Bill O’Reilly / Congressman Ron Paul

Would a President Ron Paul not ask Congress for a declaration of war against Iran should Iran attack the United States?

Of course President Ron Paul would do that.

So just what is it that Bill O’Reilly wants a president of the United States to do that President Ron Paul wouldn’t do?

President Ron Paul would not preemptively deploy the military forces of the United States of America – without a declaration of war by Congress, as required by the U.S. Constitution — to prevent Iran from developing an atomic fission bomb of a power that the United States first developed in 1945.

Currently Iran does not have a single atomic bomb in its arsenal. There is debatable intelligence that Iran is working to build such a bomb. If Iran were to succeed in building an atomic bomb this would be a weapon system far less powerful than any of the thousands and thousands of thermonuclear fusion bombs that the United States has attached to intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reduce Iran to radioactive rubble in under an hour.

Bill O’Reilly wants a president of the United States to prevent Iran from building its first atomic bomb because Bill O’Reilly fears that Iran would use such a bomb against Israel, which has in its arsenal several hundred atomic bombs that could reduce Iran to radioactive rubble in under an hour.

Ron Paul has said in the Republican presidential debates that because it has many of its own atomic bombs Israel can defend itself from any Iranian threat and not only does not need the United States to attack Iran but Ron Paul also has noted that the United States does not even have a treaty with Israel that requires it to come to the defense of Israel.

So why is Bill O’Reilly so hot on a president of the United States turning the Constitution of the United States into a kind of radioactive rubble by preemptively attacking Iran to prevent it from developing an atomic bomb that either the United States or Israel could respond to with the total obliteration of Iran should it attack either country?

“I don’t think we need another Neville Chamberlain with Iran,” writes Bill O’Reilly. “So, he wants to be friends with Iran, that’s swell.”

Neville Chamberlain

O’Reilly refers to the history prior to World War II, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain did not declare war on Nazi Germany when Hitler used military force to annex to Germany ethnically-German territory possessed by Czechoslovakia.

According to the BBC:

Like many in Britain who had lived through World War One, Chamberlain was determined to avert another war. His policy of appeasement towards Adolf Hitler culminated in the Munich Agreement in which Britain and France accepted that the Czech region of the Sudetenland should be ceded to Germany.

Chamberlain left Munich believing that by appeasing Hitler he had assured ‘peace for our time’. However, in March 1939 Hitler annexed the rest of the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia, with Slovakia becoming a puppet state of Germany. Five months later in September 1939 Hitler’s forces invaded Poland. Chamberlain responded with a British declaration of war on Germany.

In fact, Neville Chamberlain’s policy for the British Empire with respect to Germany was far closer to the policy Bill O’Reilly advocates with respect to Iran than the policy advocated by Ron Paul for the United States.

When Neville Chamberlain as Great Britain’s Prime Minister declared war on Germany in 1939 it was not because Germany had attacked Great Britain or any territory claimed by the British but because Britain had a defense treaty with Poland. Furthermore, Chamberlain’s declaration of war on Germany in 1939 was made at a time that Britain was militarily unprepared for a Second World War with Germany. Had the United States not entered the war on the side of Great Britain Hitler’s Germany almost certainly would have won.

Neither did Neville Chamberlain have any reason to be able to count on the United States entering the war. American popular sentiment was overwhelmingly opposed to entering another European war and it’s only by a quirk of history that the United States did join Great Britain as an ally against Hitler.

Had Hitler in December 1941 ignored his treaty with Japan the same way he ignored his 1939 Munich treaty with Great Britain — and not declared war on the United States in response to the U.S. declaration of war on Germany’s ally Japan — the United States would have been engaged in a Pacific theater war against Japan and unable to join Britain in a war against Germany. All U.S. warships in the Atlantic would have had to be immediately redeployed to the Pacific as of the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941. Rather than insulting Chamberlain for “appeasing” Hitler by not declaring war in 1938, history would have recorded that it was Chamberlain’s rash 1939 declaration of war against Germany in defense of Poland that led to the end of an English-controlled Great Britain.

Developing its own atomic bomb is not the only way Iran might become a nuclear power. Consider this scenario: following a preemptive U.S. strike on Iran, destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities with attendant loss of life, a nuclear-armed Pakistan might well be sympathetic enough to sell Iran an atomic bomb. In another scenario, someone in the post Kim Jong Il North Korea vying to consolidate power, and needing cash to do it, might decide the cash Iran is willing to pay for an atomic bomb is well worth the risk of making the sale to Iran — and with little consequence since if that bomb were used against the United States an overextended United States expanding war in the Middle East would be unlikely to spark a second-front war against North Korea.

And then what? Would a sneak attack by the United States on Iran result in the Fox News studios in midtown Manhattan be ground zero for a nuclear explosion with millions of casualties making the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 look like a picnic by comparison? Or would the United States luck out by merely having tens of thousands of deaths from an atomic–bomb attack on Disneyland in Anaheim, California or Disney World in Orlando, Florida?

That’s the thing about sneak attacks, especially when they leave the country being attacked intact enough to launch a counter-attack.

The Japanese found that one out the hard way.

Ron Paul’s caution reflects the caution of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Calling Ron Paul unacceptable as a President for promising to maintain a traditional – and Constitutionally-demanded – foreign policy is un-American, dangerous, and using Bill O’Reilly’s favorite phrase, the words of a Pinhead.

This article is Copyright © 2011 The J. Neil Schulman Living Trust. All rights reserved.