Has Iran reached its pivot point?

I am adding updates at the end.

I would hope that by now, readers are quite aware of the massive, nationwide popular protests and other actions by the people of Iran against the ruling Shia Muslim regime, headed by Ayatollah Khamenei. It began about 14 days ago, impelled at the start by the massive devaluation of Iran's currency, the rial, plunging the nation into severe inflation. 

But that devaluation was merely the "presenting issue" for the protests, leading now to millions of Iranian citizens taking to the streets across the entire nation to denounce the regime and in some places, burn government buildings. But presenting issues are never the issue, they are just the straw that breaks the camel's back. The fundamental issues relate to the decades of harsh, violent oppression of the Iranian people by the hardcore Islamist regime. Recall that just last month, there was the Kish Island marathon race where hundreds (maybe more) of women refused to wear head covering, defying strict Islamic dress codes that have seen increased public defiance since at least 2022. 

Just a few days ago, the regime blocked internet across the country. Elon Musk has made Starlink available to them, and almost all reports from the anti-regime movement are sent that way.

So what is the fundamental issue?

The popular rebellion springs from two basic conditions that have been building and reinforcing resentment against the ayatollah-led national government for many years. First is that in religious demographics, there has been a massive shift away from Islam in general, Shia Islam specifically. 

while we we commonly think of Iran as a Shia Muslim nation, independent studies, not under control of the regime, belie it. From, "Iran’s secular shift: new survey reveals huge changes in religious beliefs," published in 2020:

Our results reveal dramatic changes in Iranian religiosity, with an increase in secularisation and a diversity of faiths and beliefs. Compared with Iran’s 99.5% census figure, we found that only 40% identified as Muslim.

In contrast with state propaganda that portrays Iran as a Shia nation, only 32% explicitly identified as such, while 5% said they were Sunni Muslim and 3% Sufi Muslim. Another 9% said they were atheists, along with 7% who prefer the label of spirituality. Among the other selected religions, 8% said they were Zoroastrians – which we interpret as a reflection of Persian nationalism and a desire for an alternative to Islam, rather than strict adherence to the Zoroastrian faith – while 1.5% said they were Christian.

What accelerating changes have come in the last five years cannot be determined confidently, but the 2020 World Values Survey showed that Shia Islam adherents were down by 32% from the prior survey. As it also points out, 

Official figures often inflate Muslim numbers due to laws penalizing apostasy, leading to undercounts of atheists, agnostics, and other faiths, with significant numbers of Iranians identifying as non-Muslim or secular in independent studies. ... Conversion from Islam is illegal and apostasy can carry the death penalty, distorting official data. Independent surveys reveal a growing secular or non-Muslim segment within Iran, challenging state narratives.

So it is no surprise that the passing years have brought rapidly increasing discontent with the nation being ruled according to very strict, unforgiving dictates of Muslim sharia law, and increasingly lethal dictates at that. 

The pre-protest status quo was very harsh. According to a US Dept. of State report released by the Biden administration in 2022: 

According to numerous international human rights NGOs and media reporting, the government convicted and executed dissidents, political reformers, and peaceful protesters on charges of “enmity against God” and spreading anti-Islamic propaganda. Authorities carried out hudud punishments such as amputation of fingers (for theft), flogging, and internal exile. The government denied individuals access to attorneys and obtained false confessions through torture in some cases. It reportedly detained and held members of religious minorities incommunicado. In his July report on human rights in Iran, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran (UNSR) expressed alarm at “the disproportionate number of executions of members of minority communities, in particular the Baluch and Kurdish minorities,” who together accounted for 35 percent of the 251 individuals executed between January and June. The Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran (ABC) reported there were 576 executions in 2022, including 71 in December, an increase from 317 executions in 2021 and 248 in 2020. On November 16, Amnesty International reported that authorities were seeking the death penalty for at least 21 persons, many for “enmity against God.” The Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) stated that during the year, the government arrested 140 individuals, imprisoned 39, issued travel bans against 51, summoned 102, raided the homes of 94, and brought 11 to trial for their religious beliefs. Government officials, including the Supreme Leader, routinely engaged in egregious antisemitic rhetoric and Holocaust denial and distortion.

The report goes on to document repeated, violent human rights oppression by the Iranian government against vast swaths of citizens, particularly related to religion and enforcement of sharia law. 

Today's protest/rebellion

With the sudden devaluation of the rial, the "enough is enough" was reached. Over the last two weeks, street protests began and spread, slowly at first and then rapidly and widely, now taking place in every province in the country. Calls for the end of the regime began and spread, along with demands that governing the country be returned to Iran's historic monarchy, headed now by Shah Reza Pahlavi, who, according to The Times of Israel, is ready to return. 

The US-based son of Iran’s ousted shah says he is prepared to return to the country and lead a transition to a democratic government.

“I’m prepared to return to Iran at the first possible opportunity. I’m already planning on that,” Reza Pahlavi says on the Fox News show “Sunday Morning Futures” with Maria Bartiromo.

He adds: “My job is to lead this transition to make sure that no stone is left unturned, that in full transparency, people have an opportunity to elect their leaders freely and to decide their own future.”

But that may not be a great idea. As the NY Post reports, 

Pahlavi may be the figurehead of the monarchists, but he does not represent the majority of the 92,000,000 people of Iran or the millions of Iranians in the diaspora. President Trump has been right to state that it would be inappropriate for him to meet with him as president, as Pahlavi has proven to be a divisive rather than unifying figure. ...

What appeal Pahlavi may have is not due to any personal accomplishments — he has not created any successful businesses or built any institutions. Also, he does not have a revolutionary infrastructure inside or outside of Iran. He does not even appear to have a fully paid office staff.

His prominence stems from a sense of nostalgia for pre-revolutionary Iran, constant promotion by Persian-language media such as Iran International and reported cyber operations and diplomatic support by elements of the Israeli government.

Today's status quo 

Multiple news outlets have reported that, as predicted when the regime shut down internet access across the country three days ago, the regime has resorted to violence to crush the demonstrations. The BBC reports that as of now, many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Iranian protesters have been killed by Iranian police, Revolutionary Guard, and army forces. The UK Guardian also reported, "The streets are full of blood" and, 

Video emerged of riot police breaking into a hospital treating wounded protesters in the western province of Ilam on 4 January, shocking Iranians, who were outraged at the beating of patients and doctors.

The BBC reports that 10,600 people have been arrested and imprisoned so far, a figure that is surely below the real number. Hospitals are reported to be overwhelmed by the number of shot Iranians brought there. 

Bodies outside a medical
centre in Tehran, from Reuters.

The Guardian report said,

A demonstrator who gathered in the Tajrish Arg neighbourhood detailed how snipers were firing at crowds, saying that he saw “hundreds of bodies” in the streets.

A picture of two Irans began to emerge.

During the day, state TV and official government bodies projected an air of normalcy, airing pro-government demonstrations and footage of people going about their business in neighbourhoods that were free of any protest actions.

At night, videos of protests raging through the streets leaked to the rest of the world, brought out at great effort by activists and shared with the Iranian diaspora abroad. Videos showed protesters braving the crackdown, with thousands marching through the streets across the country despite facing what appeared to be live fire from authorities.

What will the next day or two bring? 

Ayatollah Khamenei has proclaimed the protesters as "enemies of Allah," which carries an automatic death sentence. Multiple Iranians have reported that the regime's forces have been firing indiscriminately into the crowds. 

That level of deadly force may quell the rebellion. OTOH, it may make the public conclude that it's now or never to overthrow the regime, concluding quite reasonably that to try again later will bring mercilessly forceful responses much more quickly than this time.  

Will the United States strike Iran? 

CBS News reports, 

President Trump was briefed on new options for military strikes in Iran, a senior U.S. official confirmed Sunday.

Mr. Trump appeared to lay out his red line for action on Friday when he warned that if the Iranian government began "killing people like they have in the past, we would get involved."

"We'll be hitting them very hard where it hurts," he said at the White House. "And that doesn't mean boots on the ground, but it means hitting them very, very hard where it hurts." ... 

 The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous U.S. officials, first reported Saturday night that Mr. Trump had been given military options but hadn't made a final decision. The WSJ reports that Trump will receive further options on Tuesday.

The U.S. has not moved any forces in preparation for potential military strikes. ...

Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, Iran's parliament speaker and a hardliner who has run for the presidency in the past, warned Sunday that the U.S. military and Israel would be "legitimate targets" if the U.S. strikes the Islamic Republic.

"In the event of an attack on Iran, both the occupied territory and all American military centers, bases and ships in the region will be our legitimate targets," Qalibaf said, according to the Associated Press. "We do not consider ourselves limited to reacting after the action and will act based on any objective signs of a threat."

Would US military intervention be justified? I says yes. But that does not mean it would be wise. And I would say as well that, unlike the limited strike against select Venezuelan targets to support the capture of its president, Nicolás Maduro, military action against Iran would require prior Congressional authorization. 

But it should also be realized that Congress need not "declare war" against Iran. It need only recognize that the United States has been at war with Iran almost since the beginning of the post-Shah regime in 1979. While we have not declared war with Iran, it has definitely made war against us. And to ensure the success of replacing the regime there now may be worth the risks of direct US operations. After all, since 1979, Iran and its proxy groups have killed more than 1,000 Americans, including U.S. service members, diplomats, and civilians in various attacks worldwide, many of which occurred in the Middle East. See here for the list, which is not short.

There is another major factor, however, that mitigates against direct US military action. It is that the central key to whether the regime stays in power is the loyalty of the Islamic Republic Guard Corps, IRGC. The IGRC has two major functions: internal security through its Gestapo-equivalent arm, the Basij, and overall control of Iran's military and foreign policy, especially subverting western nations. On that function, "On 22 November 2020, Hussein Salami, the IRGC Commander-in-Chief, acknowledged: 'Today, the power of the Islamic Revolution has removed America from its strategic base. Today, the Basij discourse has spread in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Latin America, and parts of Africa' " (link). 

However, as retired Army officer and strategy analyst Robert Maginness observes, 

This creates a decisive tension. On one hand, the IRGC has every reason to defend the regime that enriched it. On the other, prolonged instability, sanctions, and economic collapse threaten the very assets the Guards control. At some point, self-preservation may begin to compete with ideological loyalty.

That is why Iran’s future may depend less on what protesters do in the streets—and more on whom the IRGC ultimately chooses to back.

I think that there is surely awareness within the Trump administration that while Iran's regime must fall, it must fall at the hands of Iran's people, not the United States. Otherwise, the new government, whether run by the Shah or a democratic vanguard of the people, will not be seen by other nations as legitimate, and probably not by a significant number of Iranians - remember, the vast majority of Iranians are not joining the rebellion. 

I anticipate that US action will be mostly covert and directed toward two main objectives. First, advisory, material, and financial support to the revolutionists, especially in organization and establishing internal command and control. We will also enable communications that do not use the internet. I do not rule out that we will supply them weapons. 

Second, actions to decrease the IRGC's effectiveness in the near term, such as jamming communications and inserting counterfeit messaging into their comms systems. Axios reported late Jan. 11 that,

U.S. officials said most of the options that will be presented to the president at this stage are "not kinetic."

Such options include steps to deter the regime, like announcing an aircraft carrier strike group is heading to the region.

The officials said cyberattacks and information operations against the Iranian regime are also being considered.

The focus will be on increasing the capabilities of the revolutionists and decreasing the ability and the willingness of the IRGC to support the regime. There is no guarantee of success, of course. And it will almost certainly prove much more difficult than anticipated. 

Let us hope, however, that the people of Iran may persevere and replace the regime there on their own accord, and with as little loss of life as possible. For if they do not succeed, countless more will be killed by the regime nonetheless. That is their new reality, and I have to believe that they know it. 

Update, Jan. 12:

The revolutionists may well be doubling down. Link to video: https://x.com/Tendar/status/2010465996042064329 

Hudson.org, Jan. 9: "The Ayatollah’s Regime Is Crumbling."

Update, Jan. 13: 

1. The value of the rial has now dropped like an anvil tossed from a hot air balloon. 

A good, short analysis is here, bottom line:

Iran’s currency collapse is the final non-kinetic phase transition before irreversible regime fragmentation. This is an extinction-level internal systems failure. ...

Regime Forecast:

No currency = no supply chain = no governance = no control

The currency didn’t just collapse

The state did

2.

The BBC: "Authoritarian regimes die gradually then suddenly, but Iran is not there yet."

How does an authoritarian regime die? As Ernest Hemingway famously said about going broke – gradually then suddenly.

The protesters in Iran and their supporters abroad were hoping that the Islamic regime in Tehran was at the suddenly stage. The signs are, if it is dying, it is still at gradual.

The last two weeks of unrest add up to a big crisis for the regime. Iranian anger and frustration have exploded into the streets before, but the latest explosion comes on top of all the military blows inflicted on Iran in the last two years by the US and Israel.

But more significant for hard-pressed Iranians struggling to feed their families has been the impact of sanctions.

In the latest blow for the Iranian economy, all the UN sanctions lifted under the now dead 2015 nuclear deal were reimposed by the UK, Germany and France in September. In 2025 food price inflation was more than 70%. The currency, the rial, reached a record low in December.

While the Iranian regime is under huge pressure, the evidence is that it's not about to die.

Crucially, the security forces remain loyal. 

More at the link, of course.

The aftermath of Hamas murdering children

On Feb. 20, Hamas handed over to Israel the corpses of four dead Israeli hostages, including two small children, but only after using them for propaganda. 

Before handing over the remains, Hamas staged a parade of the bodies through streets of Gaza, proudly and cruelly displaying them  to cheering Gazan crowds. As the Wall Street Journal observed, 

Hamas put their coffins on a stage in front of a huge propaganda poster of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A crowd looked on and milled around, and “triumphant music” played, according to one news report. Mr. Netanyahu was depicted with fangs, dripping blood above the faces of the four dead hostages, smiling in photographs from happier times. “The War Criminal Netanyahu & His Nazi Army Killed Them with Missiles from Zionist Warplanes,” the poster claimed.

The coffin propaganda underlines the challenge of deradicalization for any postwar plan for Gaza.

Israeli medical staff conducted autopsies on the returned hostages. One was Oded Lifshitz, 84. The other three were Kfir and Ariel Bibas and their mother, Shiri. The Israeli government then announced: 

A. The bodies of the two children, one taken hostage at 4 years old and the other at 9 months, are injured in ways completely consistent with being brutally murdered, mainly by manual strangulation, and inconsistent with being killed by an air strike, as Hamas claims. 

Update: It is also confirmed that after the two boys were strangled, their bodies were pounded with rocks to make them appear to have been killed by an air raid. Details here, if you can stomach them.

B. The body of Shiri is in fact not Shiri at all. Hamas gave a corpse to Israel of a dead woman whose identity is unknown. 

Update: Hamas has now returned the actual remains of Shiri, whose identity has been so confirmed by Israel. 

What Hamas did drew sharp rebukes from very senior Arab Muslim authorities. 

And in yesterday's WSJ, author Bernard-Henri Lévy had this and other things to say about Hamas. 

Once, children were gassed as they descended from the trains. Hamas waited. Damn those who try to drag us into the false game of moral equivalency. These two breaths cut short, this double death of innocence, is Hamas’s abomination alone—and it is unforgivable.

Were the two muftis sincere in their condemnations? I think so. The muftis know very well that Muhammed specifically forbade the intentional killing of children, even in warfare. (That is no doubt why Hamas lied about Kfir and Ariel being killed by an Israeli airstrike. Hamas openly celebrated that they were dead but lied about how they died. Why one and not the other?)

Islam holds that there are two inarguable sources of commandments that must be obeyed with no exceptions. One of course is the Koran. The other is the Hadith, which is a collection of sayings of Muhammed. The Hadith is equal in status to the Koran. 

In a well-known hadith, Muhammed instructed his companions during military expeditions, "Do not kill children, women, or the elderly, and do not attack those who are not fighting." (Reported in Sahih Muslim, Sunan Abu Dawud, and other collections)

Another narration states, "Do not kill a child, nor a woman, nor an old man, nor destroy crops, nor kill those who are in their places of worship." (Sunan Abu Dawud)

Islamic jurisprudence distinguishes between combatants (those actively engaged in fighting) and non-combatants (those who are not involved in hostilities). Children, by their very nature, are considered non-combatants and are protected under Islamic law.

The deliberate targeting of children, whether in warfare or otherwise, is considered a grave sin and a violation of Islamic law.

The looming question now is, "In light of these Hamas atrocities, what happens (eventually) to Hamas and the future of Gaza and its people?" 

On Feb. 4, President Trump raised a lot of eyebrows by declaring that Gaza should become an American protectorate, the Gazan people should be resettled elsewhere, and then the US would rebuild Gaza as a sort of "Middle East Riviera." Political and media commentators scornfully denounced the idea right away. On Feb. 6, I commented on Facebook:

When the Israelis withdrew from Gaza in (IIRC) 2004-2005, they actually offered to do much the same thing as Trump said, although on a smaller scale. Hamas seized power shortly afterward and killed every Gazan who got in their way.

But could it happen now? I think this is less a real proposal than Trump's way of signaling to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states that the status quo antebellum must not be restored. Trump's real message, I think, is, "The perpetual warfare between Israel and Hamas stops now." And yes, it has been perpetual; I visited the southern Israeli town of Sederot in 2007 on the same day it received a rocket bombardment from Gaza.

What Trump did was describe a wealthier, peaceful future for Gaza and the next step is to simply ask, "If not that, then what? Because more years of war is not on the table."

The Wall Street Journal's editorialists said much the same thing, but with more historical context and detail. 

President Trump’s idea that the U.S. might remove and relocate some two million Palestinians from Gaza and then “own” and rebuild the strip isn’t going to happen soon, if ever. But the idea, however preposterous, does have the virtue of forcing the world to confront its hypocrisy over the fate of the Palestinian people.

What was the Arab powers' reaction? It was that they got Trump's message, at least in part. 

Egypt led the response, probably because Hamas was a child of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian Islamist, insurrectionist movement dating to the 1920s. Egypt's government finally defeated the Brotherhood only in 2013, although the Brotherhood cannot be said to be fully neutralized yet. That Hamas and the Brotherhood are so closely linked is doubtless the reason that when the present war between Gaza and Israel began, Egypt publicly announced it was sending a tank battalion to its border with Gaza with orders to shoot on sight anyone crossing the border without prior permission. Egypt also strongly reinforced its border wall.

So it is no wonder that Egypt's immediate response to Trump's declaration was that it would refuse to resettle any Gazans, even temporarily, and that Hamas must have no role governing postwar Gaza. 

And now the rest of the Arab world understands that Hamas has committed atrocities that directly violate the commandments of Muhammed. Of course, the Arab elites already knew that, but Hamas handled the return of the dead hostages, especially the two dead children, so stupidly that it could not be ignored or shrugged away. 

I think a corner has been turned. If, as I wrote at the time, Trump's real message was "this is the last war Hamas will fight, ever," then I think the Arab powers are taking it seriously, regardless of the rest of what Trump said. The stupid parading of the four dead hostages to celebrate their deaths and the obvious lie that Hamas did not kill the children have forced Arab elites and rulers to take Trump's declaration seriously, even if not literally. 

So has a corner been turned? We can hope so, but at this point only the steering wheel has moved. The war is not over. But at least the Arab powers are finally confronting the fact that when it ends, the ending must be permanent this time. And that is progress. 

War and the reshaping of societies

 Let me emphasize at the outset that my assessment of the looming Israeli invasion of Gaza is intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive. I am not proposing what Israel should do, but what it may do as the coming days and weeks unfold, even if Israel does not actually intend it now. 

Israeli artillery firing

Having formed a "unity government" for the war, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has stated clearly that the permanent end of Hamas as the principal war aim. That this objective requires a land invasion of Gaza is also clear. But what can it take to destroy Hamas? Netanyahu has said that killing its terrorists fighters is a specific goal, but Hamas is not merely an organization. It is also an ideology. How does Israel end with not only the present Hamas organization destroyed, but also the ideology?

America's Civil War and World War 2 may provide a clue. 

But first, what is Hamas' ideology? 

It is very simple: Kill Jews, kill Jews, kill more Jews. Specifically, Hamas (and Lebanon's Hezbollah) has said publicly and often that it has at least the following goals:

1. The elimination of the state of Israel and establishment of a Muslim nation "from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea." Jews must vacate this land entirely or they will be killed. 

2. In the meantime, and as a tactic to attain that goal, Hamas has said before and again very recently that Jews must be killed. Last Saturday, Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif announced,  “Operation Al-Aqsa Deluge.” Al-Aqsa is the name of the mosque atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Deif said that the mass killings of Israelis were a mere “first strike,” with much more yet to come. 

Photos: New York Times

Deif was not ambiguous, emphasizing, 

“I say to our pure mujahedeen: This is the day that you make this criminal enemy understand that its time is up. ‘Kill them wherever you may find them.’” 

The last sub-quote is directly from the Quran, Suras 2:191 and 4:89. Someone might object that Deif is being very selective in his quotes of the Quran (he used other such verses) because there are verses of peace and tolerance in the Quran. For that, please read the explanation of the Muslim principle of Naskh, or abrogation, at the end of this post. 

Hamas is making total war against Israelis. It only goal is to kill Israelis. It does not merely hope, but actually believes that doing so will bring the cessation of Jews living in Hamas' future Palestinian state.

It is also worth noting that mainline Islamic exegesis of the Quran and Hadith is (and has been since Mohammed's day) that any Muslim killed while fighting for Islam is brought immediately into Allah's paradise. This is not a fringe view; it was stated plainly by Mohammed himself. As Muslim scholar Tajuddin B. Shu`aib explained:

[F]or Muslims to wield weapons in a war in which Islam itself is defended is literally an act of worship. The Muslim jihadi has the right to expect reward proportionate to his sacrificial worship. In military jihad, the ultimate sacrifice is to die, which deserves the ultimate reward, immediate entry by the slain jihadi's soul into Paradise. This doctrine springs from the words of Mohammed himself, who during the battle of Badr told his soldiers, "I swear by the One in whose hand Mohammad's soul is, any man who fights them today and is killed while he is patient in the ordeal and seeks the pleasure of Allah, going forward and not backing off, Allah will enter him into Paradise.“

Lessons from the Civil War and World War 2

As I noted in, "Confederate monuments: So what? Now What?," the only meaningful ideological difference between the CSA and the Union states was over slavery. What the CSA's ideology was hardly needs explaining. (I should note again that President Lincoln was adamantly anti-slavery, but ending slavery was not why he went to war with the CSA.) 

After more than two years of indecisive, though bloody fighting, the Union's strategy took a linchpin turn when Gen. U.S. Grant was appointed commander of the US Army and he unleashed Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman to invade the South. Sherman stated his goal very plainly:

 "War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want."

"This war differs from other wars, in this particular. We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war."

Sherman's tactics were ruthless, but they did do what he set out to do. His and Grant's maneuvers and battlefield victories made it very plain not only to the Confederacy's leadership (especially Gen. R.E. Lee) that they could not win the war, it was also crystal clear to ordinary men and women throughout the South, including those never actually touched by the fighting. Slavery was ended by the war and it is worth noting also that no state has attempted to secede since then. 

When the United States entered World War 2, it knew that invading enemy-occupied nations and territories was unavoidable. In 1943, Gen. D.D. Eisenhower was named Supreme Allied Commander of European operations and was given this simple directive: "You will enter the continent of Europe and in conjunction with other Allied nations, undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her armed forces.” 

 Based on what the Israeli government has said about its objectives in its present war, Eisenhower's directive could be lightly modified to state Israel's objectives in invading Gaza. However, as allied forces in WW2 found out, and as Israel undoubtedly realizes, military theorist Carl von Clausewitz nailed it about 200 years ago: "In war everything is simple, but the simplest things can be very difficult."

One of the preludes to the massive landings on Normandy's beaches to "enter the continent or Europe" in 1944 was sustained, large-scale aerial bombing of Germany by American and British aircraft. As the war went on and German (and Japanese) resistance failed to slacken, President Roosevelt decided that the German and Japanese peoples must realize after the war that not only had their armed forces been defeated: the entire nation, as a nation, had been beaten. He and Churchill were well aware that German militarism had survived World War I because its apologists had successfully propagated the myth that the Kaiser's army had not really been defeated, it had been "stabbed in the back" by disloyal factions at home.

Hence, wrote Roosevelt in a letter to Secretary of War Henry Stimson,

It is of utmost importance that every person in Germany should realize that this time Germany is a defeated nation. . . . The fact that they are a defeated nation, collectively and individually, must be so impressed upon them that they will hesitate to start any new war.

So, according to historian Richard B. Frank in his award-winning book, Downfall, the End of the Imperial Japanese Empire:

Viewed in this light, massive urban bombing complemented the aim of unconditional surrender. It was not just a handful of vile men who flaunted vile ideologies; whole populations imbibed these beliefs and acted as willing acolytes. Unconditional surrender and vast physical destruction would sear the price of aggression into the minds of the German and Japanese peoples. No soil would be left from which myths might later sprout that Germany and Japan had not really been defeated. These policies would assure that there would be no third world war with Germany, nor would Japan get a second opportunity.

One notes that Japan and Germany have been well behaved since 1945. But we also have to note that massive, destructive bombing was alone not the reason. It was simply impossible for either country's armed forces to claim that they had prevailed, or at least held their own, on the field of battle. German and Japanese orphans, widows and grieving parents were in almost every other household, and a lie that their armed forces had not really lost could not possibly have found legs to stand on.

Dresden, Germany, 1945

Gaza, 2023

Israel's task is to discern what it will take (a) actually to destroy Hamas as a threat to Israeli lives, and (b) how to make sure that Gazans never again consent to another such organization to operate among them. (Remember, the Gazans elected Hamas to power in 2006, but that was the last time the Gazans had any say.) 

That Israel has today issued warnings to northern Gazans to evacuate within 24 hours was done from humanitarian considerations as well as hoping for military simplicity when Israel invades I have no doubt. That Hamas has said that it will not permit anyone to evacuate underscores Hamas' brutality, but it may also serve to underscore to ordinary Gazans that Hamas is not really their benefactor. (However, as I type, TV news is showing video of long lines of cars moving south along the Gazan coast.)

When Israel incurred into Lebanon in 2006, I observed that the fighting there had come to resemble the combat on Okinawa in World War 2, with well-prepared defensive positions and underground lines of communications. Hezbollah emphasized anti-tank capability, just as the Japanese had learned to do on the Pacific war. 

But combat in both Okinawa and Lebanon was mainly on open terrain, while Gaza is heavily built up. Urban combat is the most brutal and difficult of all conventional fighting for it takes place not only in left, right, front, and rear, as in open country, but also up and down. Hamas has spent years not only fortifying potential defense positions, but also constructing tunnels around Gaza that some estimates say are 300 miles in length altogether. As well, they are certainly booby-trapped with remote detonation. 

The End Game

At this point, both Israel and Hamas must realize that, as Gen. Douglas MacArthur said, "In war there is no substitute for victory." Victory for Hamas can be defined very simply: it survives as an ongoing, at least minimally effective, violent anti-Israel entity as before. Hamas' leaders know that to abandon murderous violence to establish a purely Palestinian state by political measures, rather than violence, means two things: (a) Hamas would not even be Hamas any more, so what is the point, and (b) mere politics will never accomplish that goal anyway. Hamas' true believers would literally rather die than take that course.

As for Israel, its leadership at least knows that Hamas must be ended and no Hamas-by-another-name can be allowed. There is no answer to how long it will take to destroy Hamas or how many casualties it will cost. But neither Grant nor Sherman knew those things ahead of time, either. So Israel must proceed, though it is doing so as Otto von Bismarck reportedly said about going to war, "entering a dark room blindfolded to search for a black cat that is not even there." 

Gaza's residents, whether they know it now or not, must decide in whose hands they literally trust their lives and the lives of their children. Hamas is quite willing to sacrifice them. But they may come to realize that while Israel will not target them, neither will Israel refrain from attacking if Hamas militarizes their refuges. An international standard called Common Article 3 governs combat between state and non-state combatants. Its states that civilians' presence at a location does not automatically make that location off limits from attack. As Human Rights Watch explained during 2006's Hezbollah war, 

It, too, can be targeted if it makes an “effective” contribution to the enemy’s military activities and its destruction, capture or neutralization offers a “definite military advantage” to the attacking side in the circumstances ruling at the time. 

Victory for non-combatants on both sides really means that they live through the war. But tragically, so many have died already and so many more will die to come. 

End Note: The Muslim principle of abrogation. 

The Quran is not arranged chronologically. Its chapters (Suras) are presented according to their length. Even within chapters chronology is confusing. For example, Sura 2, v. 190 was revealed to Mohammed six years after v. 193, and there are other such examples.

The principle of abrogation is followed by all Muslims and Muslim clerics. It is simply that the chronologically-later verses supersede, or abrogate, the earlier ones if there is a conflict (and there are many such conflicts). All the verses of peace are earlier than, and therefore abrogated by, the "verses of the sword." 

The principle of abrogation is mainline Muslim exegesis; the Quran has been understood this way since Islam's beginning. (See "Islam: the requirement of jihad.")

See also "Israel's Darkest Day," by David P. Goldman, with whom I have corresponded now and then over the years. Very thought-provoking essay. 

Update: The Wall Street Journal, "Israel Aims to Destroy Hamas. What Comes Next for Gaza Is Unclear" (free link):

“We will destroy the rule of Hamas,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Friday after meeting U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in Tel Aviv. “We will eliminate the military capabilities of Hamas. We will make sure this threat does not exist on our borders. It will be lengthy. It will be lethal. It will be powerful. And it will be for forever.”

But Israeli leaders have yet to answer another important question: What comes after Hamas? ...

“I don’t give a damn,” said Jacob Nagel, who served as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security adviser and is in touch with government officials. “It’s much more important to act and finish the problem. And then we can decide what to do.” 

“I used to say: think then act. What happened this weekend changed all the rules of play,” added Nagel. His view is echoed by Israeli military and political leaders across the political spectrum.

The war in Israel

In late December 2008, Israel and Hamas fought a somewhat smaller-intensity war than what began this week. I took the occasion to write about what Hamas is, how it began, what its objectives are, and how the Hamas-Israel ongoing war can end (Notes on the Gaza Bombings). 

As you will see, not much has changed since then, except that the scale and ferocity of Hamas' attacks this week are evoking a much stronger Israeli response than in earlier years. Furthermore, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was a professional solider before entering politics. While he faces criticism and controversy on domestic matters, Israelis know that his skills for this crisis are excellent.

In southern Israel there is a town called Sederot (sometimes spelled Sderot). It is only one kilometer from Gaza. Just Friday, Hamas gunmen drove through Sederot, shooting at Israelis.

Just surreal! Footage of Palestinian Hamas terrorists who infiltrated into Israel from Gaza, firing at residents in Sderot from an SUV. pic.twitter.com/ffUO5XwG1I

— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) October 7, 2023

I visited Sederot in October 2007, arriving only a few hours after it had come under rocket attack from Hamas, firing from Gaza. Such attacks were frequent. Here is my account, "The Sederot Gambit:" 

I will update this post from time to time with additional developments. It needs to be understood, however, that Hamas has literally, militarily invaded Israel. Dozens of towns in Israel were not only bombarded with Hamas rockets, Hamas soldiers went into them shooting people on the street without regard to age or status. John Hinderaker has posted several videos of just those things as they happened. 

Does God have a plan for your life? Well, not really. A Maundy Thursday Reflection

Well, not so fast. Is this claim actually supported by Scripture?

The Thursday before Easter is called Maundy Thursday by Christians around the world. The word Maundy is derived from the same Latin word as the English word, "mandate." Maundy Thursday reminds of Christ's commandments and our obligation to obey them. 

Immediately after the Day of Pentecost and its empowerment of the church by the Holy Spirit, Peter and the other disciples began preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Jerusalem. Acts records that "great numbers of both men and women" were converted to faith in Christ by their preaching. As a result, the Jewish high priest and some allies on the Jewish high council had the apostles arrested and locked in prison.

But during the night an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors, brought them out, and said, 20 'Go, stand in the temple and tell the people the whole message about this life.' 21When they heard this, they entered the temple at daybreak and went on with their teaching" (Acts 5:19-21).

When the council discovered it, they had the Temple police bring Peter and the others to stand before them.

Acts 5:27-32:
27 When they had brought them, they had them stand before the council. The high priest questioned them, 28 saying, “We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man’s blood on us.”

   
29 But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than any human authority. 30 The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. 31 God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. 32 And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.”

“We must obey God,” the apostles said. I have to tell you, I am not impressed by those words. God commands it! That was what Osama bin Laden declared before 9/11, when he said that it is the duty of every Muslim to kill infidels wherever they are found. Since then al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, and other such groups have made grisly work of what they insist is divine duty.

  
Now, it's easy to point fingers at Muslim terrorists. In fact, it's required, but it doesn't get us Christians off the hook. When I was a boy, I worked a couple of summers in the now-gone Woodlawn Market in Nashville. The owner, "Pappy," was the staunchest racist I ever met in person. He was absolutely ironclad in his belief that God's will was that black people be oppressed. He was convinced beyond persuasion otherwise that black skin was the mark of Cain. Cain was the first murderer in the Bible, whom God sent to exile with every hand against him. Racism was to Pappy literally a holy duty.

   
I am guessing that most of us can think of someone who was convinced he or she was obeying God in things we thought were disturbing, even shocking. So I read Peter's retort to the high priest as potentially troubling. "There's what you want and there's what God wants," Peter is saying. "And we obey God, not you."

   
That's real in-your-face stuff, and following verses explain that the officials there were so vexed at Peter's defiance they wanted to kill the apostles.

I am going to take the high priest's side here, at least for a moment. I don't defend his desire to have Peter killed. But the high priest and I have something in common. We're both clergy of well-established religions. When something upsets the apple cart of proper religious order, we get our hackles up and immediately set about trying to bring it under our control.

   
Of course, this makes us no different from business managers or most parents. But what makes the issue especially nettlesome for clergy is that we formally recognize that the Holy Spirit is supposed to be breaking in and upsetting our apple cart. In fact, I often think that one on the main reasons the Holy Spirit came to enliven the church on the Day of Pentecost was to stir things up and keep believers on their toes.

 
Nonetheless, there are some issues for all of us, the church assembled, to consider.

   
One is that if it is unacceptable to excuse sin by saying like Flip Wilson's character Geraldine, "The devil made me do it," then it is equally unacceptable to use a claim of divine mandate as an excuse for doing what one wants to do to begin with. Cathy and I knew a woman in Virginia who told us that she knew it was God's will for her to win the lottery because she would give more than a tithe of the jackpot to the church. True story.

 
"God requires it" has been used to justify everything from simple murder to mass murder to tyranny and oppression. So the claim that one is acting from divine authority deserves to be regarded with deep suspicion at least at first.

On the other hand there is a real chance that someone really might be acting under God's command, and therefore we must leave the possibility open. 

So how to tell?

I think a crucial key is found in what Peter went on to say: “We are witnesses,” he said, to what we testify. Which is to say, God did not reveal Christ to me privately, but publicly, with others, all of whom attest to this truth.

This is important because the unambiguous testimony of the apostles in the New Testament is that Christian faith and practice are not solitary ventures. Everywhere the apostles went they did two things, never separated from one another: they brought people to confess faith in Christ as risen Lord and organized the new believers into churches.

The apostle Paul explained more than once that the body of Christ present in the world today is the aggregation of Christ's present disciples organized as the church. I have found no evidence in the New Testament that people can live Christian lives apart from the church belonging to Jesus Christ.

 
More than thirty years ago my pastor in North Carolina put it this way: "I won't tell you that you can't be a good Christian outside the church. I'll tell you that you can't be any kind of Christian outside the church." That statement struck me as pretty stark at the time. We Americans are stiff-necked individualists. We pretty much think that whatever we want to do we should be able to do on our own, but that's not how the New Testament sees it.

Anyone can be religious outside the church, but Jesus did not minister, teach, suffer, die and rise just to make us religious. Religions are a dime a dozen. Founding another one sure didn't require God's incarnation, or Christ's passion, death and resurrection. We are not called to be merely religious, but to be transformed and made anew in Christ's likeness – to be a new people, a new kind of community. So when we think God has some special demand for us, or someone makes that claim to us, we need to discern whether its context is related to the present body of Christ. Who does the command serve, Christ or self?

 

 And that leads to the second way to assess a claim that “God commands it.” It is the famous lawyers’ question, “Who benefits?” The apostles gained nothing from preaching Christ but severe tests of their character, their faithfulness, perseverance, and fortitude. All were killed but one for insisting that they had to obey God rather than human authority. They might have been killed the day of this passage had not a wise rabbi spoken against it. So, who benefited? By the standards of the world, none of the apostles did. 

The experiences of the apostles and other devoted Christians through the centuries is that God play his cards pretty close to the vest. God’s commands often do not make sense to us and frequently do not appeal to us. God generally leads us only one step at a time. So, I am leery of visionaries with grand plans, all filled in from start to finish, because I don't see in the Bible where God explains that he has a lifelong plan for each person who follows him. He does not lay out a plan to those he calls. God did not give Moses a plan. He gave him a command: "Go tell Pharaoh to let my people go," and that was that.

When the Lord spoke to Paul on the Damascus road, he did not lay out Paul's apostolic mission to him, culminating in being crucified in Rome. Christ simply told him, "Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do" (Acts 9:6). 

Even Peter, in today's passage, shows no sense of grand mission. He didn't tell the high priest, "God wants me to be the foremost of all his apostles and become the first bishop of Rome, founder of what will become the worldwide Roman Catholic Church." All he understood that God wanted him to do was preach the Gospel. He started out a street-corner preacher and there is no evidence that on his own account that he thought God wanted him to be anything else. 

God's commands are pretty simple, at least at first. Often they do not make a lot of sense and leave one wanting to ask him, Why? But enlightenment is not the point; we leave that to the eastern mystics. Obeying God is the point. 

Speaking of obedience, there are some basic commandments of Christ that are obligatory of all Christian people and churches wherever found. These commandments are not mysterious; they are clearly stated in the Scriptures: pray, give, love, forgive, help, worship. Bear one another's burdens, esteem others more highly than oneself. Love God, love neighbor. Be baptized. Consider our lives lost to the world and gained in Christ. Use all that we have to the glory of God and the building up of the kingdom of Heaven. These are the foundational commands God give us. 

The story is told of a star college football player whom we will call Eddie. Almost every week the school paper had a photograph of Eddie leaping across the goal line for a touchdown or jumping high into the air catching an impossible pass. Oh, Eddie was good! The cheerleaders loved him. Eddie loved them back.

One day, Eddie went to the coach and said, “Coach I’m not coming to practice anymore.” The coach said, “Eddie, are you quitting?” Eddie replied, “Oh, no, I’m not quitting. I’ll still dress for the games on Saturdays. But you know Mondays? Mondays you make us to do wind sprints. And Tuesdays are grass drills and strength training. Wednesdays are full contact practice. Thursdays are special team drills. I don’t like all that. I’m not going to do any of that anymore. But come game time, Coach, you can count on me. I’ll catch those passes, I’ll make those touchdowns, I’ll get my picture in the paper. And after the game I’ll go out with the prettiest cheerleader. I like all that! But man, I’m not going to suffer through your practices anymore.” 

Now ask yourself whether come Saturday the coach sent Eddie into the game. 

So, another test of discerning whether we are given a particular command from God is to ponder whether we have been faithful in carrying out God's general commands. If God cannot trust me do the basics, why would he command me to accomplish the special?

Jesus said, "Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much" (Luke 16:10).

 
But suppose you work through all those things and conclude that God indeed is giving you a special command or laying upon you a special obligation. What then? Then Peter's courage is a model. Peter had to know the tempers flaring at him and his fellow disciples. Before the council, recognizing the danger, Peter and the disciples stood their ground precisely because they were under God's mandate.

 
The pressures and excuses the world lures us to turn from following Christ are innumerable. They are also hard to resist because to say yes to Christ we must say no to something, or someone, else – for example, Sunday morning league sports (but now I’m meddling). To obey God, we must first disobey ourselves, and it is disobeying ourselves that makes us think obeying God is hard. But remember that Jesus said, "My yoke is easy and my burden is light." 

Staying on course is the only faithful option. Only coincidentally will the world at large approve of our faithful service, but that's okay. The world's applause is far more spiritually dangerous than its jeers.
_______

New Testament scholar Robert Wall wrote that Peter’s “heroic retort to the high priest" served “missionary ends.” Peter was a “witness to God’s salvation of Israel. He [was] not the leader of a movement of protest but a movement of God."

 
And that is what we are under God's command to do: proclaim salvation through Jesus Christ our Lord. We should be satisfied with God's direction for each day, not for our sake, but for the sake of those who know him not.

A Muslim wants to know

Muslim writer Dr Rakib Ehsan:

Following the mosque massacres in Christchurch, political figures across the Western world did not hesitate in accurately describing what they were – white-supremacist terrorist attacks on Muslims in their places of worship during Friday prayers.

In the aftermath of Christchurch, Hillary Clinton expressed her solidarity with the global Muslim community – the Ummah – and said ‘we must continue to fight the perpetuation and normalisation of Islamophobia and racism in all its forms’. Former US president Barack Obama tweeted that himself and his wife Michelle were grieving with the people of New Zealand and the ‘Muslim community’. Our own prime minister, Theresa May, correctly labelled Christchurch as a ‘horrifying terrorist attack’.

Now, contrast this with the language used by the same three figures following the coordinated series of Islamist-inspired terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka. Affectionate expressions of solidarity with persecuted Christian communities have been missing. The Christians killed in their own churches have been referred to by Clinton and Obama as ‘Easter worshippers’. Despite the clearly sophisticated, well-planned nature of the terrorist attacks, which very much had the aim of killing a large number of Christians, the British PM – a vicar’s daughter – referred to them as ‘acts of violence’.

The differences in tone and nature between the condemnations of the Christchurch and Sri Lanka terrorist attacks are striking. After Christchurch, there was no hesitation about stating the religious backgrounds of the victims and directing emotion and affection towards Muslim communities. Politicians took no issue with categorising the events in Christchurch as terrorism.

In contrast, the words ‘terrorism’ and ‘Christianity’, along with their associated terms, have so far failed to feature in much of the reaction to the attacks in Sri Lanka. ...

The fact is that the persecution and victimisation of Christians continues to take place in many parts of the world, often at the hands of Islamists.

Would that we had such clarity from our own religious and political leaders.

How ISIS drove Muslims to Christian Faith

NBC News: Life under ISIS led these Muslims to Christianity "If heaven is made for ISIS and their belief," said one convert, "I would choose hell for myself instead of being again with them in the same place, even if it’s paradise."

While residents are still dealing with the emotional scars left by the brutality of ISIS, Omar says many people in Kobani have been open-minded about Christianity.

Omar reads the Bible at the Church of the Brethren in Kobani, Syria.  NBC News

“Most of the brothers here converted or come to church as a result of what ISIS did to them and to their families,” he added. “No one is forced to convert. Our weapon is the prayer, the spreading of spirit of love, brotherhood and tolerance.”

Europe has simply given up

 Here is a chart by Eurostat showing European nations' birth rates by decade beginning at 1960 and by year 2012-2014. See a trend there? And do you see that Turkey is the only nation to show a steady, upward trend? 

Demographer s agree that a birth rate of 2.1 live births per woman is what it takes to maintain a level population level. When the rate falls below 1.8 it becomes increasingly difficult to reverse and below 1.5 it approaches near-impossibility. That's why rates that low are often called a "demographic death spiral."

And that is one reason why I have for many years advocated America's disentanglement from the military part of the NATO alliance. As I have said before, if NATO’s countries will not have enough children to preserve protect themselves, why should American women have children to protect them?

The chart:

Spain's government is so alarmed that it has literally set up an official office to address the problem and,

... has tasked demographic expert Edelmira Barreira with sorting out the problem. The move comes after the country reported a higher number of deaths than births for the first time in 2015.

Spanish women between 18-49 reportedly had an average of 1.3 children in 2015 - below the European Union’s (EU) figure of 1.58. Spain’s birthrate has fallen by 18 percent since 2008, according to figures from Eurostat.

And between 1977 and 2015, the number of childless couples tripled from 1.5 to 4.4 million... .

As a demographer, though, Senora Barreira cannot be optimistic since once a society's rate drops to 1.3, more than a marginal increase over the long term is almost impossible. And besides, Spanish couples "blamed long working hours and late nights for the decrease" - whatever that really means.

Long ago Europe's countries decided to build a welfare state instead of bear children. But as the birth rate correspondingly fell, who would provide the labor and wealth to pay for Europe's very generous retirement payouts and nationalized health care? They answered that question, too, but did not foresee or did not care the long-term outlook: "The Mohammed Retirement Plan Will Kill Europe."

Once again, European values are in conflict with European survival.

The European values that require Europe to commit suicide are about ideology, not language, culture or nationhood. But the incoming migrants don’t share that ideology. They have their own Islamic values.

Why should 23-year-old Mohammed work for four decades so that Hans or Fritz across the way can retire at 61 and lie on a beach in Mallorca? The idea that Mohammed would ever want to do such a thing out of love for Europe was a silly fantasy that European governments fed their worried citizens.

Then there is this informative little chart: "Muslims have an average 3 children per family (or woman? The data does not clarify this). Not hard to calculate how large the population will explode into within the next three decades."

This is one reason Europe's future decades will be decidedly non-European in ways that we recognize Europe now.

Update, March 1: The trend is also worldwide:

Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world and will overtake Christianity as the most popular before the end of this century, according to an analysis of religious surveys published Tuesday by the Pew Research Center.

With 1.6 billion, Muslims made up 23 percent of the world’s population, according to a 2010 Pew estimate. That figure was still some way short of the 2.2 billion Christians which comprised 31 percent of the population.

However, by 2050 there could be near parity between the numbers of adherents of the two religions for the first time in history. The reasons for this rapid growth are thought to be the greater number of children Muslims have compared to other religious groups and the comparatively young age of Muslims.

War and the reshaping of societies

I first published this essay in 2002 but is no longer online. I republish it now because of the prominence in the 2016 presidential campaigns of the how to confront and defeat ISIS and one candidate's assertion that he would order the intentional deaths of family members of enemy combatants, and other candidates' assertions of large-scale bombing raids against ISIS. 

Various commentators have pointed out that during the early 1990s Persian Gulf War, only about 10 percent of the bombs US air forces dropped were precision guided. But during the Afghan campaign, so far, two-thirds or more have been precision guided.

There are many military and political advantages of using precision guided munitions, or PGMs. But may be some long-term drawbacks as well. Crudely put, our reliance on PGMs make it possible for a foreign power to fight us and lose, yet not suffer many of the consequences of war.

World War II "precision" bombing

The primary advantage of PGMs is simple: hitting the target. During World War II, when there were no PGMs, the allied air forces sent up to 1,000 heavy bombers over German targets at a time. Yet the number of bombs that actually had militarily significant target effects was small in comparison to the number dropped. The British knew this would be the case from the beginning, and didn't even try to hit their targets except by using the law of averages. "Area bombing" was their tactic. They hoped that if they dropped as many bombs as they could, enough would happen to hit the target to make the mission worthwhile.

Area bombing of a German city

American commanders believed that intentionally accurate bombing was possible; they even misnamed their technique "precision" bombing. Yet long before the end of the war, American bomb wings were really conducting area bombing tactics; they just pretended it was "precision" bombing. In all, according to the US Strategic Bombing Survey completed after the war, "2,700,000 tons of bombs were dropped [on Germany], more than 1,440,000 bomber sorties" were flown. Yet the Survey reports that "only about 20% of the bombs aimed at precision targets fell within [the] target area."

That this was "precision bombing" was simply propaganda. US Air Corps bombing raids' accuracy was severely affected by German weather, which was almost never suitable for accurate bombing. An enormous number of US bomb missions were conducted by radar, which in that day was very inexact. There was no such thing as precision-guided bombs for these raids.

The destruction achieved was enormous. Almost 60 years later we can scarcely comprehend what the Germans and Japanese endured. In Germany, "3,600,000 dwelling units, approximately 20% of the total, were destroyed or heavily damaged. Survey estimates show some 300,000 civilians killed and 780,000 wounded. The number made homeless aggregates 7,500,000. The principal German cities have been largely reduced to hollow walls and piles of rubble."

Hamburg, Germany, 1943. Destruction of this magnitude across the whole of Germany was the deliberate war aim of both Britain and the United States.

Most of this destruction was what we now term, "collateral damage." With an average of 80 percent of the bombs falling outside the target area, it was inevitable that non-target areas would suffer heavy damage. The British intended from the beginning to inflict massive destruction on civilian populations and facilities. Partly, this desire was revenge based, since the German Luftwaffe had terror-bombed England. But it was mostly based on the mistaken notion that heavy bombing of civilian centers would reduce civilian morale to the point where they would not support the war any longer. (Why the British thought that German morale was more frail than their own is an unanswered question.)

The Americans rejected terror bombing, but not for long. As the war went on and on, and German and Japanese resistance failed to slacken, President Roosevelt decided that the German and Japanese peoples must realize after the war that not only had their armed forces been defeated: the entire nation, as a nation, had been beaten. He and Churchill were well aware that German militarism had survived World War I because its apologists had successfully propagated the myth that the Kaiser's army had not really been defeated, it had been "stabbed in the back" by disloyal factions at home.

Hence, wrote Roosevelt in a letter to Secretary of War Henry Stimson,

It is of utmost importance that every person in Germany should realize that this time Germany is a defeated nation. . . . The fact that they are a defeated nation, collectively and individually, must be so impressed upon them that they will hesitate to start any new war.

(Roosevelt's policy seems not far from Civil War Gen. William T. Sherman's observation of the Confederate States, "War, and war alone, can inspire our enemy with respect, and they will have their belly full of that very soon.") So, according to historian Richard B. Frank in his award-winning book, Downfall, the End of the Imperial Japanese Empire:

Viewed in this light, massive urban bombing complemented the aim of unconditional surrender. It was not just a handful of vile men who flaunted vile ideologies; whole populations imbibed these beliefs and acted as willing acolytes. Unconditional surrender and vast physical destruction would sear the price of aggression into the minds of the German and Japanese peoples. No soil would be left from which myths might later sprout that Germany and Japan had not really been defeated. These policies would assure that there would be no third world war with Germany, nor would Japan get a second opportunity.

One notes that Japan and Germany have been well behaved since 1945. But we also have to note that massive, destructive bombing was alone not the reason. It was simply impossible for either country's armed forces to claim that they had prevailed, or at least held their own, on the field of battle. German and Japanese orphans, widows and grieving parents were in almost every other household, and a lie that their armed forces had not really lost could not possibly have found legs to stand on.

Most importantly, US forces occupied both countries for several years after the war. In Germany, the division of the country into free and communist states imbued it and Europe with a forced stability that they might not otherwise had. This gave time for democratic institutions to take serious root, and today German democracy is as strong as any in the world. It helped that Germany had no ages-long tradition of centralized authority in monarchs; it had been unified into a single nation only a few decades before.

But in Japan, the situation was quite different. Militarism was deeply rooted; in fact, the entire culture of the country was oriented on producing warriors. The imperial throne had been intact for 2,400 years, although its present polity dated only to the 1860s. Women were politically and socially powerless. And in 1945, its army, navy and air forces virtually eliminated, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur arrived as the first successful invader ever to set foot on the soil of Japan. In Japan, MacArthur eliminated Japanese militarism first by emplacing a democratically-based constitution and second by liberating Japanese women from centuries of patriarchal oppression. He gave women the rights to vote and to serve in democratic assemblies and government offices, steps MacArthur saw as essential to ending Japanese military aggressiveness. America also bore the brunt of rebuilding Japan's economy and infrastructure.

The result: today Japan may fairly be characterized as a Western country. It bears all the hallmarks of Western culture ands tradition: a capitalist economic system, a representative parliament, a toothless monarchy, a vibrant university system and the rule of law.

 A comparison to America's present enemies is therefore apt. What made Japan's transition from a medieval culture to a modern one so successful so quickly was the fact that the Japanese people, from top to bottom, realized that the way they had been doing things, in every arena of their society, was no longer tenable and had to be abandoned. This realization was profound and wrenching, but it had been brought about through great violence and enormous cost to their nation.

I have noted before that there is no inherent contradiction between the religion of Islam and democratic institutions. On the contrary, I am convinced that state Islam, as practiced in the Arab countries today, serves mostly to amplify rather than create political and cultural oppression.

The real problem with Islam is not actually Islam; it is how Islam is practiced in Arab lands. Saudi Arabia is a paradigm. According to Prof. Fouad Ajami of The Johns Hopkins University, Islam has been "the handmaiden of the state" since the beginning of the modern Saudi realm, resulting from

... an alliance between a desert chieftan, Muhammed bin Saud, and a religious reformer named Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab. This partnership anchored the kingdom. The House of Saud defended the country and struck bargains with world powers, while the descendants of the Wahhab family dominated the judiciary and an educational system suffused with religion.

The real enemy of Western civilization today is not Islam. It is arabism: a system of political and social authoritarianism in Arab lands using Islam as a handmaiden, as Prof. Ajami put it. (Remember, most Muslims are not Arabs.)

Our task is therefore over the long term to bring home to these nations, at every level of their societies, the fact that Japan had to face: the times, they are a-changing. These nations must come to realize at every level that they cannot successfully continue with business as before. They must transition into democratically based institutions with free-market systems and individual freedoms. The question is, can these reforms be brought about non-violently or do they require profound suffering by their peoples?