17 hours ago
A damaged Iran is more dangerous than before
Admiral Jacky Fisher, creator of the modern Royal Navy, knew a thing or two about war. So when he said: 'the essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is an imbecility,' he knew whereof he spoke.
Unfortunately, president Trump did not heed Fisher's advice last week when he imposed a premature ceasefire on both Israel and Iran, ending their 12 day war. This left the Mullahs' regime in Tehran intact, wounded and damaged to be sure, but not destroyed. It is now even more intent on exterminating Israel and undermining the US and the West than they were before the war began.
What looks superficially like a brilliant Israeli victory – with Iran's nuclear sites seriously compromised, its leading atomic scientists dead, and its military leadership decapitated – may prove instead to be a temporary triumph and a long-term strategic defeat.
For, in forcing Israel to halt its crushingly devastating air offensive against the Islamic Republic with the job only half done, Trump has chosen the 'imbecility of moderation' over the urgent need to destroy the poisonous regime that has waged an undeclared war against both the Jewish state and its western allies for almost half a century.
The ceasefire leaves the clerical regime shaken but not stirred – still firmly in control of the Iranian population that it has repressed so brutally for so long, and still fixated on its final goal of subverting the whole Middle East and destroying any chance of lasting peace in the region. After the huge humiliation of Israel raining rockets, bombs and drones on Iran with impunity and complete command of the skies, the ayatollahs will have even more grievances to add to their existing stockpiles of hatred and rancour; their desire for vengeance will only be turbo charged.
Trump's pulling of punches is an eerie echo of the massive mistake made by the Allies at the end of World War One, when they granted an armistice to Germany without occupying the country to enforce the peace.
As a result, Hitler was able to exploit the myth that Germany had not been beaten on the battlefield but had been 'stabbed in the back' by enemies within. Playing on German resentment, he was able to rearm and have another go at dominating Europe when he launched the Second World War.
The Allies did not make the same error in 1945 when World War Two ended with the total destruction of the Third Reich, the occupation of Germany, and the permanent eradication of Nazism. Elected on a pledge to his Maga supporters never again to mire the America in the 'forever wars' in the Middle East like the bloody chaos that followed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Trump has allowed his famous desire to make deals – and his aversion to war – to override the cruel necessity of ending Iran's threat to peace once and for all.
Eradicating that threat, and letting Israel complete its campaign to liberate Iran from the mullahs' reign of terror, would no doubt have been fraught with peril. But it remains the only safe and certain way of ensuring the security of Israel and its very existence as an island of democracy amidst an ocean of Iranian backed enemies.
Because only one outcome of this inconclusive conflict is absolutely guaranteed: so long as the fanatical clerics and their Revolutionary Guards rule Iran, their ultimate aim of undermining peace in the Middle East and destroying Israel with nuclear weapons or via their Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi proxies will remain unchanged.
Donald Trump has missed the golden opportunity offered by Israel's superbly successful blows struck at Iran to end the menace posed by the Islamic Republic and bring permanent peace to the war torn region. Instead of ending Iran's aggression and oppression of its own people, he has given the mullahs a reprieve, and a new thirst for revenge that will only be slaked in the future by the blood of more innocents.
