"Nothing would improve the prospects of the people of Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Yemen and Israel more than removing the Islamic regime in Tehran."
Thomas Friedman, in today's New York Times
Maybe the U.S. and Israel aren't the bad guys. Maybe Iran is.
Yesterday's guest post by Herb Rothschild listed the policy and moral failures of the U.S. and Israel. I invited someone to respond and argue "that the policy and actions of the U.S. and Israel have been honest, above-board, and peace-seeking in this region."
Michael Trigoboff doesn't argue that the U.S. and Israel are good, but rather than their war against Iran is good because it is necessary. Iran is a danger to Israel, to the region, and to the USA. It is fanatical, brutal, and relentless in its desire to destroy The Great Satan (the U.S.) and The Little Satan (Israel.) They pray for our deaths.
Michael Trigoboff is a retired computer science professor at Portland Community College.
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A response to yesterday's post by Herb Rothschild:
Mr. Rothschild thinks that the United States has no reason to go to war against Iran. I wonder what he thinks incessant chants of “Death to America” are all about. I wonder why he thinks Iran is motivated to get nuclear weapons and who they might want to use them against.
Iran doesn’t just chant its wishes. Iran and its proxies killed over 200 US Marines in Beirut; they captured the CIA station chief in Lebanon, tortured him to death, and sent us a video of the torture; they supplied Iraqi insurgents with IEDs that killed and wounded thousands of our soldiers.
Iran is the foremost sponsor of Islamic terrorism in the world. It threatens all of our regional allies. Its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, provided it with a strong deterrent against attack. Thanks to Israel's destruction of those proxies, that deterrent has evaporated. Iran’s currently weakened state provides a golden opportunity to take down one of our foremost enemies.
Israel made numerous offers to live in peace beside a Palestinian state. The Palestinian response was not just refusal, but refusal accompanied by terrorist violence. One such offer was made to the Palestinians in 2000 by President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Not only did the Palestinians refuse to negotiate about this offer, they accompanied their refusal with the Second Intifada, a wave of 140 vicious terrorist suicide bombings targeting school buses, pizzerias, and cafes. Israel had a strong peace movement, but after the Second Intifada it collapsed, because most Israelis saw that the only outcome acceptable to the Palestinians was the total destruction of Israel.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators often chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” That's the chant in English. In Arabic, they chant: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab.” The Palestinians want a one-state solution; a state “from the river to the sea” completely free of Jews.
Iran’s ruling ayatollahs are not a normal regime that wants the best for its people. Their extreme Islamic ideology wants nothing less than the destruction first of Israel, then America. Their goal is Islamic rule over the entire world. Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Iranian regime, said this ultimate victory was worth it, even if Iran had to burn in the process. That same ideology was at play in Gaza, where Hamas spent its years of rule building nothing but tunnels so that it could hide under its civilians, turning them into human shields. The fate of those human shields mattered to Hamas only as a propaganda tool against Israel.
Obama’s “nuclear deal” with Iran was fatally flawed by its sunset clauses. By now those sunset clauses would have taken effect and Iran would be free to pursue nukes again. Allowing an Islamic death cult like the Iranian regime to get nuclear weapons is nothing short of criminal strategic negligence.
Israel had to destroy the Iranian proxies before it could go after the head of the snake. The United States is in the same position, but on a much larger strategic chessboard. Ninety percent of Iranian oil goes to China, which is how Iran gets around sanctions. China needs this oil to support its economy. By becoming a proxy of China and stepping onto that larger chessboard, the Iranian regime made a strategic, and hopefully fatal error.
The United States needs to deter China from attacking and taking over Taiwan. A credible threat to cut off China’s external oil supplies could do this. Just as Israel needed to take Hamas and Hezbollah off the chessboard before it could go after Iran, the United States needs the means to credibly threaten China’s external oil supply.
This could be the coherent strategy behind going after Venezuela first, and then Iran. We now control Venezuela’s oil exports. That oil is no longer going to Cuba, and we could stop it from going to China. If we gain that ability with Iranian oil as well, we may have what we need to deter an attack by China on Taiwan.
Both Mr. Rothschild and I are of Jewish heritage. When he thinks about who the good guys and the bad guys are, he might consider what his life would have been like had he been born in Iran instead of here in America.
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21 comments:
Yes, Iran's regime is evil, but so is Norh Korea’s, Myanmar’s and Russia’s, to name a few. For that matter, so is ours. Mr. Rothschild's well-made point is that Iran presented no direct threat to the U.S. when Trump decided to start bombing them, which makes his campaign seem more like a distraction from his place of prominence in the Epstein files. According to Trump, he had already “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, but of course he’s delusional and a compulsive liar.
It will be interesting to see if this military misadventure produces anything better than the deal President Obama and our erstwhile allies worked out through peaceful negotiations – the one Trump tore up. The results of our previous military interventions in the Middle East don’t inspire confidence.
Michael Trigoboff, thank you for this clear and thoughtful response to Mr Rothschild’s post. And I could answer the question about what his life would’ve been like had he, as a Jew, been born in Iran, like my grandfather who miraculously escaped and my other relatives who weren’t able to flee.
Michael writes that Iran is an avowed enemy. Monday’s blog explained the logic behind why they are an avowed enemy. Now we have the emotional response that neglects the founding of the current Israeli boundaries. They echo the founding of the United States’ boundaries. When the boundaries of the original thirteen colonies were established, they were drawn from the land of indigenous peoples. Treaties were signed in many cases, only to be violated. The results, on the boundary edges, were continual skirmishes—exactly like what the world has seen in Israel on the West Bank, in Jerusalem, in the Gaza Strip, and elsewhere inside and along Israel’s borders.
Unlike the indigenous peoples in the US, the Palestinians, as they are now known, had allies in the Arab and broader Middle East region who came to their aid. It’s a bit like saying: I punched you first, and now your big brother and his friends want to beat me up. Both sides in this war have a pretext to fight, and both have violated treaties and international law. The question remains: Why should the US continue to commit its military when our national interests are not clearly at stake?
And the goal of this war is?
The relevant or comparative "indigenes" of Palestine were the Philistines, from which the first name derives (@1200 BCE). Hebrews, later Israelites, had long been there too. Philistines/Palestinians were not even Arabs, let alone Muslims, who did not exist as such until the 7th century CE.
Until its ill-advised entry into the First World War, the Turkey-based Ottoman Empire had controlled the Holy Land for centuries. Arab families such as the Sauds, who hated the Turks, were happy to obtain newly-minted nation-states drawn up for them by the victorious Allies.
After WWII, the Allies installed a renewed Israeli state because of the Holocaust. The Muslim Middle East objected because they view Jerusalem as their third holy city. A transplanted Egyptian, Yasir Arafat, then began advocating pretextually tor Arab "Palestinians".
Despite the guest blogger's claim that Israel made numerous offers to the Palestinians for a two-state solution, the truth is that Israel has never negotiated in good faith. It's relevant that every time a two-state resolution was put before the UN General Assembly, both Israel and the US voted against it. And the US, by using its veto power in the Security Council, made sure the UN couldn't move to implement it even though almost every other country in the world supported those resolutions.
Those familiar with the history of Zionism know that Netanyahu is merely pursuing the goal of occupying all of Eretz Israel (God’s so-called original land grant to the Hebrews) that was first enunciated by Theodore Hertzl, the founder of modern Zionism, and repeatedly affirmed by Zionist leaders. Here is a sample of their statements.
"[We Zionists will] spirit the penniless population across the border [of the Jewish state] by denying it employment . . . Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." Diary of Theodore Herzl, entry dated June 12, 1895.
“The Islamic soul must be broomed [ethnically cleansed] out of Eretz-Yisrael.” Also, "There is no choice: the Arabs must make room for the Jews of Eretz Israel. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs.” Ze'ev Jabotinsky, spiritual father of the Likud Party, in a letter dated November 1939 to a Revisionist colleague in the U.S.
"There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries, all of them." Also, "Not one village, not one [Arab] tribe should be left.” Diary entries of Yosef Weitz, director of the Transfer Committee Israel created in 1948, the year of its founding.
"The compulsory transfer of the Arabs . . . could give us something which we never had [even in Biblical times].” Also, "With compulsory transfer we will have a vast area . . . I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it." David Ben-Gurion, first prime minister of Israel, quoted in Benny Morris, “Righteous Victims: A history of the Zionist-Arab conflict, 1881-1999.”
"It is not as though there was a Palestinian people . . . and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them . . . they did not exist." Golda Meir, prime minister of Israel 1969-1974, quoted in The Washington Post, June 16, 1969.
"There is no Zionism, colonization, or Jewish state without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands." Ariel Sharon, prime minister of Israel 2001-2006, quoted in the New York Times, 1998.
Jews were indigenous to that land long before Islam (or even the Arab identity) existed. Jews have continuously lived in that land since biblical times.
Jews accepted the 1947 UN partition plan. The Arabs didn’t, and multiple Arab armies invaded in an attempt to destroy the new Jewish state. The Jews won that war, and the 1948 armistice lines reflected that victory. The Jews ended up with more territory than they would have had under the UN partition plan. Tough luck for the Arabs; when you start a war and lose it, there are consequences.
Israel was totally willing to live within the 1948 armistice lines, but the Arabs weren’t, and they started a new war in 1967. They lost that one too, and lost even more territory. By now, the 1948 armistice lines, which they started a war to obliterate, are now sacred to them. They rely on widespread ignorance of history when they take that position.
Egypt started a war in 1973, and lost the entire Sinai Peninsula as a result. They got it back by making peace with Israel. That’s a lesson that the rest of the Islamic Arab/Iranian world could take to heart, but the idea seems to be slow to catch on.
The national interests of the United States include not having an Islamic death cult that constantly chants “death to America” in possession of nuclear weapons.
It's to distract you from caring whether your president is a pedophile.
The results of our previous military interventions in the Middle East don’t inspire confidence.
Except the first Gulf War. When we use our awesome military properly, it produces results that would be impossible for any other country.
“Properly” in this context means not getting bogged down like we stupidly did in Afghanistan and Iraq. It means quick and decisive action, aka “shock and awe.”
And hopefully, this example of our military capabilities will make China think twice about attempting to take over Taiwan.
Mr. Rothschild has provided us with a collection of the most extreme quotes he could find from Zionists. I could easily find a similar collection of extreme quotes from the anti-Zionist side, from the Nazi-allied grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the 1930s to the current Hamas charter.
None of the quotes Mr. Rothschild provided are proof of whether the Israelis were negotiating with the Palestinians in good faith. The historical truth is that the Palestinians never put those Israeli offers to the test.
The Palestinians could have responded to the Clinton/Barak offer with a counter-offer. If they had done that, an actual good faith negotiation might have ensued. But the Palestinians did not do that. Their counter-offer was a wave of 140 vicious terrorist suicide bombings.
The Palestinians refused to negotiate about these offers because they fundamentally do not want a two state-solution if one of those states will be a Jewish state. The existence of a state for the Jews in our ancestral homeland is unacceptable to them.
But the eradication of the Jewish state is unacceptable to Israelis and to Jews in general. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, it is clear to us Jews that we need a lifeboat, and that lifeboat is Israel. The recent appalling increase in antisemitism worldwide is yet another confirmation of that necessity.
We will fight for Israel's survival as hard as we have to, for as long as we have to.
The downfall of the world's leading sponsor of Islamic terrorism.
This response to Mr. Rothschild was from me. I keep forgetting to notice whether I am logged in as Anonymous or as myself. I never purposely post anonymously on this blog.
Michael and LD
The question remains: why commit blood and treasure to fighting Iran when such a conflict is clearly not in the best interest of the United States? The case was never made for this recent attack on Iran.
If the death cult that runs Iran ever got their hands on nukes, you can be sure they would nuke us. That definitely makes it in our best interest to prevent them from doing that.
The problem for Michael and LD is that there simply isn't a good answer to that question. According to Trump himself, we completely obliterated the Iranian nuclear program over the summer. Meanwhile Israel had severely degraded Iran's proxies to the point of them posing little threat.
The Trump administration doesn't know the answer to your question either judging by the multiple, conflicting justifications they've given for why the war needed to be launched.
The long term problem with launching this war is that it strongly incentivizes every country in the world to get nuclear weapons as quickly as possible so they don't get victimized by Trump and leaders like him. There's a reason why they aren't going after North Korea and it rhymes with "dukes".
Unless we commit boots on the ground we will NOT achieve regime change, and Khamenei Junior will be likely to want the bomb more than ever.
Our enemies—Russia, China, and North Korea—are the nuclear powers that threaten the use of nuclear weapons. However, they are primarily demonstrating that these weapons are under their control. The United States remains the only nation to have deployed a nuclear weapon against an enemy—Japan. Since 1945, no nuclear weapon has been used in conflict. Nations that possess nuclear weapons merely need to threaten their use to deter an enemy or aggressor.
You can deter a country whose leaders and people want to live. You cannot deter a country whose ideology is that they will win because they love death more than we love life.
“We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”
― Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic State of Iran
These people have been duking it out since Isaac and Ishmael. It doesn’t sound like they’re going to resolve it any time soon, and we shouldn’t have anything to do with it. A bit of their weirdness is captured in a Dylan song:
God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son.”
Abe said, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on.”
God said, “No.” Abe said, “What?”
God said, “You can do what you want to, but
The next time you see me coming, you better run.”
Abe said, “Where you want this killin’ done?”
God said, “Out on Highway 61.”
I myself noted here not so very long ago the administration disconnect between the former “Iranian Nuclear Threat Obliterated!” and the recent “We Must Stop the Iranian Nukes!”.
John F. and Woke raise valid concerns which I cannot answer, though MT is an able exponent. My objections were to stock leftist (mis)casting of America and Israel historically.
The explanations of Israel's history and Islamic theology are fascinating. However, these explanations miss the point of this war. The point of this war is that it's an opportunity for the United States to participate in God's plan for the second coming of Jesus Christ.
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