Regime change in Iran is needed now more than ever 

Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan taught the Greatest Generation in the 1930s and 1940s the painful lesson that pure evil does exist on a grand scale in the contemporary world. It took the global horrors and sacrifices of the Second World War to end the ravages of those depraved regimes. Immediately after the war, the Soviet Union and its proxies and allies took up where the defeated Axis powers had left off in the pursuit of world domination under a totalitarian international order.

Despite the emergence of the new global threat, the advent of nuclear weapons made a third world war — a civilizational conflict — increasingly immoral and unthinkable among Western societies. The Soviet Union, by contrast, frequently brandished its atomic weapons to deter Western intervention as it spread communist power and ideology to vulnerable societies in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. 

Belatedly aroused to the dangers of global communist expansion in the postwar period, the Truman administration responded in January 1950 by dispatching Secretary of State Dean Acheson to deliver remarks on U.S. national security interests in Asia. Acheson traced a security perimeter across the region; unfortunately, it did not include either Taiwan or South Korea as critical U.S. security interests.  

Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung conferred on whether Taiwan or South Korea should be the next target of communist expansion. Kim won the argument — or rather, preempted it — in June 1950, by unleashing a massive invasion of South Korea across the 38th Parallel. The invading Northern forces were soon joined by hundreds of thousands of Chinese Communist ground troops, supported by Soviet arms and economic assistance.  

Truman, now fully awakened to the immediate danger, responded by mobilizing a United Nations “police action”, so named to avoid any suggestion that the world was returning to the global conflict that had engulfed it just five years earlier. That meant that “unconditional surrender” and “regime change” were excluded from the vocabulary and strategic planning options of the........

© The Hill