WarSclerotic

The Riverdale Press: It’s time to de-claw the Iranian tiger.

To the editor:

I looked at The New York Times online before beginning this letter. As I suspected, there was not one article about Iran and the threat it poses to Western Civilization, the United States and Israel.

Not so long ago the Congress supported an attack on Iraq because we suspected Saddam might be planning to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Today, although we know that Iran is close to developing an atomic bomb and the means to deliver one, there is a deafening silence from our leaders and those one might expect to be leaders of the western world.

Our secretary of state says something about sanctions, our president also occasionally makes a statement about a nuclear Iran being “unacceptable,” but both are whistling in the wind and making statements that will have no affect on Iran, but are designed to later allow them to claim that they tried to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

Politicians avoid serious suggestions on facing the Iranian threat. Sen. Charles Schumer and Rep. Eliot Engel seem to have lost their ability to suggest meaningful action. The most they can do is support sanctions. They know that sanctions will not accomplish anything. Sanctions had no affect on Iraq, nor will they have any affect on Iran.

It is not only political leaders who seek to avoid doing anything that might change Iran’s course but also our media.

When is the last time you saw an investigative program on TV about Iran and the threat it poses? A documentary on the greatest threat to world peace seems to escape public TV or any other media, newspapers and magazines included. Why?

With Iran boasting that it will wipe Israel off the map, one would think Jewish leaders would be rallying the masses against our passive Iranian policy. Not so! The silence is reminiscent of the silence of American Jewry and the western world that accompanied the Holocaust. We saw negotiations between Hitler and the democracies similar to those we now have between the West and Iran.

Today we see the same promise of a leader to kill and the same impotence of the democracies to challenge him. The price the world paid then was between 50 and 70 million lives. Today, with atomic bombs, we may expect the price to be higher.

Many thought the creation of the United Nations would prevent World-War-II-type destruction from happening again. We know that the U.N., as now structured, cannot protect us. Europe, which suffered so much for its failure to confront Hitler when he began to contest the existing peace, seems to have forgotten its history.

They are happy to bury their heads in the sand and hope that things will work out OK.

They didn’t before and they will not now. Iran, which sponsors terrorism, will not hesitate to supply nuclear weapons to groups that will use them, and if we believe what they say, they will use them first to destroy Israel.

I know there are many who abhor the thought of a pre-emptive strike. In a world where we confront atomic armed adversaries who believe that death achieved in attacking us is to be prized, dare we wait to be attacked? That would be the height of folly. It would fly in the face of the history lesson we should have learned, and it puts our vulnerable cities out as tempting targets for the associates of those who struck the Twin Towers.

Now is not the time to plead for sanctions, but the time to declaw the tiger.

This entry was posted on March 3, 2010 at 9:25 PM and is filed under Iran / Israel War. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.