By Daniel S. Mariaschin, JNS
Those who claim the sky is falling because Israel is standing up to the neighborhood bully are either tremendously naive or find something appealing in Tehran’s culture of hate—or both.
Israel’s fight against Iran has drawn out the usual doubters, defeatists, skeptics and prophets of doom.
A banner headline in the London-based Financial Times blared, “Israeli Strike on Iran Ignites New Mideast War.” Writing in The New York Times, the headline over Mark Landler’s analysis announced, “How Iran-Israel Strife Could Spawn Turmoil Across Volatile Region.”
But in the first few days of opinion and reportage, none was more noteworthy than “America Must Not Get Dragged Into a War With Iran,” by Rosemary Kelanic of Defense Priorities, a Washington-based think tank. Her opinion piece appeared in the Sunday New York Times.
Kelanic’s screed reads as if it were torn from the Charles Lindbergh playbook. The first paragraph says it all: “The United States is alarmingly close to getting dragged into another military entanglement in the Middle East, this time by Israel—which is looking less and less like a true friend.”
It goes downhill from there. She charges Israel with purposefully giving little notice to the Trump administration about its intentions. Even if America were to join the fight, “the U.S. military might be unable to accomplish” the destruction of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. She writes that a war with Iran “would be a catastrophe,” and that “we would gain nothing from fighting a weak country halfway around the globe.”
Saying that, she oddly reverses herself and writes, “Iran is more capable of defending itself than the Houthis are,” and warns of our being drawn into “the Afghan model” of being bogged down with ground troops in Iran. “Destroying Iranian nuclear sites,” she asserts, “would only delay” the Tehran regime’s march to the bomb.
“We cannot prevent weaponization in the long term,” she posits, which is why diplomacy and benign neglect have always been better choices for handling Iran.”
Is she kidding?
Both diplomacy (e.g., the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, the official name of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal) and benign neglect (the international community’s persistent, decades-long kicking the Iranian nuclear can down the road) have brought us to bomb-grade enrichment and a very short window to the bomb, that brought about Israel’s decisive move forward.
Kelanic has not one word to say about the millions of oppressed Iranians who detest the theocrats in power and who long for regime change. She incredulously says that Israeli military action has only brought people out into the streets in support of the regime. Indeed, the same way that there were crowds in Red Square under the Soviets, in Fidel Castro’s Havana or Hugo Chavez’s Caracas. They were ordered to go, with premade signs surely provided, in this case with “Death to the Zionists” a common theme.
And finally, her kicker: “And even if the regime were to be deposed, what then? For all the Iranian government’s faults, a bad government is preferable to the chaos of no government. Do we really want to turn Iran into a failed state … ?”
What is she talking about?
Iran is a brutish purveyor, enabler and funder of international terrorism. It denies rights to and oppresses women, LGBTQA+ and any political opposition that dares show its face in the streets. It runs a stable of proxies that do its bidding in the Middle East and beyond. It is in the business of developing intercontinental ballistic missiles. Its nuclear-weapons program was to be the jewel in its nefarious genocidal crown. Of course, the alternative to that would be better for Iranians and the rest of the world.
There is one other thing peculiar to Kelanic and the other Iran apologists. They demonstrate an absolute lack of empathy for Israel. Nothing in her piece quotes from Iran’s nearly five decades of calling for this “cancerous tumor” to be excised from the Middle East. Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, except for a few notable friends who have spoken out about the threats from religious leaders in Tehran to Israel and Western civilization, the Jewish state has carried the heavy burden of living daily with exhortations to destroy its very existence.
No more.
Israel is showing the way to a safer, much less chaotic Middle East. Kelanic and fellow travelers who claim the sky is falling because Israel is standing up to the neighborhood bully are either tremendously naive or find something appealing in Tehran’s culture of hate—or both. Either way, it is precisely a worldview that has coddled and indulged Iranian rulers all these decades. It is long overdue for the tables to be turned.
