So far,
Iranian President
Hasan 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 Mr. Obama managed to phone him
for the first conservation between heads of state of the two countries
since the Iranian storming of the
U.S. Embassy in 1979.
Mr. 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
Mr. Rouhani’s three-decade trajectory to power, gush that he is suddenly a “moderate” and “Western-educated.”
The implication is that
Mr. Rouhani is not quite one of those hard-line 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 does not 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
Mr. Rouhani, he seemed grating to his
U.N. audience in New York. A crabby
Mr. Netanyahu is now seen as the party pooper, who barks in his raspy voice that
Mr. Rouhani is only buying time from the West until
Iran can test a nuclear bomb and that the Iranian leader is a duplicitous “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
Why does the unpleasant
Mr. Netanyahu sound to us so unyielding, so dismissive of
Mr. 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
Mr. Rouhani is a genuine pragmatist, eager to open up
Iran’s nuclear facilities for inspection to avoid a pre-emptory attack and continuing crippling sanctions.
However, 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
Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani purportedly quipped that “the use of even one nuclear bomb inside
Israel will destroy everything.”
Mr. 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 Hernan 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
Mr. 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. Collective morality,
though, 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 pre-emptory war to disarm
Iran
seems to us apocalyptic. But then, we are a nation of 314 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 Mr. Obama might sound as neurotic as
Mr. Netanyahu would utopian.
We can be wrong about
Mr. 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.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
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