Finish it

The United States and the world need a conquered and humiliated Iran

Andrew Roberts pretty much lays it out in his essay in the Free Press:

There are some moments in history when a sudden act of opportune ruthlessness readjusts the world toward a safer path.

The news available to me tells us that we and the Israelis know where Iran’s most important enrichment facility is, Fordow. The problem is that Fordow is deep underground, and it will take perhaps sustained bombardment by gigantic bunker buster bombs to destroy it. I don’t know if Israel has such bombs — I’ve seen conflicting reports — but it seems unlikely both that it has enough and that it has the very large aircraft capable of delivering them. If it’s going to get done, and thus the primary step toward Iran’s nuclear disarmament accomplished, we’re going to have to do it. That means Donald Trump is going to have to decide to do it, putting aside opinions of ostensible allies (but actual lunatics) like Tucker Carlson, not to mention the tongue-clucking of the rest of the world — the rest of the world which, as ever, sits on its sprawling backside while the United States does the work and takes the risks needed to insure its opportunity to do yet more tongue clucking.

I don’t know what Trump will decide. I do know what he should decide. It will require, as Mr. Roberts writes, a Churchillian moment.

I know, I know, readers are breaking out in howls thinking that the chances Donald Trump will act like Winston Churchill are less than the chances Emma Watson will start writing me lewd love letters.

But so, one might have said a week ago, were the chances that Trump would greenlight a devastating surprise attack on Iran rather than go on and on with feckless “negotiations” ostensibly designed to get to some phony deal but actually designed to disguise the threat enough to make it his successor’s problem. But the raid happened. It happened because Trump allowed it to happen. The United States did not directly participate in it, no, but is there any sensate person who thinks it could have been done without (at the least) months of US supplies not to mention the final approval?

The question on the table today is whether Trump should allow more direct American participation in the form of either bunker buster bombing of Fordow or outfitting the Israelis to do it themselves.

Dealing that kind of devastating blow to Iran’s nuclear ambitions might not entirely end the war. It might not even drive the mullahs into a surrender thinly disguised as “negotiations.” But it has a decent chance of doing one or both, and for however that may be, it would of itself be a major step in advancing the peace of the world.

The case for doing it seems obvious. Rising Lion was begun to put an end to Iran’s nuclear capacities and is now close to doing so. Yes, there are risks, but likely no more than already exist. Iran’s appetite for reprisal is already there (and its predicate — hate of the West — has been there for decades). If anything, destroying Fordow down to the last molecule will degrade their capacity for reprisal, which is the main thing, other than losing our nerve, we need to worry about now.

As Roberts notes, in the Middle East, preemptive attacks in the face of grave danger have worked before; “these include Israel’s surprise attacks that saved her from certain invasion in the Six-Day War of 1967 and her destruction of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility in 1981.” He goes on to explain why finishing the job now is imperative:

[I]f Iran’s centrifuges are still spinning in its nuclear facility 300 feet underground at Fordow, then Israel will have only scored a tactical win, rather than the strategic victory she needed. The successes against the upper echelons of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, military high command, and nuclear scientists are commendable, but nothing like enough. Only the United States has the 30,000-pound “bunker-busting” bombs necessary to shatter Iranian nuclear ambitions….

Netanyahu certainly feels the weight of history on his shoulders. The son of a distinguished historian and an avid reader of books by and about Churchill, he said three days ago, “Generations from now, history will record our generation stood its ground, acted in time, and secured our common future.”

He is right. And history could record that about President Trump too if he acts decisively.

Little remarked upon in all the press coverage I have seen of this is any long term, honest assessment of how we got to the dangers we face today. Clue: It wasn’t Donald Trump.

If Trump has before him the Churchillian option, it is not hard to see who represents Neville Chamberlain in all of this. President Obama’s adamant and repeated refusal to help the Iranian opposition—either overtly or covertly—during his eight years in office wrecked its brave efforts to replace the regime, and gave the lie to his pretensions to be a new John F. Kennedy. His cringing, appeasing Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) utterly failed to stop the sinister, inexorable spinning of the centrifuges, and came at the cost of lifting key sanctions and unfreezing assets.

It was neither joint (because Iran cheated)[Editor’s note: WHAT A SURPRISE] nor comprehensive (because it did not require Iran to abandon its nuclear program) nor a viable plan of action, although it did produce the sickening detail of pallets being loaded with billions of dollars and transferred to the regime in Tehran. Joe Biden then continued his master’s policy of trying to mollify Iran, unsuccessfully. For all his obtuse, dangerous wrongheadedness throughout the 1930s, at least Chamberlain never subsidized the Nazi regime with British taxpayers’ money in the way Obama and Biden has with Americans’.

In Biden’s defense, he might not have known what he was doing. But Blinken did.

The United States has suffered so much at the hands of Iran since the humiliations of the Carter administration during the U.S. embassy hostage crisis between November 1979 and January 1981 that no one would resent it finally setting things right.

I must strike a note of disagreement there. Plenty of people, virtually all of them Democrats, would resent America’s exacting a price from Iran. That’s because they thought then, and think now, that an arrogant, imperialist America had it coming. Which, if we’re to be honest, is, with some sizable segment of the Left, the real reason they oppose last week’s attack on the mullahs. It’s not that they think prolonged negotiations would have worked. It’s that, in 1979, Iran merely handed the United States the lesson in humility it had spent decades earning. And Jimmy Carter’s cowardice laid out the welcoming mat.

There is hardly a government in the world that would not sleep easier knowing that the theocracy in Iran had been denied the power to initiate a third world war.

That is doubtless true. How ironic, and how appalling, is it that the theocratic Gulf States have more regard for America than the DNC, Hakeem Jeffries, and the Harvard faculty combined?

We should believe the threats of dictators. History is littered with times that the West assumes that dictators were exaggerating or merely playing to their domestic audiences, but were in fact being coldly truthful. When Hitler stated in January 1939 that a world war would destroy the Jewish race in Europe only eight months before he deliberately started it, or Stalin promised that the Comintern would strive to undermine western democracies, or Vladimir Putin claimed that there was an “historical unity of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples” while massing an army on Ukraine’s borders, the West ought to have listened, rather than assuming they were bloviating.

The Left in our country has spent decades believing — or more likely, pretending to believe — that when mobs in the streets of Tehran were chanting “Death to America,” what they actually meant is that they wanted a nuclear program to, ya know, teach tenth graders how atoms work.

Depending on whether Donald Trump has it in him, all this can come to an end.

Dear Mr. President: Finish it.