President Trump’s problem with Iran? He inherited a policy of appeasement. For decades, ever since the brutal dictatorship came to power 41 years ago, America has responded with gestures of peace. Look where it got us.
You can’t appease abusive people. The only way to truly appease them is to submit. Unless you roll over and submit to Iran’s savage and cruel dictatorship, they WILL kill you. “Islam” translates from Arabic into the word “submission”. It’s really that simple.
I remember a Sting song from the 1980s. The line went, “The Russians love their children too.” He was referring to the Soviet empire. His reasoning was, “Russians love their children too. So their government will never hurt anyone”.
That was absurd.
The government of a dictatorship does whatever the hell it wants — including to its chief victims, its own citizens who live under the dictatorship.
The Soviet government was “rational” enough that we were able to avoid nuclear war with them through long decades of Cold War. But the same can’t be said of Iran. You will know when/if Iran ever has nuclear weapons because the moment they have nuclear weapons, they will use them. Probably on Israel, to start. Israel knows this better than anybody.
It doesn’t matter if the Iranian people love their children too. Of course they do. But they’re held hostage by an evil government — unless they support that evil government, which undoubtedly many of them do, since that government embodies their religious beliefs.
Either way, you can’t count on offers of peace and bribery — escalating to the point of absurdity during the Obama administration — ever changing Iran.
The fools on the campaign trail, particularly Joe Biden, are now claiming, in essence, “See? I told you so. Everything would be great with the Iran deal.”
But we all know full well Iran continued to build nuclear weapons and plan terrorist attacks after that deal was signed. The Iran deal was something to make politicians feel good about themselves; it was never about reality, at all. It also gave Obama, who sternly lectured Americans every chance he got about how evil our country has always been, and how wonderful Muslim dictators in particular are, to score some points with his allies in Iran. Joe Biden went along with it because, like most people who aren’t very smart and who think with their emotions, he felt like appeasement will work.
So President Trump has been confronting the harsh reality that appeasement doesn’t work. He’s trying to come up with an alternative. He will get none of the credit when things go well, and all of the blame when things go bad. But we’re in this mess, in the first place, because you cannot appease bullies. We’d be in this mess no matter who was in office. The question is how to respond.
The Iranians themselves understand this point: “When someone declares war, do you want to respond to the bullets with flowers? They will shoot you in the head,” an Iranian official said yesterday, following threats to blow up the White House.
If you keep your head in the sand, a disaster like Iran is what you get. Keep that in mind with whatever is yet to come. War may not be the answer, but you have to tell that to the people who throw the bullets and bombs — not the people trying to defend themselves.
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