by Scott Samuelson

One of my early memories is lying awake at night, trying to discern through the sounds of the wind the creeping of an Iranian on the roof outside my bedroom window. For a few months, when I’d look both ways to cross the street on my walk to school, I’d scan less for oncoming traffic (my rural town had almost no traffic) than for a stampeding horde of Iranian college students.

I was six years old—just mature enough to pick up on the anxieties of the news. After footage of angry Iranians storming over fences under the banner of a severe bearded old man, Walter Cronkite would sign off each night by numbering how many days the Americans had been held hostage. I must have heard in passing the phrase “American embassy in Tehran,” but it entered my young mind like “city hall in Paducah.” For all I knew, the elementary school of Ainsworth, Iowa was going to fall next. Doesn’t our country have an army supposed to protect us? Why isn’t anyone doing anything? How can we let Iranians snatch up innocent Americans?

The best argument for the United States’ war against Iran (insofar as reason has anything to do with it) hews closely to my six-year-old self’s fears and demands. Don’t we have a mighty military? Why haven’t we done anything for the past five decades? We can’t let Iran have weapons, especially nuclear weapons, because Iran threatens the whole world with impunity.

Setting aside the pile of important procedural and strategic objections to the current war, let’s say—against all odds—that its ostensible goals are realized: the military power of Iran is obliterated, and the vicious ruling regime is eliminated. Obliterate and eliminate—and then what? Many years ago, in a discussion of disarmament talks, E.B. White wrote,

Every ship, every plane could be scrapped, every stockpile destroyed, every soldier mustered out, and if the original reasons for holding arms were still present the world would not have been disarmed. Arms would simply be in a momentary state of suspension, preparatory to new and greater arms.

If that’s true of disarmament talks, how much truer is it when another country has destroyed your stockpiles in an act of aggression? Read more »