What if we don't choose appeasement this time?

Dov Fischer writes in part in Spectator,

...over time we lost more than 50,000 boys in jungles located precisely in the Middle of Nowhere, with limited benefits to show for it, except for a musical named Miss Saigon. In the end, South Vietnam fell anyway, and we helicoptered out, leaving behind memories that we shall call sad. Did we prevent dominoes from falling throughout Southeast Asia? You decide. Pol Pot took Cambodia and perpetrated his own genocide, the hallmark of socialism. Our necessary ally in World War II, Stalin, perpetrated his various genocides. Mao perpetrated his genocides.

...Vietnam humbled us for a long while. Meanwhile, a beautiful war was ablaze in the Middle East, with half a million Iranians fighting for Khomeini and Iraqis fighting for Saddam killing each other for eight years. Eventually, Saddam Hussein decided to expand his country’s borders into Kuwait, and we decided to form an international coalition to stop him. So we did. In return, he decided that one of these days he would kill George Bush, and he tried. Then came 9/11, with our own foolishness contributing by convincing ourselves into believing that Wahhabi Muslim Saudi Arabians are our friends, thus motivating us to allow thousands of Saudis into our schools, including those whom we taught air piloting without requiring them to attend the class on how to land a plane. As a result, 15 of the 19 murderers on 9/11 were Saudis. And then, with Bush’s son as our president, we not only had to respond to the Taliban who had provided Osama Bin Laden with his base and wherewithal but also to evaluate the role of Saddam Hussein, the guy who had just tried to kill the president’s dad.

Enter the neoconservatives and adventurists who believed that, while we are dealing with the Taliban and, OK, with Saddam also, let’s make both countries Western-style democracies like America, Canada, the UK, Australia, and Israel. Because, you know, there beats in the heart of every Arab Muslim in Iraq and Afghanistan the pulse of Patrick Henry, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. All they want is Western democracy: the First Amendment, habeas corpus, a penumbra of emanations of rights, eminent domain, the dormant commerce clause, Miranda rights, and nationwide judicial injunctions. So instead of just bombing the Taliban and Bin Laden’s strongholds à la Dresden, we decided to send our boys to help the locals implement regime change. The results, in terms of lives, limbs, and financial treasure, speak for themselves. You decide.

...The thing is, Iran is fixated on “Death to America,” and they are determined to create a nuclear bomb with intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver them. In 1979, they took our embassy for 444 days into the 1981 Reagan inauguration, and they recently started up again. Yet, in the aftermath of the Qassem Soleimani elimination, something became unexpectedly more clear to many of us: They are trying at warp speed to get to the point that they can destroy us, but right now they actually are much weaker than many of us realized. Under the impact of the Trump administration’s economic sanctions, the mullahs are breaking financially. They cannot afford a war. The mullahs are running out of moolah. And they are encountering enormous trouble at home.

...But the Trump sanctions are forcing Iran to cut back on funding international terror, and they are leaving less money at home. Under the sanctions, Iran’s economy was estimated by the International Monetary Fund to have contracted by 9.5 percent in 2019, while unemployment rose to 16.8 percent. Iran’s Brent Crude exports have dropped precipitously. The rial, Iran’s currency, has lost more than half its value. Inflation has risen from 9 percent to 35.7 percent.

The Iranian people are hurting very intensely, and they are rising up against the mullahs. And that leads me to wonder: What if we were to prepare now, upon the next Iranian provocation, to bomb to smithereens Iran’s main oil refineries in Abadan, Esfahan, Bandar-e Abbas, Tehran, Rak, and Tabriz? No boots on the ground. No adventures, no regime change from outside. Just a boost to those inside Iran who want to overthrow a medieval theocracy that is prepared to bring the whole world — and especially us — to Armageddon if they are not stopped. Yes, the first footage from Tehran will show the usual “Death to America!,” demonstrations, as they did after Soleimani was eliminated. And then the impact will set in. There was a time when Hitler could have been stopped. Europe let it pass by appeasing him. A time right after World War II when Stalin could have been reined in. He was appeased with his Warsaw Bloc. When Mao could have been stopped. We passed.

The weakness of Iran’s response to Soleimani’s removal raises the question whether this is the time to raise the economic ante for Iranians to contemplate what half a century of the mullahs have wrought for them. And whether they would be happier with a government less intent on building nuclear weapons and exporting hundreds of millions to finance overseas terror, and more focused on feeding the citizenry at home.

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