Donald Trump has twice issued ultimatums to Hamas: If the hostages held by Hamas are not returned by his Inauguration, “there’ll be hell to pay.”
It may not take that long, since last week a deal was announced for a cease-fire and 33 of the Israeli hostages returned in exchange for nearly 1000 Palestinian Arab prisoners in Israeli custody. Once again, Trump’s foreign policy realism shames the Biden administration’s prissy foreign policy crew and its “rules-based international order” naïve idealism that for decades has ended in dangerous appeasement and shameful retreat.
But this deal is very questionable, fraught as it is with the same moral hazards that have always accompanied decades of such agreements: the Palestinian Arabs’ habit of not keeping their word, and serially violating the terms of every deal; the disproportionate number of prisoners to be released; Israel’s withdrawal from territories that Hamas has used for launching attacks; and the strong possibility that those released prisoners will help Hamas regroup and resume the war.
A much more strategically important goal should be destroying Iran’s theocratic regime, given that it’s mere months from having the wherewithal to make several nuclear weapons. More negotiations, “parchment barriers,” or “deals” piled on top of those that have been going on for ten years, are not viable, and have only provided time and billions of dollars for the mullahs’ nefarious purposes. What we need, as First Lord of the Admiralty Duff Cooper said during the doomed Munich talks, is not “the language of sweet reasonableness” but the “language of the mailed fist.” And we need it stat.
Moreover, it’s not just about the nukes. The bipartisan appeasement of the Islamic Republic of Iran for nearly half a century has been one of the most destructive assaults on our power of deterrence and national prestige, ranking with our retreats from Saigon and, for al Qaeda and other terrorists, from Mogadishu in 1993, and especially Beirut ten years earlier, when 241 American servicemen, mostly Marines, were bombed by an Iranian proxy gang of jihadists that became Hezbollah. Nor did the Reagan administration punish Iran, not even bombing its training camps in the Bekaa Valley, as France (sic!) and Israel did.
The wages of appeasing Iran include proving to the mullahs that Americans––for all their wealth and power––are corrupt infidels enslaved to pleasure and comfort. This perception has not weakened, despite the current setbacks inflicted on Iran by Israel. After all, during the Trump administration Tehran faced challenges like “maximum pressure” on its economy, further infuriating the regime’s already angry citizens. But given the mullahs’ passionate belief in their divine mission, and the continuing civilizational failure of nerve in Western nations, the Iranian theocrats still believe they will achieve the aims enjoined on them by their faith.
The many other maleficent effects of our feckless Iran policies quickly became obvious in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, which was transformed into “Little Tehran,” filled with Iranian money, weapons, terrorist training of proxies like Hezbollah, and Quds Force troops, the revolution’s expeditionary military wing.
Moreover, as historian Robin Wright said of Iran’s presence in the Bekaa Valley, Iran started “systematically mobilizing the Shiite community and establishing small cells of activists under the leadership of radical local clergy for possible action.” Later, a National Security Council staff member commented, “We had no idea that this action would inevitably lead to the radicalization of large elements of the Lebanese Shiite community, the widespread taking of hostages, a dramatic upsurge in international terrorism and the Iran-Contra Affair.”
