In its report, The Islamic Republic of Iran: A Dangerous Regime, published in December 2020, the US State Department prefaced its analysis with this assessment:
The Islamic Republic of Iran, also known as Iran and previously known as Persia, is a paradox in the Middle East. It is home to a proud and ancient culture whose ideals of freedom and democracy under Cyrus the Great helped form some of the foundations of the U.S. Constitution, while Iran itself has struggled to reach democracy. The Iranian people have been fighting to reach toward freedom throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. The Iranian people are largely pro-Western but are brutally subjugated by an anti-Western religious theocracy. Iran is an anomaly in the Middle East as the Iranian people do not speak Arabic, but rather Persian or “Farsi.” While there is diversity in Iran, the majority of the Iranian people are culturally, ethnically, and religiously unique from their surrounding neighbors.
I suggested in 1999, in my first published analytical article (I was in graduate school), that the repurposing of NATO, its original purpose having been rendered moribund by the fall of the Soviet Union eight years earlier, was driven by globalization and the need for transnational corporations to have unfettered access to the resources (including labor) in Eastern Europe. (See The US and NATO in the Balkans. See also History and Sides-Taking in the Russo-Ukrainian War.)
I was right about all that. But today I am suggesting that NATO, if it cannot be dissolved, should be repurposed once more, this time for overthrowing the Islamic Republic in Iran and joining Israel and Lebanon in their efforts to root out Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as defending the region by confronting the Houtis and other Islamist terrorist organizations. Our adversaries are not merely waging kinetic war against the West and its allies but also pursuing an economic war, which we experience as higher commodity prices (gas is once again over four dollars a gallon at the US pump).
Alongside this repurposing, Europe must repatriate millions of Muslims from its territories back to their countries of origin (America must do this also). To be sure, European elites want Muslim immigrants to denationalize their countries—and immigrants generally to undermine the proletariat)—but some are, I am certain, fearful of what would happen domestically if Islamism is confronted in the MENA and Central Asian spaces, namely a rise in Islamic terrorism on their shores.
This is a rational concern, since Islamic terrorism is already a problem in Europe, and tackling the Islamist problem in MENA and Central Asia will result in more terrorist attacks. However, if Europe re-migrates Muslims simultaneously with attacking Islamism abroad, it will disrupt domestic terrorist networks by removing the threat. The idea here is to put Islamism on its back foot. It does not have the military capability to effectively counterpunch for long—if the forces of NATO, the United States, and the Gulf States unify. And, yes, this requires ground forces. The scale I have in mind is on the order of magnitude of the Allied attack on Nazi Germany.
One big problem in mounting a unified attack on Islamofascism is the Western left, which is all in with Islamism. The Red-Green Alliance is capturing our sense-making institutions (academia, the culture industry, mass media) and even the Democratic Party. What must therefore accompany the project to contain Islamism—analogous to the communist threat during the Cold War—is an internal effort to disorganize the Western left. Central to this task is bolstering the populist-nationalist wing of the liberal revolution, not only to replace globalist elites currently in power, but to galvanize European populations to defend Western Civilization.
One of the tactics the globalists use to demoralize the Western citizenry is to dwell on US casualties in war. The mass media is already blaming US military casualties on an unnecessary war. I hate when soldiers are killed and maimed. I don’t like war. I never have. But sometimes war is necessary, and the tragic entailment of that necessity is the death and wounding of our sons and daughters. This is what soldiers sign up for. The military is right to offer the range of benefits soldiers receive when signing up. But the military is not a jobs or welfare program. Its purpose is to invade countries, break things, and kill people.
Soldiers are warriors who are sometimes called to war. This is one of those times. Either we pay now, or we pay later—and paying later will be much less desirable. Indeed, if we wait, we risk losing everything. Americans need to summon the spirit of the Greatest Generation. The Islamic Republic has been in power now for nearly half a century. The free world has put up with this menace for far too long. It’s time to relegate Islamofascism to the dustbin of history.
freedom and reason 