Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Echos of 1936
I would sleep happier if there were no Iranian bomb but a swamp of hypocrisy separates me from overly protesting it. Iran is a proud country that sits between nuclear Pakistan and India to its east, a nuclear Russia to its north and a nuclear Israel to its west. Adjacent Afghanistan and Iraq are occupied at will by a nuclear America, which backed Saddam Hussein in his 1980 invasion of Iran. How can we say such a country has "no right" to nuclear defence?
Now that he mentions it, I think Iranian "pride" and concerns about hypocrisy should be our guiding beacons in setting policy towards Iran. Don't you? Never mind their pledge to wipe Isreal off the map, or the long history of state sponsored terrorism. I'm much more concerned about their feelings, and what they will think of the US after we've wounded their pride.
It's enough to give you chills.
Faster PLEASE
11 Comments:
By 
cakreiz, at
Wed Jan 18, 02:23:00 PM:
I've heard and read similar thoughts. For many, there's a complete inability to differentiate between, say, a nuclear Canada and a nuclear Iraq.
By Dorf, at
Wed Jan 18, 02:31:00 PM:
Umm, I'm not sure why, but that phrase 'nuclear Canada' scares the crap out of me. :-)
Seriously, though, I think before Iran gets to far along Isreal is going to have to launch an airstrike on Iran, much like that did to Iraq years ago.
By Gordon Smith, at
Wed Jan 18, 03:52:00 PM:
If the Iranian President wasn't spewing anti-semitic nonsense and were instead a Musharraf Muslim (strongman who seized power in a military coup and who has a marriage of convenience with the U.S. govt.), would we gripe about the weapons issue? With all those nuclear neighbors, it would be difficult to argue against proliferation.
Unless, of course, the U.S. took a global nonproliferation stance that included the current nuclear powers.
I'm no friend of the extremists in Iran, but I do recognize their sovereignty. How can they maintain their security? I would tell them to stop with the nuke development and reach out for allies. But without their neighbors making similar moves, would it be irresponsible of them not to develop nukes?
Just throwing out some conversation fodder...
By Cassandra, at
Wed Jan 18, 04:08:00 PM:
It's precisely the anti-Semitic nonsense that is the problem, Screwy.
Just as with Saddam, it was the fact that he couldn't seem to keep from invading his fricking neighbors and using WMDs on people.
Lots of people have nukes and WMDs.
And we turn a blind eye.
The operative question is always this: how likely are you to pull the trigger?
I don't give a flying you-know-what if you have those things if I don't think you'll use them. It isn't worth my time to go in and disarm your sorry a$$.
But if I think you're an unstable nut job.... if you have a history of not working and playing well with others... well now that puts you in an entirely different class of people now doesn't it?
Pakistan and India balance each other out. No one is currently threatening Iran: in fact, we just removed their biggest enemy in the region.
Chew on that one for a few moments.... now why are they in such a hurry to get nukes? A *very* interesting question.
Vacuums have a way of getting filled.
By TigerHawk, at
Wed Jan 18, 06:10:00 PM:
Cass,
Right as rain. Nuclear weapons don't kill people, reckless governments do. There is no moral equivalence between a stable regime with a mature political system and a plausible mechanism for succession and one that is not. Democracy is not essential, frankly -- the Soviet Union met the first criteria. It was emininently deterrable, and proved it every day for forty years. In the opinion of those of us who supported the removal of Saddam Hussein, his regime was reckless, and probably not deterrable. Which is Iran? The evidence points in two directions -- it has waged successful brinksmanship to date, which implies rationality (and therefore deterrability). However, its new president is clearly unhinged to the point of undermining Iran's security. He is needlessly making Iran's enemies nervous with his rhetoric, and that is weakening, rather than strengthening, Iran's security. To the casual observer, it seems that any Western leader might hope that Iran is deterrable, but that that hope is not supported by enough evidence to be relied upon.
Sirius_sir, by the way, asks a question that I wonder as well: perhaps it is time for the West to make it clear that we have no problem with Iran having a nuclear weapon in the abstract, but that Iran must prove that it is deterrable by investing itself in the international system. I have unformed thoughts on how it might do that, which I may spew out at some future date.
By 
, at
Wed Jan 18, 08:21:00 PM:
Screwy, doesn't get to ignore the sovereignty of other nations (namely Israel) on the one hand and demand that everyone else respect their rights on the other. As they say, one guy's right to swing his arms stop at another guy's nose. I know the proprietors of this blog have harshly criticized treating nations as people, but I think the analogy here is helpful. Put another way, Iran has violated Israel's sovereign rights by threatening to launch unprovoked attacks. Even if you take the restriction of nuclear weapons programs to be a violation of sovereignty, to which right would you give priority here, the right of a largely peaceful nation to ensure its safety against an unpredictable enemy, or the right of an extremist nation to build an arsenal capable of carrying out its radical objectives with frightening effectiveness? I know which one I’d choose…
By Gordon Smith, at
Wed Jan 18, 08:30:00 PM:
"now why are they in such a hurry to get nukes?"
Could it be because we invade nations without nukes and negotiate with those that do?
By , at
Wed Jan 18, 09:24:00 PM:
The linked article is just one of many astonishingly naive things I've read on the subject of Iran this week. In the effort to promote rational discussion of the issue, it seems that the phrase "it's the regime, not the weapons" cannot be said too often.
I suspect the issue to Sirius' excellent question - since I'm sure that in practice we'd have little trouble with a democratic, liberal Iran that wanted nukes - is the language of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran is a signatory to the NPT, and will be in violation of it if they aquire nuclear weapons. Since this forms the core of the "legal" case that would be advanced in the Security Council for either containing or punishing a nuclear Iran, I'm sure noone is willing to suggest to Iran (or to other NPT states that might be paying close attention) that there's any way those treaty obligations can be relaxed.
Given the focus on allies and diplomatic actions in confronting Iran, it would appear that the Bush Administration has learned a thing or two since the last time we faced this kind of a policy decision. We can only hope that the same will hold true for their political opponents as well.
By Cassandra, at
Wed Jan 18, 09:30:00 PM:
How many nations have we "invaded" Screwy?
That's a red herring and you know it.
The pretext for invasion is threat. Remove the threat and you remove the pretext. It's that simple. Iraq could have avoided being invaded quite simply. Hussein chose otherwise. Twice.
End of story. Nukes had NOTHING to do with it.
By , at
Wed Jan 18, 09:38:00 PM:
Screwy: "Could it be because we invade nations without nukes and negotiate with those that do?"
Well, there are 178 signatories to the NPT, and at last count, the Bush Administration has invaded 2 of them. I'd even go so far as to say that Canada, Japan, Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, Italy, Germany, Mexico, Singapore and South Africa have absolutely no fears of a US invasion despite their lack of a nuclear deterrent. Even strongly anti-American regimes such as Zimbabwe, Cuba, and Venezuela don't seem to face any prospect of invasion.
So I wonder if we could come up with a narrower classification than "nations without nukes" to describe the type of country that might find itself at risk of US military action? Do those countries seem to have anything in common? Are there any attributes that the not-at-risk nations share that the at-risk ones do not?
If only we could answer questions like these, I'm sure we'd be well on our way to a meaningful foreign policy discourse both on this blog and in the country as a whole!
By Jeff Kouba, at
Wed Jan 18, 10:08:00 PM:
There certainly is a large segment of the population that yearns to be free of the mullahs.
But, there are still plenty of Iranians infected with the hate that seems to walk hand in hand with radical Islam.
MEMRI has this exchange today, another example of Iranian Holocaust denial:
Dr. Majid Goudarzi: "The [Zionists] claimed that they had to be the rulers of the world. That's why they prepared the Protocols [of the Elders of Zion] in Russia, and implemented each and every clause. They wrote instructions how to gain control of the global media, and how to control the world's natural resources. Part of this control..."
Interviewer: "They became the board of directors of the world."
Dr. Majid Goudarzi: "Yes."
[...]
"They want to write history as they wish, and in light of their unparalleled power in the media - if you like, we could talk about that on another show - they have managed to impose the [Holocaust] issue, and to depict themselves as oppressed."
[...]
"Some intellectuals have said that this should be re-examined. Interestingly, the founder of this revisionist movement was a Jew. Paul Rassinier, who was French, was a member of the French resistance in World War II. He was arrested by the Gestapo, and was held in the Nazi camps until the end of World War II. He said that the myth of the gas chambers... These are his words, I haven't told you what I think yet... He said there is no truth to this. He reduced the number of those killed to between 900,000 and 1.5 million."
