Take the Layup

Is Iran Finished?

Dear Friends,

[Note: This is being written on Tuesday, June 18th and events change quickly. I apologize if some of this is stale by the time this reaches your inbox.]

A few years ago I embarked on reading the White House diaries of Ronald Reagan. I never did finish them (although now that I think about it, maybe I’ll pick it up again), but I did make it all the way through his first term. The diaries are a treasure trove. Every single day for eight years, Reagan took the time to make a handwritten entry on the events of the day. He was indefatigable. I was delighted to come across a brief entry about a rally he held in Billings, Montana; I was five years old at the time and I remember having a very rare babysitter that night so that my parents could “go see the President.” I can now nail down the exact date of that memory, thanks to Mr. Reagan.

A few things struck me about the diaries. One, that far too many people in Washington, D.C. have been there way too long. Names of movers and shakers in a diary about the early 1980s should not be recognizable names of movers and shakers of today. Joe Biden is but one stunning example. Although he, blessedly, isn’t quite moving and shaking much anymore. Can you believe he tried to be President again?

The second thing that struck me is that the Islamic Republic of Iran has exported exactly two commodities to the rest of the world for nearly fifty years: oil and terror. Those are essentially their sole exports, which is pretty sad for a Persian people with a noble history stretching so far into antiquity. Read Reagan and you will see the beginning (1979) of the lives, time, energy, and resources Iranian-backed proxies have cost the world. For fifty years there has been conflict in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and innocent bloodshed all around the world—Iran’s fingerprints on all of it. For fifty years Israel gets attacked, punches back, only to have the American President (even a supportive one like Reagan) tell them to “knock it off” because it will “look bad” to the international community and they’ll lose the PR battle. The presidents haven’t been wrong about that, but at some point PR battles become the least of your concerns.

For fifty years everyone has tiptoed around the Middle East on eggshells because of the lunatics running the Islamic Republic of Iran. Policymakers and analysts for a half-century have been terrified that any minor conflict will explode into an all-out war of Arab nations joining each other to attack Israel, along with an oil crisis and accompanying economic distress. Very smart analysts have taken it as a given that all that can be done is to “manage” Iran, to give them enough carrots so they won’t continue to pursue nuclear weapons. They issue stern warnings that military action against Iran’s nuclear aims will break the eggshells and upset the delicate balance diplomacy has uneasily maintained for a half a century.

I am no foreign policy expert, just a lifelong observer of events. And from where I sit I think we may very well, for the first time in fifty years, be on the brink of … peace in the Middle East.