Iran must be stopped

WRITE OF CENTER

No one likes bullies, whether it be on a school playground or in world affairs.

Bullies have low levels of empathy, a strong need for dominance, and repeated, intentional aggression towards others. In short, they don’t play nicely.

Advice for children facing a playground bully includes staying calm and finding and telling an adult what is going on so that the bullying stops. Failure to deal with bullying only encourages the bully to continue acting out with more dire consequences.

On a more global level, no rational person likes war. However, sometimes it is unavoidable. To counter the madness of Nazi Germany, the allies had to coalesce in order to defeat that maniacal regime which was responsible for the murder of millions of humans.

While the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the free world was often fought through proxies, it represented an inherent battle between good and evil, with communism obviously representing evil.

Sadly, today there are apologists for the evils of communism, and they are rearing their ignorant heads once again at many colleges and universities in our nation. Vladimir Lenin, the first Soviet dictator, referred to these naïve individuals as “useful idiots.”

The answer to dealing with these apologists for communism is to educate people on the sickness of the communist ideology and its violent and bloody history that resulted in the deaths of over 100 million people due to gulags, concentration camps, forced famines, war, and more.

We also must defeat them at the ballot box.

But bullying goes far beyond the growing threat of socialism and communism.

Iran, despite its protestations, undoubtedly is seeking to build a nuclear weapon. Does any sane, rational person believe for a second that if that regime actually developed a nuclear weapon, they wouldn’t use it against the USA or Israel? After all, since they assumed power in 1979, leaders of Iran’s Islamic Republic have consistently called the USA the “Great Satan” and Israel the “Little Satan.”

Over the past 47 years Iran has stirred trouble and been responsible for state-supported terrorism throughout the Middle East and Europe, whether it be in support of Hezbollah, the murderous Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad, the Houthi in Yemen, the Islamic Jihad, Hamas in Gaza, and more.

Iran uses these groups as political proxies to foment instability, expand the scope of the Islamic Revolution, and carry out attacks against Western targets in the regions.

How can we forget that just one day after President Obama signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (alleged nuclear deal) with Iran, that nation’s Ayatollah Khamenei led a chant of “Death to America” in front of thousands of crazed fanatics.

How exactly do you deal with such people? This is not a school playground where a teacher can effectively deal with a bully who is taunting other students. These Iranian fanatics want to destroy our civilization.

Many apologists for communism are the same people who empathize with Iran. I’ll never forget the 1984 Republican Convention speech that U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a former Democrat, gave that excoriated those who “always blame America first” for all the evil in the world. These America blaming leopards never change their spots. As Proverbs 26:11 says, “Just as a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.”

While I would like to see peace in the Middle East and an end to the current conflict with Iran, I also want to see the situation resolved for good. The crazy mullahs and the violent Iranian Republican Guard, responsible for the deaths of many Americans, must go.

How that is accomplished is not so easy to determine. You can think your initial plan had it all figured out and then things can go awry. Perhaps that is what is happening.

But it is indisputable that the current battle is one of the civilized world vs. those who would bring the world back into the Dark Ages, when there was virtually no individual liberty.

We cannot let the Iranians get a nuclear weapon, period. That maniacal, totalitarian regime must be defeated, and as was the case with the Soviet Union, thrown into the ash heap of history.