If FDR Had Killed Hitler?
What if?
President Trump’s decision to take out Ayatollah Ali Khamenei produced global headlines. Like this one from TIME magazine: “Trump Calls Khamenei’s Death ‘Justice for the People of Iran.’”
The TIME story reports:
President Donald Trump announced Saturday that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had been killed in a U.S.-Israeli military strike, marking a dramatic escalation in hostilities in the Middle East.
In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote that Khamenei was “one of the most evil people in history,” and framed the killing as retribution for Americans and others harmed by Iran’s leadership.
“This is not only Justice for the people of Iran,” Trump wrote, “but for all Great Americans, and those people from many Countries throughout the World, that have been killed or mutilated by Khamenei and his gang of bloodthirsty THUGS.”
But of course, the perpetual Trump critics are now out there.
And also, but of course, there were responses to Trump’s actions like this one headlined in the U.K.’s The Guardian: “Protesters rally across US after strikes on Iran that killed Khamenei.”
The story went on to report:
As news circulated that Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, had been killed in US and Israeli airstrikes on Tehran, anti-war protesters gathered across the United States, including outside the White House and in New York’s Times Square to voice opposition to US military involvement in the region.
“It wasn’t sanctioned by Congress, so what Trump is doing is on his own terms, it’s making him a fascist and it’s making the country into a fascist state,” said Sue Johnson, a protester.
What the protestors are essentially saying is that Trump should have waited until America was attacked with an Iranian nuclear weapon. And then he was in the clear to have responded with an attack.
But, of course, this method of responding to an aggressive world player has already happened. And the obvious question occurs.
What would have happened if President Franklin Roosevelt had bombed Germany in the 1930s, taking out Germany’s Adolf Hitler before he could engage in his 1939 invasion of the rest of Europe? Or had they responded to the increasing global aggression of the Japanese by bombing Japan and, among other things, taken out General Hideki Tojo and the Japanese military leadership running Japan back in the day?
Whatever. The hard fact is that neither was done. FDR and the American leadership — in bipartisan fashion — sat back and let Hitler and Tojo roam freely through Europe and Asia. Terrorizing the population and allowing a massive military build-up that was, but of course, aimed ultimately at America and its allies.
And famously — make that infamously — that military assault on America came on the early morning of December 7, 1941, as Japanese war planes swooped down and, in a surprise, attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Killing almost 2500 Americans.
In a matter of four days after that, Dec. 11, 1941, Hitler declared war on the United States. World War II was on. It would not end in Europe until Hitler effectively ended it by committing suicide in his Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945, with a full-blown surrender by the remaining Nazis to America and its allies coming in May. The Japanese surrendered after the United States dropped not one but two nuclear bombs on Japan in August of 1945. With the Japanese surrendering officially in September.
The surrender question, of course, raises the obvious issue. President Trump has done exactly what FDR refused to do in the 1930s. Had FDR dropped a few bombs on Berlin in the 1930s and a few on Tokyo in the 1930s? Taking out both Hitler and Tojo before they could get seriously started in launching World War II, would there have even been a World War II if the dictators of Germany and Japan and their allies had been stopped in their tracks before they could ever get started?
Obviously, we will never know for sure. It remains one of history’s biggest “What If?” puzzles.
But it is a fact that at this moment, Iran’s mullahs have suffered a serious setback in their attempt to get a nuclear weapon. Which, had they been successful, surely would be followed by an Iranian nuclear attack on either Israel, America, or both. A setback that would never have occurred unless President Trump moved decisively.
One of the always sad realities of human existence is that in all too many generations, there are always, alas, evil people out there in the world whose ambition for murderous dictatorships obsesses them into action.
President Trump has now, for once, put a stop to what surely was being planned by a country whose leaders regularly chant “Death to America” — and mean it.
For which, Americans have much to be grateful for with President Trump.
But it is a reality, as Fox’s Sean Hannity has noted, that if Trump cured cancer, there would be those out in the streets to protest.
And as Hannity also says, those protestors can safely be said to have learned nothing from history.
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