Cease Fire Now

Everyone has something to say about the American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Mostly, the reviews are positive, even though the Sheriff of Los Angeles County managed to post a defense of Iran-- before taking it down.

If you believed that Los Angeles did not need the assistance of the federal government, now you know that you were duped.

Special mention to Tucker Carlson, who predicted that if America attacked Iran, the latter country would unleash horrors on the world. His was a portrait in cowardice.

The fact is, the result of the Trump attack on Iran has been something of a cease fire between the two belligerents. Not what Tucker had expected, but you were expecting nothing less.

Among the more sane and sensible commentaries we find the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens. Fair enough, he is not a man of the left, but he is also not a knee-jerk Trump supporter.

Stephens points out that Trump dared do what other American presidents recoiled from:

For decades, a succession of American presidents pledged that they were willing to use force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But it was President Trump who, by bombing three of Iran’s key nuclear sites on Sunday morning, was willing to demonstrate that those pledges were not hollow and that Tehran could not simply tunnel its way to a bomb because no country other than Israel dared confront it.

Here is the bottom line. Bill Clinton said that Iran could not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. So did Barack Obama. So did Joe Biden.

The difference is that they were all talk and no action. Trump overcame their pusillanimity and ordered a strike. 

Dare we say that it was a profile in courage:

Politically, the easier course would have been to delay a strike to appease his party’s isolationist voices, whose views about the Middle East (and antipathies toward the Jewish state) increasingly resemble those of the progressive left. In the meantime, Trump could have continued to outsource the dirty work of hitting Iran’s nuclear capabilities to Israel, hoping that it could at least buy the West some diplomatic leverage and breathing room.

Naturally, the anti-Trump left and certain members of the anti-Trump right were horrified. Those who insisted that the administration seek Congressional approval had ignored history:

Critics fault the administration for its refusal to seek congressional authorization for attacking Iran. But there’s a long, bipartisan history of American presidents taking swift military action to stop a perceived threat without asking Congress’s permission, including George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Panama in 1989 and Bill Clinton’s four-day bombing campaign against Iraq in 1998.

But, was the danger as imminent as certain American and Israeli intelligence officers believed? Stephens points out that even if the final decision had not been made, Iran was still on the verge of producing nuclear weapons.

Critics of the strike also point to an American intelligence estimate from this year that claimed Iran’s leaders had not yet decided to build a bomb. But that was a judgment about intent, which can be fickle. Trump’s responsibility was to deny Iran’s leaders the capabilities that would have allowed them to change their minds at will, to devastating effect. Amid uncertainty, the president acted before it was too late. It is the essence of statesmanship.

Of course, the American president seeks a negotiated settlement. Stephens offers his outline of potential deal:

… my guess is that the current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, will stand down and seek a negotiated settlement. In my column last week, I suggested the outlines of a potential deal, in which the United States could promise Iran relief from economic sanctions in exchange for its complete nuclear disarmament and an end to its support for foreign proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis.

More recently, President Trump floated the idea of regime change in Tehran. Fair enough. I had suspected as much, including the restoration of the Shah of Iran.

Time will tell.