At age 95 Henry Kissinger won't be with us much longer; he has, however, consistently been one of the great foreign policy minds of our era. In 2006, Kissinger
wrote in
The Washington Post:
A modern, strong, peaceful Iran could become a pillar of stability and progress in the region. This cannot happen unless Iran's leaders decide whether they are representing a cause or a nation -- whether their basic motivation is crusading or international cooperation.
Looking back twelve years, Michael Goodwin of the
New York Post observes,
In the years since, Iran’s leaders have made their choice bloody obvious: Iran is a cause, and that cause is spreading a violent Shia revolution throughout the Mideast and across the world.
With nations, you can cut deals. With causes, as we discovered with Communism, there's no "dealing with." You have to exterminate causes, slowly via economic strangulation or rapidly with kinetic force.
