How can smart people be so dumb?
I think this is the dumbest piece I've seen on Iran yet. A close look at the history of the nuclear age shows that countries with nuclear weapons are neither more likely to make coercive threats nor more likely to succeed in blackmailing their adversaries. Nuclear powers such as the United States and the Soviet Union certainly made numerous threats after they acquired nuclear weapons. But so did Libya, Serbia, Turkey, Iraq, Venezuela, and dozens of other countries that did not possess the bomb. Nuclear weapons are not a prerequisite for engaging in military blackmail.No, they're not. But what country did the United States threaten to wipe out with its nuclear weapons? When did the Soviet Union become apocalyptic? When did it ever say that it was willing to allow half its population to die in order to wipe out the United States or any other country?
The United States and the Soviet Union kept each other at bay for more than thirty years through the concept of mutually assured destruction. Given that each country was led by rational actors, and that each country had a second-strike capability that was capable of annihilating the other, the two were able to deter each other from using nuclear weapons.
Who will deter Iran, which has threatened time and again to wipe out Israel, which is led by people who have an apocalyptic vision of a 12th imam descending from Heaven at the end of a nuclear war, and which has said that losing half its population is an acceptable price for wiping out Israel?
Many hardliners say Iran’s ideological fervor makes it unique. US officials voiced similar concerns about Mao’s China in the early 1960s. But nuclear weapons did not embolden China. Iran today is certainly different from China in the 1960s, but policymakers would do well to remember that apocalyptic fears about nuclear proliferation are not new.China was not suicidal and didn't have a culture that glorified suicide and death.
The only way to write a piece like these authors wrote is to bury your head in the sand and ignore the nature and words of the Iranian regime.
Labels: 12th Imam, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, mutually assured destruction
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:36 PM
1 Comments:
I'm old enough to remember when the Christian Science Monitor was a solid, non-ideological piece of journalism. Somewhere since then and now, it's been captured, like a lot of other formerly fine papers and magazines, by the forces of "progressive" "journalism". It's now just one more reliably liberal, head-in-sand publication.
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