Here’s the always-worth-reading Dr. Thomas Sowell on the current calamitous negotiations with Iran on their nuke program. Excerpt:
It is amazing — indeed, staggering — that so few Americans are talking about what it would mean for the world’s biggest sponsor of international terrorism, Iran, to have nuclear bombs, and to be developing intercontinental missiles that can deliver them far beyond the Middle East.
Back during the years of the nuclear stand-off between the Soviet Union and the U.S., contemplating what a nuclear war would be like was called “thinking the unthinkable.”
But surely the Nazi Holocaust during World War II should tell us that what is beyond the imagination of decent people is by no means impossible for people who, as Churchill warned of Hitler before the war, had “currents of hatred so intense as to sear the souls of those who swim upon them.”
Have we not already seen that kind of hatred in the Middle East? Have we not seen it in suicide bombings there and in suicide attacks against America by people willing to sacrifice their own lives by flying planes into massive buildings, to vent their unbridled hatred?
The Soviet Union was never suicidal, so the fact that we could annihilate their cities if they attacked ours was a sufficient deterrent to a nuclear attack from them. But will that deter fanatics with an apocalyptic vision? Should we bet the lives of millions of Americans on our ability to deter nuclear war with Iran?
It is now nearly 70 years since nuclear bombs were used in war. Long periods of safety in that respect have apparently led many to feel as if the danger is not real. But the dangers are even greater now and the nuclear bombs more devastating.
Clearing the way for Iran to get nuclear bombs may — probably will — be the most catastrophic decision in human history. And it can certainly change human history, irrevocably, for the worse.
Speaking as one who wore Uncle Sam’s colors in the last years of the Cold War and the opening rounds of the present global cultural conflict, there was a big difference between the nuke-owning Soviet Union and a nuke-owning Iran. It is a difference not of degree but one of kind, and it is this: The Russians are at their heart a sane people, people who love their children and want them to have a world to grow up in. That made them not want to see nukes used; they built them, as did we, but nobody on either side (except, possibly, a few sociopathic nuts) wanted to see them use.
The Iranians know no such compunctions. When they get a nuke, they’ll use it. And the resulting conflagration will probably make World War 2 look like a small-town fireworks show.
It’s become common to compare the Obama Administration’s unconscionable pandering to Iran with Neville Chamberlain’s attempts to appease Hitler. There are similarities, not least of which is the prediction made by an MP named Winston Churchill after Chamberlain proclaimed “Peace in Our Time.” Sir Winston told Chamberlain “You had to choose between dishonor and war. You chose dishonor, and you shall have war.” Churchill was right then, and he would be right in making the same observation today.
Dr. Sowell concludes: The road to World War II was strewn with arms-control agreements on paper that aggressor nations ignored in practice. But those agreements lulled the democracies into a false sense of security that led them to cut back on military spending while their enemies were building up the military forces to attack them.
That’s what is happening now, with Iran. We are dealing with a nutbag nation, a country that lies as reflexively as they breathe, run by a cabal of apocalyptic, Bronze Age shitbags that will take advantage of the Obama Administration’s fecklessness to gain the chance to rain fire on Tel Aviv, or London, or New York – or all of the above.
