America must stop Iran

From Michael Freund in the Jerusalem Post, a call to American Christians to rally America to the defense of Israel against Iran. Iran’s president has not only said he intends to destroy Israel, but, after Israel, the West: “If you do not respond to the divine call,” he has addressed Western leaders, “you will die soon and vanish from the face of the earth.” That the president of a country that is about to possess nuclear weapons is making such threats goes orders of magnitude beyond any danger that was ever posed by Iraq, indeed, beyond any danger that has ever been posed by anyone. Yet, because of the failure of President Bush’s utopian attempt to create a democracy in Iraq, there seems to be no will to face the vastly greater threat coming from Iran. What—we’ve been willing to let our men be killed and maimed for the last four years riding up and down Iraqi highways to no purpose, but we’re not willing to use our military forces to disarm a country that is openly promising to ignite a nuclear war the moment it acquires the means to do so?

Protecting the nation of Israel which is located in the middle of the Muslim world does not contradict my call for separation between the West and Islam, as I explain here. Nor does a military strike against Iran contradict my call for separation between the West and Islam. One of the planks of that policy has always been that we must destroy or disarm regimes that become unacceptably dangerous. As I wrote at FrontPage Magazine two years ago:

On the military side, Mark Helprin of the Claremont Review has proposed a World War II-scale expansion of American military capabilities plus a permanent U.S. base located in an isolated though strategically central spot in the Mideast or Persian Gulf region, giving us the ability to destroy any Muslim regime that becomes dangerous to us. Helprin rejects any notion of occupying and reconstructing a Muslim country after we topple its government. The purpose of his strategy is not to reform or democratize the internal politics of terror-supporting Muslim societies, as President Bush and the neoconservatives seek to do, but to make militant Muslim leaders realize that they have no hope of harming us and that they face the loss of their regimes and their lives if they try….

Angelo Codevilla, also at the Claremont Review, goes further than his colleague Mark Helprin, advocating the outright destruction of several terror- and jihad- supporting Muslim regimes, either by killing the members ourselves (about 2,000 in each country) or, better, turning them over to their domestic enemies. This, he says, is the only way real regime change occurs in the Arab and Muslim world. Like Helprin, Codevilla advises that we have no interest in occupying these countries or building democracies there. The precise borders and political systems of Mideastern Arab societies are not our concern. We’re not trying to create a positive, we’re only trying to eliminate a negative—the international network of jihadist and Ba’athist terrorists and the regimes that make them possible.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 14, 2006 07:50 PM | Send