Israel's Fierce, Righteous Destruction of Iran And Hamas - Lessons From Hiroshima, Dresden, And Sherman's March To The Sea

In a bold, brilliantly planned and executed espionage and military campaign Israel has launched (6/13/25) a defiant, aggressive preemptive strike on Iran, taking out its principle uranium enrichment facility, killing its top military leaders and nuclear scientists, and destroying much if not most of its missiles and assault aircraft. 

 

This strike was considered necessary because of Iran's public, longstanding demands for the annihilation of the State of Israel and the extermination of the Jews, its financial and military support for the regional terrorist organizations Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and its development of a first strike nuclear capability. 

At the same time it launched what should be its final military action against Hamas in Gaza - action that has been delayed in the hopes of a Western-brokered peace, but never shelved.  Decades of Palestinian military incursions, and the rebuilding of its military infrastructure after the initial Israeli assaults following the October 7th massacre of Israeli civilians, meant that a final, overwhelming, consequential invasion would have to occur; and now it has. 

These strikes and incursions will put to rest the dangerous, insidious, corrupt notion of the innocence of Hamas, the righteousness of their demands, and their demands for a state.  Hamas is a terrorist organization sponsored, aided, and abetted by a genocidal Iranian regime, both determined to eliminate Israel from the face of the earth.  

The fanciful, febrile, ignorant assumption that Israel is the enemy of Palestinian sovereignty and dignity - a brutal occupier, a neo-colonial force of oppression and violence - has had its day.  American campuses, the European Left, and the feckless, hopeless United Nations will have to face reality.  Their innocent heroes are murderers, genocidal killers as malicious as the Nazis. 

It is incredible that the West has simply stood by and listened to the hateful anti-Semitic screeds of Iranian ayatollahs, believing that good will, negotiation, and consideration would transform them and return Iran to the commonwealth of nations.  The nuclear treaty engineered by then President Barack Obama was a sign of America's idealistic myopia.  Iran got everything from the deal - a minor ten year delay in their nuclear program and a free rein to support its client states to attack Israel. 

Iran kept building its nuclear program, fooling a credulous America that it was adhering to treaty provisions, upped its support of Hamas and Hezbollah, and prepared for a long-awaited final solution for the State of Israel. 

It is no wonder that Israel has decided to go it alone, to act, and to once and for all neutralized the existential threat of Iran.  They now have a strongly committed American president in the White House in Donald Trump, and can expect his full and unequivocal support. 

Faced with this existential threat, Israel's intentions are no different than the Americans in World War II.  They would used whatever military means at their disposal to completely destroy Nazi Germany and Japan. The firebombing of Dresden and the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were examples of America's resolve and conviction that they were facing an implacable enemy. Civilian casualties were not collateral but deliberate.  Only if the people of Germany and Japan watched the complete destruction of their government and land would their countries ever again threaten others. 

General William Tecumseh Sherman, Union Civil War leader espoused the same theory almost a hundred years before. Only if the South was reduced to rubble would its military be destroyed but more importantly so would be the will of its people. 

Israel has made it clear - its attacks on Iran are intended both to neuter its offensive military capabilities, and to show the Iranian people the corruption of its leaders and lead to their overthrow. 

Sherman’s brutal marches from Tennessee to Atlanta, Atlanta to Savannah, and Savannah up through the Carolinas have been called ‘disproportionate’, but they were not.  There is no doubt that Sherman left a trail of ruin and desolation behind him; but he targeted the ‘plantationists’ – the wealthy landowners who led the South into war and who persisted in the fight at the expense of hundreds of thousands of young lives and the destruction of territory, culture, and history.

Sherman was doing exactly what the Israelis have done in Gaza.  He wanted to show the common people who was responsible for the misery they had suffered.  He was willing to open himself to criticism, opprobrium, and hatred by those Southern aristocrats whom he had chased; but he knew that the citizenry would know better.  Their leaders over whom they had little control were behind the foolish and ill-advised war.

Sherman, like the Russian general Kutuzov who by strategic retreat drew Napoleon deeper and deeper into the winter hinterland where his forces froze and starved to death, avoided direct confrontation with the enemy.  Sherman knew that the Union forces were superior and would eventually and ultimately prevail, but he understood that military conquest was only part of victory.  

His goal was to humiliate the South – to show its people that the heralded aristocratic Cavalier was nothing compared to the tough and gritty farm boys from the North; that its leaders were inept and incapable of stopping the Union advances.  Sherman wanted the South never to rise again.

Sherman understood – like the Israelis – that military victory was only partial; and that complete victory was the destruction of the will of the enemy and its civilian population.  Sherman said, “War is the remedy our enemies have chosen, so let’s give them what they want.”   Sherman understood that such complete capitulation could only be achieved if he “traversed holy ground” and captured cities which were symbols of the Confederacy and what people were led to believe was Southern supremacy; and if they were easily taken or destroyed, the will of the people would be further eroded.

Sherman was very clear about his march through the Carolinas.  He knew that the journey would be arduous and physically demanding; but he wanted to burn a trail through the very heart of the Confederacy – the place where the rebellion had started – to show the South once and for all that not only had their armies been beaten, but that their whole culture had been destroyed. 

Machiavelli said, “Men hate those who destroy patrimony more than their fathers”; and Sherman understood that destroying patrimony would be the total destruction of the enemy.  The South would recover from the physical devastation, Sherman knew, but would never recover from the absolute humiliation of its culture.

Sherman – again like the Israelis – was unapologetic about civilian casualties, for he knew that political regimes, no matter how autocratic, are a result of a supportive or at least complaisant population.  Complicit civilians whether directly or indirectly so, must suffer the consequence.

Sherman's marches through Georgia and South Carolina while successful in assuring that the South would never rise again  have now been shown to be inapplicable to the current situation in Gaza; and Israel has learned this lesson.  Intimidation within the context of a hysterical, maniacal enemy will never work.  Given Sherman's successes, it was worth trying; but Israel misjudged the restorative energies of Hamas and the ferocity of its Palestinian supporters.  

There can only be one and only one solution now - the ultimate, final, deliberate, and incontestable destruction of Hamas and Gaza itself and the complete and unequivocal removal of the Iranian threat. 

Israel fights with the same moral rectitude and purpose as their radical Islamic opponents.  They will brook absolutely no threat to the Jewish homeland, and civilian Palestinian and Iranian deaths are the price the enemy must pay for its aggression and permanent hostility.  The Israelis know that they are fighting an enemy and its patron which uses a territorial imperative – a Palestinian state – only as pretext for the annihilation of Israel, the ridding of Arab lands of the infidel, and in preparation for universal Islamic rule.