to exist at all except in the
media. I can therefore understand why the American people would be
reluctant to go to war with Iran… or vehemently oppose it.
Arguments about nuclear weapons in the hands of fanatic
regimes known to export terror… and known to have goals of world dominance someday,
fall flat in the face of thoughts about ‘my son’ going to war and coming back permanently
injured or dead.
This is how the war in Viet Nam was perceived by the public
after it started dragging on with no win in sight. Talk about communism
taking over the world starting with South East Asia made no difference. It was
their problem. We were safe here. Why should we care what happens in Asia? It
will not affect us in any way.
Well that attitude ended up being the right one.
Viet Nam was a disaster that should have never happened. The Communists won and it cost over 40,000 American lives to find that out. The communist takeover of Viet Nam
has not affected us one iota.
The war in Iraq had the similar arguments
made in support of it. There was a despot who we believed to have weapons of mass destruction
and he defied the world. Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator and ruled his country with an iron fist. If you lived there and opposed his regime,
you didn’t last very long. Hussein had no compunction about killing tens of thousands
of his own people with chemical weapons because they opposed him.
Morality was on our side. We believed that he had nuclear
weapons and attacked him. His army was no match for the Shock and Awe of the mighty US military. We toppled him quickly and
set up a democratic regime. But it was weak and divided… ripe for takeover by
religious fanatics. That country is now a disaster. Had we not invaded
Iraq, Saddam Hussein would still be
there as would the status quo ante of relative peace for its people. ISIS
would never have gotten off the ground.
In my view we lost more than we gained there and we should have stayed away. True Hussein was a brutal dictator and ridding the world of
Saddam Hussein may have been the right thing to do in a vacuum. But one must
consider the consequences. Sometimes you have to choose the lesser of 2 evils
no matter how bad the lesser evil is.
I don’t blame the Bush administration for going in with a
goal of destroying weapons they believed were there and with the hope of
replacing a dictatorship with a democracy. Nobel goals. But they miscalculated. There were no weapons of mass
destruction nor were any being built or even contemplated. The country was
relatively peaceful. If you supported Hussein you could get on with your life quite nicely there. But… hindsight is always 20/20. I supported
the war then. But I would have opposed it knowing then what I know now.
So when it comes to attacking Iran – which is a far more
dangerous proposition… where many more lives will be lost, It is very understandable
that the American people might very likely be strongly opposed to it. They see a country
7000 miles away that is no immediate danger to the US. There are no nuclear
weapons there now… and who knows if they will ever be. And they are in the middle negotiations to curb their pursuit of them. And even if they ever do get nuclear weapons… a lot of countries we don’t like have them. Like North
Korea. No one wants to send their child into harm’s way for this.
Understandable. But wrong. The threat from Iran is not unknown. It is there for the entire world to see. 19,000 centrifuges are there for the sole purpose of enriching uranium to nuclear grade
capacity. Iran has a fanatic fundamentalist religious leader
whose long term goal is to take over the
world. And whose short term goal is to annihilate 6,000,000 Jews
(the approximate number of Jews living in Israel). Something he repeatedly says
must be done. Unlike our ambiguity about nuclear weapons in Iraq, no one doubts Iran’s ambitions and intention
to see them through.
This is not to say we must go to war now. I agree that we
must allow diplomacy work. But the goal must be to eliminate their ability to produce
weapons of mass destruction entirely. Anything less gives them a green light to
eventually produce them; use them to annihilate 6,000,000 Jews; and further
advance their long term goal of establishing an Islamic world order governed by
a religious fanatic like Ayatollah Khameni.
There is such a thing a good war. A righteous war. A war
worthy of sacrifice. This is what World War II was. It was the Good War. The
American people knew what they were fighting. And sent their sons willingly
into harm’s way to combat it. People died. Our entry into World War II was an
example of what kind of sacrifice was required of us. The invasion at Normandy
Beach in France was a slaughterhouse! But we went in willingly to defeat the
man who was to become the greatest mass murderer in history.
We are not there yet… and hopefully we will never
be. But should it ever come to a war with Iran, it would be a just war. 6,000,000 Jewish lives are at
stake here too. And just like Hitler’s goal was eventually world domination, so
too is that the goal of Iran’s ‘Hitler’, Ayatollah Khameni and his henchmen in
office. The world cannot allow another Holocaust of six million Jews. That is
what is at stake here at the very least. Never again ought to mean something.
We cannot just turn our heads aside and say it will never
happen. That’s what many people said about Hitler before he attacked Poland. It was all just rhetoric for the benefit of
the masses at home. Even many Jews in Germany thought that. Let us not repeat the mistakes of the past.
I will end with the
headline of an editorial by Faisal J. Abbas, Editor-in-Chief of Al Arabiya English. He is
no fan of Israel and even less so of Netanyahu: President Obama, listen to Netanyahu on Iran.
I think that says it all.
