A deal with the devils

Come Friday, many of us will replay in our mind’s eye that day … the United States’ Second Day of Infamy. It was 14 years ago, a little more than half of a generation, and that day is still vivid, painful, sobbing with horror and grief. Especially for the 3,000 innocents and their families whose lives were scorched forever. 

Anger still simmers. Justice not served.

We stood together collectively when George W. Bush vowed to pursue justice. Yes, Osama bin Laden, the diabolical leader of al Qaeda, met his end in a rain of Navy Seals bullets. But the Muslim terrorists’ quest for “Death to America” — and that of Western Civilization — persists, a ravaging, deepening, spreading cancer and plague.

Admit it: The world is not better than it was the day before that horrible day. It is much worse. It is worse than it was during and after George Bush, Congress and a world coalition united on bad information to remove Saddam Hussein and his own reign of terror from Iraq and the Taliban from Afghanistan. 

Admit it. Even if you despise George Bush, even if you detest the Republican majority in Congress, admit it: The world is in far more chaos and upheaval today than it was after 9/11; after the invasion of Iraq in 2003; after the departure of Bush and ascendancy of Barack Obama in 2008. In 2015, the world is far worse off.

You know the list: ISIS, al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Assad, Putin, Ukraine, China; persecution of Christians and Muslims; more than 23 million displaced Syrians, Iraqis and Africans, raging floodwaters of humanity into Europe. And here at home, our own sporadic and deadly confrontations with Muslim terrorists.

In the words of the late Czech president, Vaclav Havel: “Live in the truth.” And the truth is: growing world chaos and evil. 

Yet, amid these plagues and rushing waves of evil, 36 Democrat U.S. senators and two Independent senators — a one-third minority of the U.S. Senate — are on the verge of fueling this plague. They are unequivocal in giving Barack Obama the authority to disregard the constitutional requirements for treaties and sign an agreement with the world’s leading sponsors of evil, the ayatollahs of Iran, giving them access to $50 billion to $100 billion to fund what they have been funding for 35 years: death, destruction, terror and barbarism. 

Obama touts his deal will postpone for 10 years the development of Iran’s nuclear bombs. But if he were to “live in the truth,” this president — the man who scorns his own country and his country’s friends and who yields  to U.S. enemies — would see he has negotiated a deal that will do little, if anything, to reverse or stop historical trendlines. There is no evidence whatsoever to think Iranian terrorists will stop what they have done for the past three and a half decades.

And in that 35-year period, they haven’t had or needed a nuclear bomb. But they have had the money. Bomb or no bomb, over the next 10 years, thanks to the lifting of sanctions, they will have the money to do what they have always done. 

“Live in the truth.”

Giving the Iranian mullahs all that they are getting is a profound surrender, if judged by the reaction of the American people. Polls show they oppose the Iran deal by a 2-to-1 margin. But equally as tragic and maddening is how Obama and the Senate minority are proceeding in the face of Americans’ opposition, how they disregard the people they represent and this nation’s 238-year-old governing values: “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”  As the Wall Street Journal so aptly stated: They will own whatever the ayatollahs do. They will own the consequences.

No one, of course, knows what those consequences will be. But on this anniversary of 9/11, if we “live in the truth,” we know that justice has yet to be rendered for all of the death and destruction the Iranian terrorists and their accomplices have exacted on the world. We know, too, the Iranian nuclear deal will not bring that justice. 

Justice will come only when everyday people and world leaders show the courage to “live in the truth.”

“Live in the truth.”

— Vaclav Havel