Israel and Iran. Self Defense and Aggression.

I was afraid of this. Corruption, jingoism, opportunism, profiteering, and just plain wrongheaded-stupidity have led us into so many unjustifiable armed conflicts, that when a credible threat arises, fatigue and ideology overwhelm our instinct to defend ourselves.

History is instructive on this count. There was no leadership in the Warsaw ghetto. There was no insurgency. That is why my grandmother was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust. She came alone as a teenager to the United States in 1917. She took my mother to Poland in 1937 so her family might meet their American granddaughter. It was the last time they saw any of them alive. Shortly thereafter, Hitler rounded up the Jews and fenced them into the Warsaw ghetto. The residents of the ghetto underestimated the evil, and overestimated the outside world's understanding of their plight and its willingness to help. After millennia of persectution, Jews decided to keep their heads down, counting on aid that never arrived. It guides everything they have done since. Like so many American Jews, I hate that after all the years of being occupied, Jews in Israel have become the occupiers. I trusted Rabin. He fought for peace and, like Sadat in Egypt, was assassinated by his own right wing. I don't trust Netenyahu. He's built his coalition by courting Rabin's murderers. Like all fundamentalists, they are rigid in thinking and stuck in a world the rest of humanity left centuries ago.

War is almost never the answer. But, when slavery couldn't be stopped by political means, we had a devastating--but necessary--civil war. Hitler had to be stopped, but fatigue, fear from WWI, and general isolationism, kept us out of WWII until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor dragged us in. Had we geared up earlier, as Churchill admonished, and gotten on the Continent even a year sooner, we would have saved millions from the death camps.

Most wars are fought for territory, treasure or ideology. Only occasionally through man's history have we taken up arms to defend against ruthless aggression or unthinkable inhumanity. On these occasions, we have served the best interests of mankind.

I don't trust anybody who's overwhelmed by their own dogma. If there is a unifying precept among liberals, it is open mindedness. I hope we can keep an open mind and leave all options on the table with respect to Iran. A stupid war in Iraq freed Iran's hand, just as we tried to tell the last administration it would. Now we're weary, Israel is faced with the threat of annihilation, and a theocracy that properly belongs in the seventh century is on the verge of possessing a weapon of mass destructive power. Let us hope that technologies like the stuxnet computer virus and political strategies that support regime change are enough to slow Iran. But let's not be dogmatically bound to any single course of action.

This is NOT an entreaty to war, it is a plea for open mindedness.