Why is Iran with a bomb inherently more scary than Pakistan with a bomb or N. Korea, China, and India, or even--with Bush in office--the U.S. with a bomb? After all the U.S. is the only country that has ever dropped one on people, and Bush seems ok with the idea of doing it again. We'll nuke the Iranians to prevent them from getting a nuke. Makes a certain kind of Strangelovian sense.
But hey, it's an option the ever-loving, America-loving Joe Klein says we have to keep on the table. That, in his mind, is the the differenece between being a Liberal and a Leftist. Leftists are wishy-washy pansies who hate America and who don't have the cojones to think nuclear.
Don't you see how it works? Don't you see how the so-called center is pulled off center by so-called centrists talking such nonsense?
To me the much scarier threat is the bomb arriving in a container ship in New York, Philadelphia, or wherever. The retaliatory consequences of a nation state delivering such an attack make it far less likely than a terrorist nuclear attack. We have demonized Iran to such an extent that we just assume that if they get the bomb they'll be inherently more dangerous than the other nation states who own one. I'm not saying that a nuclear Iran is a good thing, but why is it so much worse than other dangerous situations that we're facing. Why is it so so urgent to attack now? Are you losing sleep over Pakistan's nuclear threat? Is the situation there really any less crazy?
But people who love America will use nukes if it's in America's interests. But whose interests are we really talking about here? Is it the interests of the ordinary American on the street? Or is it the big money interests of the so-called military/industrial/ congressional/media complex? There's no money in defending our ports. The big money is in the nation-state game.
I know how nutty the Iranian leadership is right now, but still.
We can't really be so stupid as to allow ourselves to be conned into a war with a huge Middle Eastern country? Can we?
Update: "Inside the military family, I made no secret of my view that the zealots' rationale for war made no sense ... But I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat -- al-Qaeda." Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, former director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff on April 9.
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Saddam's regime really was one of the most brutal in the world (probably number two after North Korea). Iran's regime is unpleasant, but not notably more repressive than those prevailing in the region. Indeed, compared to close Arab allies of the United States like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar, etc., Iran is closer to being a democracy. Politically, it's about on the level of Morocco's pseudo-democracy, probably the most progressive of the bunch. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is given to saying crazy stuff, but unlike Saddam, the Iranians have never waged war on their neighbors and the government hasn't even "gassed its own people" or whatever other talking points you want to break out. Nor has Iran, to anyone's knowledge, ever been involved in any terrorist attacks on American civilians.
Instead, the big fear is supposed to be that Iran will launch an unprovoked nuclear first strike against Israel. The evidence for this is so weak that people feel the need to make stuff up. In The New Republic, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen tried to make this case and had to clearly misinterpret something a former (yes, former) president of Iran said after he left office to do it. In a later issue of the same magazine, Matthias Kuntzel just truncated the same quotation to make his interpretation seem more plausible. Jeffrey Bell once alleged in The Weekly Standard that Ahmadinejad "muses about the possibility of correcting that Nazi failure by dropping a nuclear bomb on Israel," which never happened. I called him up and asked him about that, and he explained he was using "poetic license" (my understanding had always been that journalists, not actually being poets or fiction writers of any sort, didn't have this license). Matt Yglesias,