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| Donald Trump and FDR. Will Trump rise to the occasion as did FDR? |
His perspective is virtually the opposite of mine. A
perspective that is not uncommon in liberal circles. And is in fact the
prevailing view among most of them. It deserves a response that I think should
be read more widely than it would be - buried in a lengthy comment thread.
First, his comment:
Without popular or actual congressional support, Trump could not sustain a full-on war against Iran, especially should victory require a grinding, stretched-out, house-to-house ground war against a nation with 92 million civilians. Trump could start such a war before November 3, but after the initial wall-to-wall attack the bad news would come fast and overwhelming. Americans would put irresistible pressure on Congress to end it all, even if doing so would mean Iran will maintain effective control of oil shipments out of the region.
What Israel wants from the U.S. is therefore unobtainable, short of atomic warfare. Previous American presidents understood this. Trump doesn’t understand, or can’t, or is living in a delusional space in which reality is unwelcome.
Netanyahu understands Trump very well, as a matter of their shared personality-based Weltanschauung. But Netanyahu doesn’t understand America—he thinks he does, but that’s just his ego talking—and he apparently doesn’t realize the extent to which Americans will blame him and Israel for Trump’s suckerdom.
Somebody better fix this whole thing, and fast. Or America will become a self-inflicted victim. Israel will suffer much more, and for much longer.
My response:
The idea that the most powerful military in the world by far
- more powerful than any military in history could not defeat a country with
vastly inferior capabilities is simply not true. It is absurd to even suggest
it. Yet many appeasement-minded members of Congress do say exactly that.
If they are right, then maintaining the world’s most
powerful military is little more than a colossal waste of money. It would also
mean that members of Congress who advocate military victory in Iran - as the
late Lindsey Graham did - are simply ignorant, and that any attempt to achieve
total victory is doomed to end in their self-described “worst-case scenario.”
I’m sorry, but I think this view is highly subjective and is
hardly unanimous.
It is certainly not the view of the military experts that I have heard
interviewed.
Had the United States embraced this kind of thinking during
World War II, America might well have evenally become part of Hitler’s Third
Reich.
That war was not universally popular. Isolationists in
Congress strongly opposed entering it. What ever one my think of Franklin
Roosevelt, to his credit, he understood what was at stake and wanted to enter
the war long before Pearl Harbor, but Congress would not allow it.
The stakes then were enormous. Millions of people living
under Nazi rule were subjugated, brutalized, and murdered. Yet Congress had
little appetite for war.
The Nazi war machine was formidable. Far more advanced for
its time than Iran is for its time today. Germany was fully prepared for the
Allied invasion of Normandy. American soldiers were expected to be mowed down
as they stormed those beaches. And many were. Roosevelt knew that. Eisenhower
knew that. But they also understood what was at stake, and they did not flinch.
The war took years, but the United States and its allies
ultimately defeated Nazi Germany. Hitler committed suicide. Many of his
henchmen were tried at Nuremberg, convicted of crimes against humanity and
genocide. And hanged.
The dangers posed by the current Iranian regime are not
entirely dissimilar…
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