The War Against Iran’s Regime and the Lessons of History
“Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured.”
The present war against the Iranian regime is one of the rare occasions when leaders of the free world have heeded the lessons of history and seized an unprecedented opportunity to fight evil with courage and clarity.
Many have rightly compared former Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei to Adolf Hitler in terms of their fanaticism and the murderous actions and ambitions of their regimes. In both cases, Western politicians have tried misguided policies of appeasement.
On September 30, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced:
The settlement of the Czechoslovak problem which has now been achieved is, in my view, only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace. … We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.
Similarly, Obama’s Iran nuclear deal agreement proclaimed:
The goal for these negotiations is to reach a mutually agreed long-term comprehensive solution that would ensure Iran’s nuclear program will be exclusively peaceful. Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek or develop any nuclear weapons.
It took vision and courage to see the fallacy of Chamberlain’s popular appeasement stance. Five days after the agreement, Churchill labeled it “a total and unmitigated defeat” and remarked:
You must have diplomatic and correct relations, but there can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power, that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force. That power cannot ever be the trusted friend of the British democracy.
In 1940, Churchill further elaborated on the fallacy of appeasement:
Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured. But I fear — I fear greatly — the storm will not pass. It will rage and it will roar, ever more loudly, ever more widely. It will spread to the South; it will spread to the North. There is no chance of a speedy end except through united action; and if at any time Britain and France, wearying of the struggle, were to make a shameful peace, nothing would remain for the smaller States of Europe … but to be divided between the opposite, though similar, barbarisms of Nazidom and Bolshevism.
Today, the “useful idiots” of the West believe that appeasing radical Islamists and communists would make them embrace the values of liberal democracy. In a recent conversation, Dinesh D’Souza and Iranian political activist Goldie Ghamari noted:
The reason that the 1979 Islamic coup d’état was successful in the first place is because the Islamists were joined by the communists and the woke progressives. … [They] are so blinded by their “anti-imperialist” ideology that they are literally willing to side with brutal Islamic dictators because all they care about is the downfall of Western democratic societies like the United States.
…
[T]he left in America and in the West somehow thinks they can take these savages … and domesticate them. They think we can have Mamdani, we can have Ilhan Omar. In other words, Mamdani is in some ways an Islamist, but on the other hand, he is for the trans, he is for gay rights, he is for mandatory health care, so he seems to line up with the priorities of the progressive left.
Fortunately, the irreversible dangers of appeasing those who are determined to destroy Western civilization at any cost are all too clear to Trump and Netanyahu. Melanie Phillips eloquently summarized the far-reaching historical significance of the two leaders’ alliance against the epicenter of anti-Western forces:
The war against Iran … doesn’t merely offer the hope of relief for the whole world by eradicating one of its most evil, murderous and far-reaching regimes. We are also witnessing an even more momentous development — the likely birth of a new world order….
According to [the “rules-based international order”], war is only permitted as a response to an attack that’s imminent or already underway…. Far from producing an end to tyranny, persecution and oppression, … this international order has created a world in which the United Nations, which administers the rulebook, is in bed with Hamas. And the world body has long empowered states that pose an acute threat to freedom, such as Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, to hold the whole world hostage to their predatory and murderous agendas….
What few have properly understood is the enormous change in the world order that may result from this war…. Destroying the Tehran regime would deal a blow to the Islamist goal of destroying Western civilisation. It would also transform geopolitics by dealing a blow to China and Russia. Iran was indispensable to China in supplying it with oil. It was also crucial to China’s Belt and Road Initiative — its plan to create overland and maritime economic corridors to promote Chinese domination in global affairs.
For Russia, Iran has been vital as a major supplier of drones in its war against Ukraine and as the indispensable gateway for the International North-South Transport Corridor linking the Moscow region to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. With Russian influence much diminished in the Caucasus and in Syria, Iran was one of Moscow’s last bastions against the West in Eurasia.
…
This war against Iran may … be seen with hindsight as the pivotal moment when the old international order gave up the ghost of its own decadence and was replaced by a new global framework in which Israel, the light unto nations, was finally able to see that radiance begin to illuminate the world.
Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Another wonderful article ! I learn alot by reading your contributions.
For decades, leftists and Libertarians have demanded that the US cease being the world’s policeman. It never occurs to them that without the cop, there is no civilization.
Which is what leftist want. Libertarians are just too stupid to understand oceans no longer protect us.
Do what? The physical location of the USA absolutely helps protect us. If the USA was located not in N America but in the Mid East the simple geographic proximity to those wish us harm would allow not just more attacks nut more successful attacks. There’s a big difference between isolationist policy of never get involved overseas and that of non intervention where we don’t rush around the world playing world police on behalf of the globalist, neocon, corporatist interests.
We should always pursue the National Security and Economic interests of the USA though the current center/right populist definition of ‘interests’ is different that ‘what’s good for GM is good for America’ replacing that corporatist stance with the question of does this policy improve the lot of the broad middle-class the 70% in the center between the bottom 15% and top 15%.
Slapping down narcoterrorist regimes and asserting robust hegemony in our hemisphere is fine. So is settling old scores with the Iranian regime which still wishes ‘death to America’, has targeted and killed, maimed, wounded thousands of US service members and Citizens and wants Nukes and better ballistic missiles to increase the damage. Curb stomping those regimes is ‘America First’ Intervention into Kosovo wasn’t nor Ukraine.
Which leaders of the free world are standing up to Iran? I only see two: Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyah. Everyone else like Starmer, Macron and Mertz is cowering in the shadows.
Leave a Comment