Bret Stephens dreams of bombs

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Why Live With the Threat of Iran When You Could Have War With Iran Instead?

"IRAN," COLUMNIST BRET Stephens wrote in the New York Times last week, "presents an utterly intolerable threat not only to Israel but also to the United States and whatever remains of the liberal international order we’re supposed to lead."

A year ago, as soon as news coverage began to grasp the scale of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the idea took hold that October 7 was Israel's 9/11. Every cliche is an invitation to stop thinking, but even so, it's hard to grasp the stupefying effect that particular insta-cliche had on the Israel—United States alliance. What was America's 9/11, originally? It was a sneak attack by a weaker power, inflicting savage horrors on helpless civilians. 

What else was 9/11? A shocking failure of intelligence and security, an event that should easily have been cut short before it could begin. 

And what else? An excuse for lashing out at whatever targets the military could hit, with no regard for whether or not it would punish the perpetrators. A brief moment of accumulation of global sympathy and moral credit as the victim of the attacks, to be squandered on unchecked violence and war crimes. A pretext for a second-front war of choice meant to settle old grudges, dressed up in the language of writing history and reshaping the geopolitical landscape. Slaughter, slaughter, and more slaughter for two decades, a cascade of strategic failure measured overwhelmingly in other people's lives. 

To call something another 9/11, then, would be to identify it as not just a single atrocity but as a moment of open-ended peril, when the affected country needs to reckon not only with the evil and brutality inflicted on it, but with its own capacity for evil and brutality. It would be a warning against repeating a particular set of blunders and atrocities. 

Or, if that's too daunting a responsibility, apparently everyone can just take it as license to do it all over again. And so, a year after Israel's 9/11, Bret Stephens wanted to bomb Iran.