George Will’s World

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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It must be nice living in George Will’s world. There, the current war for Iraq’s elected government is the fault of a few editorialists at the Weekly Standard who did not warn the rest of the nation that it may not run smoothly. In Will’s world it’s quite possible to contain the Islamic Republic of Iran, because after all, Stalin was contained. In this place, the policies that preceded the war in Iraq led to stability, preferable to the current chaos in the region.

This is the gist of Mr. Will’s column at the outset of the current fighting in Lebanon, dripping with contempt for all things neoconservative, which he dubs as “radicalism,” preached by the likes of William Kristol. Far be it from me to defend Mr. Kristol, he can do this himself. His focus on the alleged inadequacy of troop levels and his relative lack of interest in Iran’s liberal opposition I find troubling. But the gist of Mr. Will’s complaint is that these misnamed neocons got their war, it has failed, and it’s now time to try something else is also troubling.

The fact is that neoconservatives were soundly defeated inside the administration on everything from the grounds on which the war was justified to the establishment of the occupation regime after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The frivolity of Iraq’s debaathification process is another of the many gripes neoconservatives had with the handling of the war thus far.

On Iran, Mr. Will has evaded the central challenge posed by the latest attack from international jihad on the Jewish State. Iran supplies most of the missiles now raining down on Haifa. It strains belief to think that its regime did not know of or indeed authorize the July 12 cross-border raid that kicked off war in Lebanon. After all, only hours before Hezbollah’s abduction of the two Israeli soldiers, foreign ministers from Germany and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council withdrew the offer of incentives over Iran’s nuclear intransigence, paving the way for the U.N. resolution Iran has been trying to avoid. There is every reason to think July 12 is a preview of what will happen once Iran gets the nuclear weapons for which it has been making fuel since February.

Yet for Mr. Will an attack on the very production centers Iran is using to build these weapons for now should be off limits for the world’s most powerful nation. He writes that America should not strike them “because the U.S. military has enough on its plate in the deteriorating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which both border Iran. And perhaps because containment, although of uncertain success, did work against Stalin and his successors, and might be preferable to a war against a nation much larger and more formidable than Iraq.”

There are those of us who have long endorsed a plan to bolster Iran’s opposition as an alternative to a war with Iran and there are sound arguments that bombing Iran’s nuclear infrastructure would scuttle the efforts of Persian democrats to rescue their country from the Mullahs. But let’s not pretend that Iran is not at war with America and Israel. If it was true that Iran could be contained with a nuclear threat capability, then how does one explain its emboldened recklessness with regard to its proxies, Hezbollah.

One can suppose that Mr. Will is content with the threat of “sanctions” the U.N. Security Council made yesterday. But sanctions, unless they are directed at isolating Iran’s leaders from the population as opposed to punishing the entire population, will likely only cement the position of the country’s terror clerics, just as the oil for food program was a gift for Saddam Hussein.

And then there is Mr. Will’s contention that the Soviets were successfully contained. That containment did not stop Stalin’s predecessors from helping foment a revolution in Cuba and Nicaragua — and from funding and advising the early secular terrorist organizations attacking Israel a generation ago.

Ultimately, it was Reagan’s rejection of containment and his bold decision to align American foreign policy with the dissidents of the Soviet empire that felled the red menace. Containment’s big success was in preventing a full-scale nuclear war, and even this nearly unraveled during the Cuban missile crisis.

It’s doubtful that we will have the same luck with the new menace of our age. In the case of Iran and the Sunni strains of fundamentalist Islam, we have already seen their Imams and political leaders praise the recruitment of adolescents to suicide. If the current zealots who run the international jihad movement are willing to send their future generations off to die in Iraqi police stations and Israeli markets, why would they not consider committing national suicide as well? It’s a thought for Mr. Will to ponder as Israel tries its best to deter their proxies in Lebanon.


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