Peace Through Bombing
What Russell Kirk might have said about Trump's Iran war
The WSJ reports that Trump posted the following about his war on Iran on social media:
“The heavy and pinpoint bombing, however, will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”
My thoughts immediately went to an essay by the great conservative intellectual Russell Kirk, Political Errors at the End of the 20th Century, in which he blasted President George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy:
What are we to say of Mr. Bush's present endeavor to bring to pass a gentler, kinder New World Order? …
After carpet-bombing the Cradle of Civilization as no country ever had been bombed before, Mr. Bush sent in hundreds of thousands of soldiers to overrun the Iraqi bunkers -- that were garrisoned by dead men, asphyxiated. …
Now indubitably Saddam Hussein is unrighteous; but so are nearly all the masters of the "emergent" African states (with the Ivory Coast as a rare exception), and so are the grim ideologues who rule China, and the hard men in the Kremlin, and a great many other public figures in various quarters of the world. Why, I fancy that there are some few unrighteous men, conceivably, in the domestic politics of the United States. Are we to saturation-bomb most of Africa and Asia into righteousness, freedom, and democracy? And, having accomplished that, however would we ensure persons yet more unrighteous might not rise up instead of the ogres we had swept away? …
Prudent statesmen long have known that armed conflict, for all involved, ought to be the last desperate resort, to be entered upon only when all means of diplomacy, conciliation, and compromise have been exhausted.
Sadly, prudence is not one of Trump’s virtues (assuming hehas any).
To paraphrase Kirk, I would ask Trump: Are we to bomb Iran into righteousness, freedom, and democracy? And, even if by some miracle that were to happen, how would we ensure persons yet more unrighteous might not rise up instead of the ogres we had swept away?
And at what cost to our own country?
Set aside the distrurbing fact that the WSJ notes we might run “out of interceptors to fend off Tehran’s retaliation.”
What about the long-run consequences?
Back to Kirk (remember he was writing in the 1990s):
In this century, great empires have collapsed: the Austrian, the German, the British, the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Italian, and the Japanese. …
But there remains an American Empire, still growing -- though expanding through the acquisition of client states ….
Such a universal ascendancy always has been resented by the lesser breeds without the law. Soon there sets to work a widespread impulse to pull down the imperial power. But that imperial power, strong in weapons, finds it possible for a time to repress the disobedient. In the long run -- well, as Talleyrand put it, "You can do everything with bayonets -- except sit on them." In the long run, the task of repression is too painful a burden to bear; so the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has discovered in the past few years. Napoleon discovered that hard truth earlier and King George III and the King's Friends discovered it between the years 1775 and 1781. …
But devastating Iraq (and the rescued Kuwait) is an uncompromising way of opening an era of sweetness and light. Peoples so rescued from tyrants might cry, as did the boy whom Don Quixote de la Mancha had saved from beating by the muleteers but who was thrashed by them not long later, nevertheless -- "In the name of God, Don Jorge de la Casablanca, don't rescue me again!"
