By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, October 10, 2013
So far Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's peace ruse is
still bearing some fruit. President Obama was eager to talk with him at the
United Nations -- only to be reportedly rebuffed, until Obama managed to phone
him for the first conversation between heads of state of the two countries
since the Iranian storming of the U.S. embassy in 1979.
Rouhani has certainly wowed Western elites with his
mellifluous voice, quiet demeanor and denials of wanting a bomb. The media, who
ignore the circumstances of Rouhani's three-decade trajectory to power, gush
that he is suddenly a "moderate" and "Western educated."
The implication is that Rouhani is not quite one of those
hardline Shiite apocalyptic theocrats like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who in the past
ranted about the eventual end to the Zionist entity.
Americans are sick and tired of losing blood and treasure
in the Middle East. We understandably are desperate for almost any sign of
Iranian outreach. Our pundits assure us that either Iran does not need and thus
want a bomb, or that Iran at least could be contained if it got one.
No such giddy reception was given to Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In comparison with Rouhani, he seemed grating to
his U.N. audience in New York. A crabby Netanyahu is now seen as the party
pooper who barks in his raspy voice that Rouhani is only buying time from the
West until Iran can test a nuclear bomb -- that the Iranian leader is a
duplicitous "wolf in sheep's clothing."
Why does the unpleasant Netanyahu sound to us so
unyielding, so dismissive of Rouhani's efforts to dialogue, so ready to start
an unnecessary war? How can the democracy that wants Iran not to have the bomb
sound more trigger-happy than the theocracy intent on getting it?
In theory, it could be possible that Rouhani is a genuine
pragmatist, eager to open up Iran's nuclear facilities for inspection to avoid
a preemptory attack and continuing crippling sanctions.
But if the world's only superpower can afford to take
that slim chance, Mr. Netanyahu really cannot. Nearly half the world's
remaining Jews live in tiny Israel -- a fact emphasized by the Iranian
theocrats, who have in the past purportedly characterized it as a "black
stain" upon the world.
After World War II, the survivors of the Holocaust
envisioned Israel as the last-chance refuge for endangered Jews. Iranian
extremists have turned that idea upside down, when, for example, former
President Hashemi Rafsanjani purportedly quipped that "the use of even one
nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything."
Netanyahu accepts that history's lessons are not nice.
The world, ancient and modern, is quite capable of snoozing as thousands
perish, whether in Rwanda by edged weapons, Saddam Hussein's gassing of the
Kurds, or, most recently, 100,000 in Syria.
Centuries before nuclear weapons, entire peoples have
sometimes perished in war without much of a trace -- or much afterthought.
After the Third Punic War, Carthage -- its physical space, people and language
-- was obliterated by Rome. The vast Aztec Empire ceased to exist within two
years of encountering HernĂ¡n Cortes. Byzantine, Vandal and Prussian are now
mere adjectives; most have no idea that they refer to defeated peoples and
states that vanished.
The pessimistic Netanyahu also remembers that there was
mostly spineless outrage at Hitler's systematic harassment of Jews before the
outbreak of World War II -- and impotence in the face of their extermination
during the war. Within a decade of the end of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and
hatred of Israel throughout the Middle East had become almost a religion.
In the modern age of thermonuclear weapons, the idea of
eliminating an entire people has never been more achievable. But collective
morality does not often follow the fast track of technological change. Any
modern claim of a superior global ethos, anchored in the United Nations, that
might prevent such annihilation is no more valid now than it was in 1941.
Again, ask the Tutsis of Rwanda.
The disastrous idea of a preemptory war to disarm Iran
seems to us apocalyptic. But then, we are a nation of 313 million, not 8
million; the winner of World War II, not nearly wiped out by it; surrounded by
two wide oceans, not 300 million hostile neighbors; and out of Iranian missile
range, not well within it. Reverse those equations and Obama might sound as
neurotic as Netanyahu would utopian.
We can be wrong about Hassan Rouhani without lethal
consequences. Mr. Netanyahu reviews history and concludes that he has no such
margin of error. That fact alone allows us to sound high-minded and idealistic
-- and Israel suspicious and cranky.
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