Dershowitz Asks the Obvious Question on Iran
Or why we should be grateful to the pirates of the Red Sea
Alan Dershowitz in his Substack column asks the obvious question: why don’t we want war with Iran? Especially measured against all the ridiculous self-defeating wars we have waged since the Soviet Union landed on the trash heap of history, Iran is the one war we should have waged and did not. From the seizing of the American embassy in 1979 through the repeated surrogate attacks on the U.S. and its allies, Dershowitz rightly observes, Iran has given us repeated casus belli.
Now they have given us the biggest one of all.
Iran is guilty, directly and via its proxies, of the one crime that should always get a military response from a commercial republic: piracy.
In 1801, barely a decade after the union was formed we built a navy we could ill-afford specifically to suppress the Barbary pirates who had been preying on American merchant ships. We declared war on pirate-sponsoring Tripoli--the marines have been singing about its shores ever since—and forced them to a treaty abandoning piracy. In 1815 we did the same to Algiers decisively enough that Tunis and a recidivist Tripoli also backed down
We undertook this extraordinary effort because we held freedom of the seas sacrosanct, a first principle of American foreign policy.
British impositions on American trade were the reason New England led in advocating independence and then led in the field with Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. We fought the war of 1812, despite the odds, because the British continued harassing American merchants
The USS 'United States' captures the British ship 'Macedonian,' October 30, 1812
If the U.S. cannot guarantee free passage through the Red Sea, or the Persian Gulf why do we have a navy at all? What is the point of having nine carrier groups, half a trillion dollars-worth of floating steel, if Iran can chase away American or America-bound shipping.
And what are idiot Republicans doing calling Biden a warmonger for shooting back—however feebly—tat direct attacks on Americans.
Foreign policy is difficult for democracies. It requires flexibility and rapid adaptation uncharacteristic of nations with strong legislatures and independent political parties. Instead, we tend to develop stiff positions—even ideologies—that by their very consistency make for incoherent policy.
During the Cold War, once isolationist Republicans became reliable hawks. “Getting tough”, and “not backing down to bullies” and “remember Munich” became ingrained patterns of thought.
When the Soviet Union collapsed so did the reason for the tough guy approach. By then, however, getting tough had become an ideology or at least a label, a way of telling Republicans apart from Democrats and a way of intimidating Democrats into going along. We proceeded to fight thirty years of self-destructive wars almost out of habit.
The thirty years took their toll. Now the GOP is swinging wildly in the other direction. Having wasted the national will destroying Iraq, our bulwark against Iran, we cannot summon the will to keep a sworn, possibly insane enemy from going nuclear.
Our leaders are not nimble enough—or good enough at leading—to confront how the errors of the Bushes and Obama/Biden have narrowed our options and raised the price of peace. They seem unable to imagine the consequences of Iran with nukes, nor realize that time is not on our side.
This is why we should be grateful to Iran and its proxies for taking the pirate path.
Freedom of the seas is a bedrock principle of the sort that democracies can sustain and act on all but automatically. For us piracy is the ultimate casus belli.
Our response to Iranian piracy, in the very first instance should have been massive and unhesitating. We should have flooded the seas with American power, suppressed any air or naval resistance, and taken out the Houthis bases. We should now demand the Iranians surrender any soldier or sailor participating in raids on American or allied ships. We should require them to prove that they have cut off any supplies to the Houthis.
Then we should hope they refuse.
Just totally nailed it. Might you be available to replace Blinken?