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| 40 years of appeasement has not changed this (EA Worldview) |
No one has expressed the concerns over Iran and the US (and its allies) failure to deal with that threat than did Jonathan Rosenblum’s column in last week’s Mishpacha Magazine (which should be read in its entirety). The following are some very extensive but highly pertinent excerpts that spells this out.
FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress three months ago, “As the world’s largest state-sponsor of terrorism, the Iranians, for instance, have directly, or by hiring criminals, mounted assassination attempts against dissidents and high-ranking current and former US government officials, including right here on American soil. And... Hezbollah, Iran’s primary strategic partner, has a history of seeding operatives and infrastructure, obtaining money and weapons, and spying in this country going back years.”
(Biden’s) approach to Iran, however, is Afghanistan on steroids…
Between Inauguration Day in January 2021 and March 2023, American forces in Iraq and Syria were attacked 78 times by Iranian proxies, the head of US Central Command told Congress. That was nothing compared to the three and a half months since October 7, during which there have been 165 attacks on American forces alone...
…the extreme deference to Iran has long been American foreign policy. And it is largely based on the assumption that the one result that must be avoided at all cost is military confrontation with Iran.
President Obama fully shared that assumption. He came into office determined to placate Iran for past wrongs suffered at American hands, including CIA involvement in the overthrow of the Communist-leaning Mossadegh government in 1953. He believed that doing so would encourage Iranian moderation in pursuing its nuclear goals.
While negotiating the JCPOA nuclear treaty with Iran, President Obama asserted from time to time that “all options,” including the military, were on the table, but no one took him seriously, least of all the Iranians, particularly after Obama abandoned all his previously announced “red lines” in Syria, in the face of Bashir Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people.
Similarly, Obama dropped all his previously announced red lines in negotiating the JCPOA agreement, which effectively sanctified Iran’s developing nuclear weapons by 2030.
Far from lessening the danger of nuclear war, the JCPOA virtually guaranteed a nuclear arms race in the Middle East among some of the world’s least stable regimes. And rather than allowing decreased American involvement in the region, efforts to appease Iran have only deepened American involvement, to the point that President Biden openly frets today about events in the region triggering a world war.
(Obama’s) appeasement of Iran ended with the entry of Donald Trump into office. He promptly tore up the JCPOA, which had never been ratified as a treaty by Congress, and reinstituted strong sanctions on Iran. The result was to reduce the amount of money the mullahs could funnel to their terrorist proxies surrounding Israel on every side and to create economic instability in Iran that only strengthened internal opponents of the regime.
(Biden) entered office determined to reinstitute the JCPOA and prepared to shower Iran with whatever it wanted in exchange for its agreement…
(The) United States has continued to shower the mullahs with billions of dollars, even as the regime has allied itself ever more closely with Russia and China…
And even after Hamas’s murderous rampage on October 7 and Hezbollah’s attacks across Israel’s northern border since then, the United States provided a waiver to Hamas and Hezbollah’s chief sponsors in Tehran, allowing them to access $10 billion from Iraq. In addition, the Biden administration permitted a UN missile embargo on Iran to expire.
On January 2020, President Trump channeled Reagan by sending an American drone to eliminate Qassem Soleimani, the head of the IRGC’s Quds Force. Soleimani was then directing all Iran’s proxy wars throughout the Middle East and was widely considered the second-most-powerful man in Iran. His death was a major blow to the regime’s imperial designs, though clearly not the end of them.
I understand the threat to world peace Iran poses and I share the fear that an escalation of the conflict might lead to nuclear war. And since Iran is not bothered by that scenario the US believes the onus is upon us - and our allies to do whatever we can to prevent it. Which explains the appeasement policy shared by both the Obama and Biden administration.
Problem is that if World War II taught is anything, it is tht appeasement doesn’t work. It only encourages our enemies to do more damage to world order.I’m not saying the US should declare war with Iran. What I am saying is that we ought to have the courage to do a lot more to than appease them in the hope that it will curtail their aims. That clearly hasn’t worked. The US needs to summon the courage to do more. As Jonathan further notes:
During the Trump years, facing a much more confrontational American president, Iran did not increase its uranium enrichment to 20 percent, as it did in the early months of the Biden presidency. Nor did it strike at American targets with anything close to the frequency of the Biden years.
The US need not even carry out a direct strike at Iran; the IRGC offers plentiful high-value targets in the region — over 500 military sites in Syria alone. And as Arthur Herman pointed out in the aforementioned Commentary article, the elimination of Iranian oil refineries on the Persian Gulf would bring most transportation in Iran to a halt within weeks, and the capture of its largest oil wells near the Gulf by an amphibious American force would deal a heavy blow to the Iranian economy. No large-scale American ground force would be required, as was the case in Iraq. The key point is that Iran has certain vulnerabilities that do not require an invading army to expose.
This is about as solid an explanation of how we got here and what needs to be done as I have ever seen.
One more thing. Anyone that thinks that any of this is about protecting Israel at the expense of American lives is mistaken. Yes, Israel will benefit. And that’s good for the US too. But this a lot more about retaining our way of life while securing the peace and security of the entire civilized world.
