I have two phrases that I have learned to try and live by:
“Never say never”
“Everyone is this way”
Best said, I don’t live anymore in a world of absolutes. Too often I find the exceptions. So when I read this recent post of Pat Buchanan’s I saw red flags – what do you see?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
High among the blunders of history was the “blank cheque” Kaiser Wilhelm gave Vienna, after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to deal with the Serbs as they saw fit.
Five weeks later, Vienna cashed the check and declared war, after Belgrade refused to submit to all 10 demands of an ultimatum. Russia mobilized; Germany and France followed. And war came, the bloodiest in all of European history with 9 million soldiers in their graves.
Since June 1914, a “blank check” given by one nation to another for war has been regarded as strategic folly.
Thus it is startling to learn 47 House Republicans just signed on to H.R. 1553 declaring unequivocal “support for Israel’s right to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by Iran … including the use of military force.”
These Republicans have just given Tel Aviv a blank check for a pre-emptive war that Israel, unless it uses its nuclear weapons, can start but not finish. Fighting and finishing that war would fall to the armed forces of the United States.
The House Republican resolution supports Israel’s use of “all means necessary” to “eliminate nuclear threats” that represent an “immediate and existential threat to the State of Israel.”
What “immediate and existential threat” are they talking about?
Why, with all the issues going for them, House Republicans would announce full-throated support for a pre-emptive war on Iran that Americans would have to fight and finish, escapes me.
But if this is where a Republican House would take America, into yet another war, best that we know it before voting this fall.
