Prelude to War

By Aussiegirl

John Batchelor's radio program on every evening is a great way to keep up to speed on what is happening in Israel and the world. He writes a timely column here in the New York Sun.

Prelude to War - August 9, 2006 - The New York Sun

Why is America waiting to be attacked by Iran? Why do we sit on the sidelines while Tehran makes war on our ally Israel in order to provoke America to join the fighting, first against Syria and then against Tehran itself? Why do we listen to the European appeasers as they pretend the Lebanon front is a regional conflict, a national liberation contest, when it is demonstrably the prelude to the wider war — the Spain 1936 to the continental war of 1939? What is the explanation for America's willful fiction that the United Nations Security Council can engineer an accommodation in Lebanon, when it is vivid to every member state that this is a replay of September 1938, when Europe fed Hitler the Sudetenland as the U.N. now wants to feed the jihadists the sovereignty of Israel?

The most threatening answer is that America waits to be bloodied because it has lost its will to defend itself after five years of chasing rogue-state-sponsored gangsters and after three years of occupation in failed-state Iraq against Tehran- and Damascus-backed agents. A grave possibility is that America is now drained, bowed, ready to surrender to the tyrants of Tehran.

Then again, perhaps America has been here before, and it is part of America's destiny as the New Jerusalem that we rarely start wars but that we are unusually good at finishing them.

There is a strange parallel right now to the first days of December 1941, before the Japanese sneak attack. America was still not in the war in Asia and Europe, but it was busy getting ready for a momentous calamity and was filled with the presentiment of doom.

My treasured evidence that America knew what was coming is Life Magazine, Volume 11, No. 23, dated December 8, 1941, which means it was printed and distributed a week before Pearl Harbor.

The astonishing 13-page cover photo essay by Clare Boothe on Commander of the Far East General Douglas MacArthur is complete with maps showing America's strategic challenges at Manila, including the daunting air and sea mileage from San Francisco to Manila and from "Tokio" to Manila. "Will the Island of Luzon then become the great theater of war, and General MacArthur the outstanding khaki-clad figure in it?" asks Boothe. "Or will peace descend upon the Pacific while the U.S. plunges into the war across the Atlantic?"