Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran
[From article]
Against ferocious opposition at home and abroad, [the White House] is about to repeat the grievous mistake of appeasing Iran that Carter made over three decades ago and do even more geopolitical damage than [Carter] wreaked in 1979.
[. . .]
On February 1, 1979, two weeks after the cancer-ridden Shah of Iran left his country in the hands of a caretaker as he wandered the world in search of treatment, his fanatical opponent, Islamist cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, returned from his 14-year Parisian exile and within a week had engineered the overthrow of the shah’s feeble substitute and installed his own puppet regime. Not only did Iran’s Islamists hail the ayatollah’s return; Carter’s United Nations ambassador, the painfully naïve Andrew Young, lauding Islam as “a vibrant cultural force in today’s world,” prophesied that the ayatollah himself—with ferocious indignation flashing from his eyes and bristling from his beard under his sharia-chic turban—would prove “somewhat of a saint.” On February 15, the saintly imam began murdering Iran’s officer corps, and on April Fool’s Day, which he called “the first day of a government of God,” he declared his nation an Islamic republic. In mid-May, the U.S. Senate condemned Iran’s systematic slaughter of its officers, a rebuke Iran met by recalling its ambassador from Washington. By July, mullahs began publicly taking control of the government.
[. . .]
on November 4, a mob of “students” invaded and seized the American embassy in Tehran and took its 68 employees hostage, though they soon released the 15 women and African-Americans, and later set free another hostage suffering from multiple sclerosis. The other 52 Americans endured 444 days of captivity.
[. . .]
What the president should have done, as was clear even then, was simple and traditional. He should have told the mullahs that they had 48 hours to release our citizens unharmed, or else we would leave not one stone standing on another in the “holy” city of Qom. We then should have leafleted the city with warnings to the population to flee. And, were the hostages not released, we should have done what we threatened to do. And were they not released at that point, we should have made the same threat against Tehran.
[. . .]
Being a world leader, however, sometimes requires making such harrowing choices. To prevent the powerful French fleet in Algeria from falling into Nazi hands after the 1940 Vichy surrender to Germany, British prime minister Winston Churchill ordered the Royal Navy to seize or sink it, if its commanders did not get it out of Nazi reach, thus protecting Britain’s vital mastery of the seas. A single pigheaded French admiral failed to choose any of the three honorable options Churchill offered. As a result, 1,297 innocent French sailors went to their watery graves after the British fleet opened fire on July 3, with 977 dying in the first 15 minutes. Also as a result, skeptical Americans finally came to believe that Churchill wasn’t kidding when he said that the British would never surrender, and the U. S. government took a giant step closer to joining the war. As sociologist Max Weber warned, anyone who wants to keep his hands clean should stay out of politics, because politics ultimately rests on the force and violence necessary to repel force and violence against one’s countrymen. And force and violence, however legitimate and productive of ultimate good, also produce evil in the process.
[. . .]
the mullahs have been avid supporters of Islamic terrorism, and with their enthusiastic backing of Hezbollah, they have become state sponsors of terrorism, as well.
[. . .]
So now President Obama wants to make an agreement that will ensure that Iran can produce an atom bomb essentially overnight. He has not seen fit to explain his reasoning to the American people, and it is hard to imagine what it might be. But all I can think of is Churchill’s rebuke to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain when he returned from his infamous appeasement of Hitler in Munch in 1938. “You were given the choice between war and dishonor,” Churchill thundered in Parliament. “You chose dishonor, and you will have war.” Certainly President Obama is choosing dishonor. What kind of war he might unleash, the world watches with dread.
http://www.city-journal.org/2015/eon0322mm.html
MYRON MAGNET
Iran and the Lessons of History
With the pending nuclear deal, Obama courts dishonor—and possibly war.
March 22, 2015
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