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We Should Want Israel to Win

(New York Times) Bret Stephens - The world had better hope that Israel wins its wars against Hamas, Hizbullah, the Houthis and their masters in Tehran. By "wins," I mean that Israel inflicts such costs on its enemies' capacity to wage war that they accept that their interests, irrespective of their desires, are no longer served by fighting. A peace deal between Jerusalem and Riyadh - among the grand geopolitical ambitions of the Biden administration - is not going to happen if the Jewish state emerges from the war looking like a loser. Worse, the Mideast coalition of moderates and modernizers that was coalescing in the wake of the 2020 Abraham Accords will fall apart in the wake of an Israeli loss, as nervous Arab states recalibrate their approach toward an ascendant Iran. The American people had better hope Israel wins. Since it came to power in 1979, Iran's Islamist regime has declared itself at war with two Satans: the little one, Israel; the big one, us. This has meant suffering for thousands of Americans: the hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran; the diplomats and Marines in Beirut; the troops around Baghdad and Basra, killed by munitions built in Iran and supplied to proxies in Iraq; the American citizens routinely taken as prisoners in Iran; the Navy SEALs who perished in January trying to stop Iran from supplying Houthis with weapons used against commercial shipping. The war Israelis are fighting now is fundamentally America's war, too: a war against a shared enemy; an enemy that makes common cause with our totalitarian adversaries in Moscow and Beijing; an enemy that has been attacking us for 45 years. Americans should consider ourselves fortunate that Israel is bearing the brunt of the fighting; the least we can do is root for it. Those who care about the future of freedom had better hope Israel wins. We are living in a world that increasingly resembles the 1930s, when cunning and aggressive dictatorships united against debilitated, inward-looking, risk-averse democracies. Today's dictatorships also know how to smell weakness. We would all be safer if, in the Middle East, they finally learned the taste of defeat.
2024-10-10 00:00:00
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