A day at ‘the Beth’ and Iran déjà vu

The last time I was under the red tile roofs of Newark Beth Israel Hospital was in the fall of 1980.

Folks familiar with “the Beth,” as it is known, will recall that it has been one of the key community institutions of the Weequahic section of town, home to Philip Roth and so many other Newark Jews, including my cousins. We frequently visited the neighborhood.

Although both Roth and my cousins had already moved away, the Beth was still something to be proud of. It had been built by the community, brick by brick, over the course of the early- to mid-20th century, after other healthcare institutions discriminated against Jewish doctors and patients. By 1980, it was especially known for its pioneering work in open heart surgery.

That same year, my dad, who was 63, had to go under the knife for triple arterial bypass. I rushed from my new job in Manhattan and made a bus connection to meet Mom, who picked me up in the family Buick to take me the rest of the way to the Beth.

I noticed a small yellow ribbon Mom had taped to the dashboard by way of a prayer for her husband of almost four decades. That fall, the yellow ribbon was also a popular national symbol of support for the 66 Americans held hostage in our embassy in Tehran by the Islamic Republic militants who chanted “Death to America.”

Like everyone else, I wished very much for the peaceful return of our countrymen, but I was also aware of some of the complexities of the history. A few years before, I had met some Iranian students here who told me about the Shah’s torture chambers in the notorious Evin prison. I had heard of the Shah’s dreaded secret police, the SAVAK, allegedly supported by our CIA after the 1953 U.S.- and British-sponsored coup, which had overthrown Iran’s democratic government to grab control of that country’s oil wealth. A revolution overthrowing the Shah had to be a good thing for the people of this large historic country, right?

We Americans were all babes in the woods then about what to expect from the newly minted rule of Iran’s Shiite clerics who had taken over. (My Iranian student acquaintances, as it turned out, were also naïve. The few who tried to go back to Iran found that there was no real place for the secular values they had become accustomed to in the United States, instead facing more torture and finding no democracy.)

In the 46 years since Iran’s Islamic revolution, our nation has continued a very spotty record with regard to that country. As is well known, our embassy hostages were ultimately returned alive after many months of up-and-down secret negotiations by then-President Jimmy Carter, but not before Carter had lost the 1980 elections to Ronald Reagan, in part over his alleged weakness in that crisis. Reagan’s administration, for its part, went on to do even worse than Carter’s. Behind the back of Congress and the American people, it secretly traded U.S. arms to the Ayatollah’s regime in exchange for getting other weapons into the hands of the contra death squads of Nicaragua, the arming of which had been banned by our law. That was one of the most shameful antidemocratic episodes in our country’s history.

By coincidence, I recently found myself hospitalized for my own open-heart surgery. It was the same day that Israeli war planes began their assault on the regime’s nuclear and military structure. I was under general anesthetic at the state-of-the-art Cooperman Barnabas Hospital Center in Livingston, now a major affiliate of Newark Beth Israel, which had pioneered these procedures.

I’m pleased to say that after receiving excellent medical care, my recovery, like my dad’s all those years ago, is going very well. Thankfully, U.S. medical care has continued to make many advances.

It’s beyond the scope of this piece to speculate about the result of President Trump’s decision to follow the Israelis into attacking Iran with the bunker-buster assaults on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear sites. Perhaps Iran’s threatening bomb-building capacity was actually completely obliterated, as Mr. Trump claimed. Or perhaps enough highly enriched nuclear material and advanced centrifuges survived to allow Iranian hard-liners, who still are in power, to create one or more dirty bombs quickly, even within a few months, as no less an expert than Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has suggested.

Will President Trump follow up on the threat he made to pursue regime change by military force? As we finally learned in Iraq, several years after the overthrow of the late, unlamented dictator Saddam Hussein, this is no easy thing. Iran is a much larger country than Iraq, with key allies in Russia and China, and while it is weakened, its repressive government is still intact. If things go badly, will the Jews get the blame?

If Mr. Trump really wants the Nobel peace prize he claims he deserves, he will have to follow a course much like President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry did a decade ago, at the head of an unprecedented coalition of countries. Obama’s Iran Nuclear Deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as it was formally titled, arranged the tightest international monitoring over the Iranians in history; it limited all enrichment to the 3.5 percent consistent with strictly peaceful uses of radioactive uranium. But Donald Trump, almost alone among world leaders, still insists that his blowing up the Obama agreement in 2018 was the right thing to do, even while that blunder was the single biggest step triggering the large-scale Iranian enrichment that created the current crisis.

It’s both frightening and shocking to me that President Trump has so presented the military confrontation with Iran as a partisan MAGA effort, and has attempted to freeze Congress — which under our Constitution is given the power over war and peace — largely out of the process of monitoring the intelligence and the planning.

Our country has come a long way since 1980, especially in medical science. The risk I underwent in my recent heart procedure was relatively low.

It scares me that in many ways the Donald Trump MAGA administration is trying to turn the clock back in our country many decades.

My dad did really well at the Beth in 1980. But according to Mom, one of the other two patients who underwent open heart surgery that day didn’t make it.

Our path forward in the dangerous Iran situation is much too important to trust to those poor 1980s odds.

Mark Lurinsky of Montclair recently retired from a career in public accounting. He is an activist in local politics and a member of the steering committee of J Street’s New Jersey chapter.

opinion

comments