[O]bviously Israel’s nuclear program is not a direct security concern for the United States in the way Iran’s is.Man, they're gonna kill that poor woman!
-Yglesias
Iran's nuclear program isn't even an indirect "security concern" for the United States. It's a non-concern. At best, it doesn't exist, and is a public relations fantasy perpetuated by Western governments (in contravention of their own intelligence services, notably) in order to maintain a pretext for isolating, or attempting to isolate, the Iranian state, a holdover Cold War policy about as useful, practical, and sane as the continued American policy of isolating Cuba. (Nevermind "Iran is a state sponsor of terror" and so on. The genesis of our Iranian policy was the Islamic Revolution--the bastards had the temerity to kick out our selected kleptocrat!) At worst, it's an attempt to create a deterrent--hell, even the appearance of a deterrent--to keep the truly insane regional players, i.e. Israel and the United States, from doing something crazy.
And let's digress for a moment. The increasingly bellicose rhetoric coming from the Israeli government toward Iran is not the result of some fear that Iran is going to "wipe Israel off the map," as the endlessly repeated and thoroughly mistranslated phrase goes. (Really, do Iranian presidents speak in late 20th century American war-nerd idiom? Uh, no, emphatically not.) Israeli hysterics are the result of their perception that the window of opportunity is closing. An Iran in possession of a nuclear weapon does not threaten Isreal's existence. It does however threaten the Israelis' ability to, for instance, launch unilateral air strikes, should it ever come to that. Such talk should be familiar to Americans, whose own government defines as intolerable any other nation taking steps that abrogate America's capacity to do whatever the fuck it wants inside any other country in the world.
Anyway, returning to the good Mr. Yglesias, I have been unfair in excerpting an especially tendentious line out of a more reasonable post, but I think it serves to highlight the fact that even most domestic skeptics on the universal goodness of Israel and universal badness of Iran accept nonetheless that Iran is somehow uniquely dangerous (how it is dangerous is never, ever specified), unlike, say, our ad hoc allies India and Pakistan, whom we must simply try "to bring . . . over time into the NPT framework."
21 comments:
She probably kidnapped herself.
Why is Israel's nuclear program obviously not a direct security concern for the United States? The idea of nuclear war in the Middle East seems to me to be a pretty obvious direct security concern for just about everybody on the planet. If anybody starts throwing nukes around, especially in that area, we're all in really deep shit.
Everybody knows that if the Israeli regime were disrupted from outside or in, the Israelis would nuke the land itself and anyone else they please. Samson option and all that.
It almost happened once, and do we really think folks have learned since the 1970s?
Stay out of Esfahan, Lebowski.
Well... we do have troops in Iraq. And we do have a large naval presence in the Gulf. So while it might not be a direct security concern for the actual states of the United States, it's certainly a threat to our military that's busy making sure the spice flows our way.
her life is in your hands, dude.
"Why is Israel's nuclear program obviously not a direct security concern for the United States? The idea of nuclear war in the Middle East seems to me to be a pretty obvious direct security concern for just about everybody on the planet."
That's a fair question. Some other ideas that seem to be a pretty obvious direct security concern for just about everybody on the planet...
* Extra dimensional beings invading planet earth
* A Middle Earth Orc army bursting forth from a fissure in the ground commaned by Sauramon to enslave the human race
* Genetic mutations among some humans that give them extraordinary powers and who organize themselves into extra-legal teams of arbitrary enforcement for morality and legality
* Winged Monkeys controlled by an extraordinarly mean spirited cauldron brewing witch.
* Chickens getting wise en masse to what has been going on and begin taking human babies in retribution.
Just off the top of my head.
That's a new height for ironic detachment. "Nuclear war? Meh."
Perhaps Justin misread "Israel" as "Iran"? Hence his evocation of entities as fictional as "Iran's nuclear weapons program"?
Oops, that is right. I did misread Israel as Iran, I think the "nuclear program" thing threw me as I most often see that phrase coupled with Iran. Ha. I apologize for nothing. Screw you guys.
Okay. I can imagine Iran's nuclear ambitions (whatever those may be, and let's not find out, because then we can assume the worst) as being equated with unicorns and chickens-harvesting-human-children, but nuclear war full stop? I was shocked, sir, shocked. You usually don't hear that kind of bluster outside of a summit.
"I think we should look at this from the military point of view. I mean, supposing the Russkies stashes away some big bomb, see. When they come out in a hundred years they could take over... In fact, they might even try an immediate sneak attack so they could take over our mineshaft space... I think it would be extremely naive of us, Mr. President, to imagine that these new developments are going to cause any change in Soviet expansionist policy. I mean, we must be... increasingly on the alert to prevent them from taking over other mineshaft space, in order to breed more prodigiously than we do, thus, knocking us out in superior numbers when we emerge! Mr. President, we must not allow... a mine shaft gap!"
"to keep the truly insane regional players, i.e. Israel and the United States, from doing something crazy."
Yeah, because the suicide bombers and antisemites are really sane.
Jesus fucking Christ, dude, how can you call Hamas sane?
Versus our military, Nutella, who are being encouraged to proselytize fundamentalist dispensalitionalist christianity in fucking AFGHANISTAN by our lovely "chaplains."
Still, Hamas, too, is "insane". More the reason to stop mucking with them.
no people in the history of ever has ever, is or will behave admirably until the sun shrinks and dies and explodes and life itself on this planet ends.
I am done with the World. psah! you can all go kill yourselves according to yer principlez.
Well, let's see. Hamas was funded by Israel to begin with (to make trouble for the PLO), so if Hamas is insane, that makes Israel even more so.
How are "suicide bombers" any less sane than anyone else who goes on a mission that is likely to get them killed? The early Christian martyrs, say, or American soldiers who let themselves be sent to places like Iraq? Everything I've seen indicates that suicide bombers are usually people who've lost family members to Israeli or American violence, or who've been victims themselves of such violence at a less lethal level. They want revenge. Whatever else you can say about that on a moral level, it's not insane. If anything, they've seen too much reality.
("A land without a people for a people without a land", however, is at least deranged, since the land did of course have people in it.)
As for "antisemites," that too is iffy. First you ought to read Michael Neumann's article "What Is Anti-Semitism?" Then consider that Hamas, like other groups of Palestinians, have every reason to hate Israel, which is, we are often and tiresomely told, "the Jewish homeland." Wanting to destroy a vicious rogue state that for decades has killed thousands of your relatives and neighbors, driven thousands more into exile, and beaten and tortured thousands more is not insane. It may not be a realistic desire, but it's not at all crazy. Parroting Israeli/US talking points, however, is not a sign of playing with a full deck.
I think that the Palestinians must surely dream of the sanity that Israel exhibits, a sane governance in which they smuggle nuclear weapons into the country (after testing them with the cooperation of a friendly, racist power), cut deals with the people they publicly deride, and have their foreign ministers casually suggest that ethnic minorities should be deported for the safety of the state. Some sanity.
Jesus fucking Christ, dude, how can you call Hamas sane?
Nobody called Hamas sane. But when Hamas does something crazy, a couple of dozen people die. When the US does something crazy, a couple of hundred thousand people die. Sure, they're both crazy, but there's a couple of orders of magnitude difference.
Referring to the US and Israel as "truly insane" does not logically imply that everyone else is sane, because sanity is not a zero-sum game. This should be obvious.
sanity is a full-time job
Promiscuous: You are correct (as always). My trying to be "bipartisan" (or whatever you want to call it)is a mistake.
I still think the "You soldiers need to go hunt you some converts for Christ" story is amazing. :)
no people in the history of ever has ever, is or will behave admirably until the sun shrinks and dies and explodes and life itself on this planet ends.Mr. F, truer words...
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