Facing Down Iran
Back when nuclear weapons were an elite club of five relatively sane world powers, your average Western progressive was convinced the planet was about to go ka-boom any minute. The mushroom cloud was one of the most familiar images in the culture, a recurring feature of novels and album covers and movie posters. There were bestselling dystopian picture books for children, in which the handful of survivors spent their last days walking in a nuclear winter wonderland. Now a state openly committed to the annihilation of a neighboring nation has nukes, and we shrug: Can't be helped. Just the way things are. One hears sophisticated arguments that perhaps the best thing is to let everyone get 'em, and then no one will use them. And if Iran's head of state happens to threaten to wipe Israel off the map, we should understand that this is a rhetorical stylistic device that's part of the Persian oral narrative tradition, and it would be a grossly Eurocentric misinterpretation to take it literally.
The fatalists have a point. We may well be headed for a world in which anybody with a few thousand bucks and the right unlisted Asian phone numbers in his Rolodex can get a nuke. But, even so, there are compelling reasons for preventing Iran in particular from going nuclear. Back in his student days at the U.S. embassy, young Mr. Ahmadinejad seized American sovereign territory, and the Americans did nothing. And I would wager that's still how he looks at the world. And, like Rafsanjani, he would regard, say, Muslim deaths in an obliterated Jerusalem as worthy collateral damage in promoting the greater good of a Jew-free Middle East. The Palestinians and their "right of return" have never been more than a weapon of convenience with which to chastise the West. To assume Tehran would never nuke Israel because a shift in wind direction would contaminate Ramallah is to be as ignorant of history as most Palestinians are: from Yasser Arafat's uncle, the pro-Nazi Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, to the insurgents in Iraq today, Islamists have never been shy about slaughtering Muslims in pursuit of their strategic goals.
Mark Steyn
No one, but no one does it better than Steyn.
There is zero chance that Bush or anyone in his Administration gets the point Steyn is making. There is also zero chance that Bush will handle this correctly. He will probably blunder into this with guns blazing, shouting about WMDs and regime change and exporting democracy. That will be the rough equivalent of striking a match to a gasoline-soaked pile of cordwood that stretches from Tehran to Caracas. And that doesn't even take into consideration the insanely dangerous export of ideas in which Tehran has been engaged these past 25 years.
If Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons, the probability of our grandchildren living under sharia approaches unity. Preventing this event is not a matter of using guns to deliver butter. There is no way that we can engage in a "kinder and gentler" war, complete with soldiers delivering "humanitarian" assistance. We have to make a choice between doing what is necessary, regardless of how ugly it gets, and doing nothing. The middle road leads to misery for everyone. If we choose the road of complacency, we might as well start weaving burkhas and printing Q'urans now.
As Steyn says:
Amen to that.
The fatalists have a point. We may well be headed for a world in which anybody with a few thousand bucks and the right unlisted Asian phone numbers in his Rolodex can get a nuke. But, even so, there are compelling reasons for preventing Iran in particular from going nuclear. Back in his student days at the U.S. embassy, young Mr. Ahmadinejad seized American sovereign territory, and the Americans did nothing. And I would wager that's still how he looks at the world. And, like Rafsanjani, he would regard, say, Muslim deaths in an obliterated Jerusalem as worthy collateral damage in promoting the greater good of a Jew-free Middle East. The Palestinians and their "right of return" have never been more than a weapon of convenience with which to chastise the West. To assume Tehran would never nuke Israel because a shift in wind direction would contaminate Ramallah is to be as ignorant of history as most Palestinians are: from Yasser Arafat's uncle, the pro-Nazi Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, to the insurgents in Iraq today, Islamists have never been shy about slaughtering Muslims in pursuit of their strategic goals.
Mark Steyn
No one, but no one does it better than Steyn.
There is zero chance that Bush or anyone in his Administration gets the point Steyn is making. There is also zero chance that Bush will handle this correctly. He will probably blunder into this with guns blazing, shouting about WMDs and regime change and exporting democracy. That will be the rough equivalent of striking a match to a gasoline-soaked pile of cordwood that stretches from Tehran to Caracas. And that doesn't even take into consideration the insanely dangerous export of ideas in which Tehran has been engaged these past 25 years.
If Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons, the probability of our grandchildren living under sharia approaches unity. Preventing this event is not a matter of using guns to deliver butter. There is no way that we can engage in a "kinder and gentler" war, complete with soldiers delivering "humanitarian" assistance. We have to make a choice between doing what is necessary, regardless of how ugly it gets, and doing nothing. The middle road leads to misery for everyone. If we choose the road of complacency, we might as well start weaving burkhas and printing Q'urans now.
As Steyn says:
At hinge moments of history, there are never good and bad options, only bad and much much worse. Our options today are significantly worse because we didn't take the bad one back then.
Amen to that.
posted by Anonymous | 11:17 AM
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