America and Israel Together

Among the angles to the weekend’s news is the emergence of America and Israel as fully aligned in respect of Iran. President Trump, in his remarks on America’s attacks on Iran’s nuclear sites, made a point of acknowledging and thanking Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel. The prime minister, for his part, made a point, in a pre-recorded statement broadcast after the event, of thanking Mr. Trump and America as well.One would think this would be received as great news. Not on the left, though. Feature a dispatch in the Guardian newspaper. It runs under a headline saying that Mr. Trump “falls into the Netanyahu trap.” When Mr. Trump was elected, the Guardian reports, he suggested that he could “hammer out a new relationship” with Mr. Netanyahu, “who was used to getting his way with the White House.”In the event, the Guardian reckons that the trap into which Mr. Trump has allegedly fallen “is the same as his predecessors.” After “the most consequential strike on Iran in generations,” the Guardian suggests, it appears that the Israeli leader “has manoeuvred” America “into striking Iranian uranium enrichment sites directly after a series of military attacks that Washington was unable to deter the Israeli PM from.”Then there’s, say, Senator Schumer. The minority leader in the Senate, who used to present himself as the guardian of the Jews, declares that the “danger of wider, longer, and more devastating war has now dramatically increased.” Now he wants to use the War Powers Resolution, a law of doubtful constitutionality, to curb the campaign against Iran. He implores the majority leader to put the matter on the Senate floor “immediately.”We remember when it was the Republicans who wanted to go to the Senate floor with the Iran question. That was when the Democrats were trying to enact articles of appeasement in the form of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, but it was “overwhelmingly” — to use the Times’ word — opposed in both houses of Congress. So President Obama took the matter to the UN, where our envoy voted against our own legislature.In the runup to the American attack Saturday, we’ve also been hearing from the Republican far right. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene griped that “foreign wars/intervention/regime change put America last, kill innocent people, are making us broke, and will ultimately lead to our destruction.” Tucker Carlson suggested that backing a strike on Iran reflected, as PBS put it, “too much emphasis on protecting Israel.”In the wake of Saturday’s events, the UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, condemned America. The U.S. strike of three Iranian death factories, he said last night, is “a dangerous escalation in a region already on the edge, and a direct threat to international peace and security.” Russia, Communist China, and Pakistan called for a Security Council session. They drafted a resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in the Mideast.Mr. Trump’s detractors keep citing a partial “intelligence community assessment” claiming no evidence exists that the mullahs have ordered a breakthrough to a nuclear bomb. Yet neither did Iran yet nuke Tel Aviv, either. Is that a reason to shy from striking its nuclear capabilities? As Secretary of State Rubio told CBS, “It doesn’t matter if the order was given, they have everything they need to build nuclear weapons.”We get that there are cautionary notes. The extent of the damage to Fordow, and to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, is not yet clear. In a reminder of the need for future vigilance toward Iran, one top official at Tehran avers that “you cannot bomb knowledge.” More broadly, America’s past experiences in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan underscore, too, that wars are more easily started than won. Yet our own view, long held, is that whoever the president, he doesn’t have to be certain the ayatollahs are close to an A-bomb. Just the possibility of an atomic bomb in the hands of Iran was enough, given the potential consequences, to respond militarily. What happened over the weekend is that the American and Israeli leaders concluded that the moment was at hand. It’s nice to see the American and Israeli leaders together in action.

America and Israel Together

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