Alan Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Dershowitz is one of the best known criminal defense attorneys in the United States. At the age of 28, he became the youngest full professor of law at Harvard. He is seldom on the Right side of issues of importance (especially in the criminal justice system), but, when Israel is involved in any way, he becomes almost a Conservative. In an article he wrote for the Wall Street Journal today, he argues that Obama's legacy will NOT be his revamping of our health care system (which, according to Dershowitz, is not a bad thing - see what I mean?), but whether Iran becomes a nuclear power on his watch - something that appears to be inevitable.
Here are some excerpts from the Dershowitz article (emphasis added):
In these respects, allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons is somewhat analogous to the decision by the victors of World War I to allow Nazi Germany to rearm during the 1930s. Even the Nazis were surprised at this complacency. Joseph Goebbels expected the French and British to prevent the Nazis from rebuilding Germany's war machine.
In 1940, Goebbels told a group of German journalists that if he had been the French premier when Hitler came to power he would have said, "The new Reich Chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!"
But, Goebbels continued, "they didn't do it. They left us alone and let us slip through the risky zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs. And when we were done, and well armed, better than they, then they started the war!"
So too will Iran's construction of nuclear weapons, if it manages to do so in the next few years, become President Barack Obama's enduring legacy. Regardless of his passage of health-care reform and regardless of whether he restores jobs and helps the economy recover, Mr. Obama will be remembered for allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. History will not treat kindly any leader who allows so much power to be accumulated by the world's first suicide nation—a nation whose leaders have not only expressed but, during the Iran-Iraq war, demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice millions of their own people to an apocalyptic mission of destruction.
The Wall Street Journal now requires a subscription to read the whole article online, but the above excerpts provide more than an adequate glimpse of the piece.
