As we enter the secular new year of 2014, few problems in the contemporary world political scene trouble me more than the possibility of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons. But few other problems seem to have as few good solutions.
Since 1979, Iran has been governed by an immoral Muslim religious fascist regime. Its leaders sponsor terrorism, brutally repress Iranian civilian dissidents, seek political hegemony over the Middle East, were likely responsible for the bombings in Argentina of the Israeli embassy (1992) and the Jewish community building (1994), have made ferociously hostile statements about Israel and have funded and provided arms to the anti-Israel terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah.
Iran has developed a nuclear energy program that its leaders say has only peaceful purposes. But they have demonstrably lied about so many things that it is impossible to trust their assurances.
And as the website United Against Nuclear Iran puts it, “the facts unequivocally demonstrate that the Iranian nuclear program is military in nature. The Iranian regime has kept its nuclear program clandestine, barred IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) inspectors and enriched uranium to levels far surpassing the requirements for a peaceful nuclear program. Above all, Iran’s official support for terrorist organizations, brutal human rights abuses at home and bellicose posture against the West render it unable to be trusted with the serious responsibility of independently developing nuclear energy.”
But what to do about this? Here we enter the deep philosophical waters of what should moral people do about immoral people.
Everything I have ever read about “just war theory” — that is, the ideas about when it is right to go to war and when it is not — says that an actual attack on Iran would be unjustified at this point. This is true if you look in Judaism, Christianity and Western secular philosophy, to say nothing of Western concepts of “international law.”
All of “just war theory” says “War should always be a last resort… all other forms of solution must have been attempted prior to the declaration of war” (from the article on “Just War Theory” on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Jewish law says the same, according to Milwaukee’s own Rabbi David Shapiro (1909-1989) in his essay “The Jewish Attitude towards Peace and War” in his “Studies in Jewish Thought,” vol. 1 (1975): “No war may be waged against a nation that has not attacked Israel… Even Edom, Ammon and Moab, who had throughout their history displayed hostility to Israel, were not to be attacked…”
The implications seem clear. In Jewish and Western morality, war cannot be justly waged if one only suspects that a nation is doing something that may someday be threatening. Even if a nation appears to be arming or developing possible weapons, one must try all possible peaceful means to discourage that nation before going to war. That seems to indicate that all possible negotiated agreements must be tried first — such as the deal concluded this past November between Iran and a coalition including the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany.
And I have a sense that the Iranian regime’s leaders know this and have been playing a subtle game around it. Take, for example, their statements of hostility toward Israel.
They have been very careful to say “Israel should be destroyed,” “Israel deserves to be destroyed” and “Israel will someday be destroyed” — but they have never said in public “We are going to, are seeking to or are planning to attack and destroy Israel.” They have not made the truly aggressive public statements or taken the kind of directly and openly hostile actions that, for example, the leaders of Egypt and Syria did in May and early June of 1967 that justified Israel’s first strike in the Six Day War.
This behavior reminds me of a schoolyard bully who taunts someone until the victim hits out, and who then runs to the teacher complaining “He hit me first; I didn’t touch him.” But the dynamic involves not just psychological manipulation. It also expresses the shame-honor value system permeating the political culture of the Muslim Middle East. That is, it gives the Iranian leaders a no-cost way to “humiliate” Israel.
However, there is more yet. In April 2008, Israeli political scientist Efraim Inbar of Bar-Ilan University spoke at the Foreign Policy Research Institute about this topic. His conclusion was: “The Iranians’ nuclear strategy is… to talk and build… Tehran is ready to talk… but its goal is to gain time. It wants to bring about a fait accompli and present the world with an Iranian bomb.”
If Inbar’s analysis is correct, Iran’s leaders are not negotiating in good faith, but are playing on Western “just war” morality and even hiding behind it. But if an evil person or evil regime exploits a moral principle in order to plan an uncertain future evil action, does that justify violating the moral principle?
Must we wait for an Iranian first strike of some kind, like the Allies had to wait for Nazi Germany to invade Poland before declaring war in 1939? If so, how much possible death and suffering will occur that maybe could have been prevented? But if Israel or the U.S. strikes first, how much possible death and suffering will they have to inflict that also might have been prevented?
I truly do not feel I have the wisdom to know the answer to this. But I would like to open the pages of The Chronicle for discussion of this issue and learn what community members believe the U.S. and Israel should do about this problem. Please send your ideas in around 350 words or so to chronicle@milwaukeejewish.org. If enough are received, selected and edited samples will be printed in future issues.
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