Margin of error

Victor Davis Hanson writes that

So far, Iranian president Hassan Rouhani’s peace ruse is still bearing some fruit.

On the other hand,

A crabby Netanyahu is now seen as the party pooper who barks in his raspy voice that Rouhani is only buying time from the West until Iran can test a nuclear bomb — that the Iranian leader is a duplicitous “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Netanyahu accepts that history’s lessons are not nice. The world, both ancient and modern, is quite capable of snoozing as thousands perish, whether in Rwanda by edged weapons; in Iraq when Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds; or, most recently, more than 100,000 in Syria.

In the modern age of thermonuclear weapons, the idea of eliminating an entire people has never been more achievable. But collective morality does not often follow the fast track of technological change. Any modern claim of a superior global ethos, anchored in the United Nations, that might prevent such annihilation is no more valid now than it was in 1941. Again, ask the Tutsis of Rwanda.

The disastrous idea of a preemptory war to disarm Iran seems to us apocalyptic. But then, we are a nation of 313 million, not 8 million; the winner of World War II, not a people nearly wiped out by it; surrounded by two wide oceans, not 300 million hostile neighbors; and out of Iranian missile range, not well within it. Reverse those comparisons and Obama might sound as neurotic as Netanyahu would utopian.

We can be wrong about Hassan Rouhani without lethal consequences. Netanyahu reviews history and concludes that he has no such margin of error. That fact alone allows us to sound high-minded and idealistic — and Israel suspicious and cranky.