“You do not reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth,” Winston Churchill shouted at the top of his lungs as most of his Cabinet ministers and senior British military commanders tried to persuade him why Britain had to reach an agreement with Nazi Germany.
By 1940, Germany had already conquered most of Europe. The isolationist United States still refused to join the war. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact allowed Adolf Hitler to divert his forces from the Russian front. The Nazi monster was poised to invade Britain and sever its head.
In Britain, the opposition and most Cabinet ministers supported opening negotiations with the Nazis. The cunning Hitler made sure to offer personal envoys to Britain and to publicize in the world media that he did not want war. British military leaders urged Churchill to respond to Hitler’s overtures and immediately sign a peace agreement without dismantling Germany’s military capabilities. Churchill stood alone.
He saved his knockout blow for last. “As long as I am prime minister,” he thundered, “there will be no negotiations with the damned Nazis. And if the long story of our island is to end, then it is better to end it only when each of us lies on the ground, choking on his own blood.”
The die was cast. Since then, Churchill taught humanity that if we are destined to fight evil, it must be without compromise. You do not contain it. You do not seek to understand it. You set out to destroy it.
The die has also been cast for Trump, despite the impression created by his confusing rhetoric. Trump has decided that in the face of the Iranian Nazis, who have gripped the head of the entire world in the jaws of the terror they created, they must be wiped out.
Many experts argue that Trump will not attack. They base their confidence on the United States’ extensive efforts to continue negotiations and explain the massive deployment of forces as merely a stick with which to threaten the Iranians. I disagree. Let us set out the facts.
The negotiations have three central goals. First, they serve as an answer to American isolationists. Commentators here who write that isolationism stems from an anti-Israel ideology and proves that Israel has lost U.S. support are mistaken. American isolationism is woven into the very fabric of the nation’s founding. For two full years, Churchill tried to persuade Franklin D. Roosevelt to join the war. It did not help. Even the attack on Pearl Harbor did not immediately bring the United States into the war against Germany. The United States joined the war in Europe only after Germany declared war on it.
Second, the United States is preparing to topple or replace the regime. It appears the die has been cast. In either case, a massive deployment of forces to the region will be required for many months to stabilize the country until a stable leadership emerges.
In the Middle East, before you set out to hunt, you must first put the rabbit to sleep. Although Iran was significantly weakened in Operation Rising Lion, it remains a vast country with missile capabilities that must be brought under control. That requires time
Third, in the Middle East, before you go out to hunt, you must first put the rabbit to sleep. Although Iran was significantly weakened in Operation Rising Lion, it remains a vast country with missile capabilities that must be subdued. That requires time to amass forces and prepare defensive systems for Israel, which will certainly both be attacked and launch attacks.
Thus, the futile negotiations, as conducted by Trump, are driving the Iranians out of their minds. The childish war games they carried out last week in the Persian Gulf point to mounting pressure. Beyond the Iranians, the Qataris and the Turks are also seething. All the pressure they exerted on Trump is coming to nothing. Their nightmare is that the ayatollahs will fall and that Israel will overnight become the strongest power in the region.
Trump, ostensibly a friend of Qatar and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is increasingly revealing himself as a Churchillian thinker with a global outlook. In his view, on the road to restoring American hegemony in the face of China, the United States must destroy the Iranian regime, which has become a proxy of China, Turkey and Qatar, and in the process turn Israel into America’s foremost outpost in the Eastern Hemisphere.
We are on the very eve of the destruction of the ayatollahs’ regime, in the Jewish month of Adar, which precedes the festival of Purim. Iran’s fall at the hands of the United States and Israel would place its vast gas and oil reserves at the disposal of the Western world, secure supply chains needed by the United States from India to Israel and bring a host of Gulf states into the Abraham Accords, U.S.-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states. Did someone say messianic times?