Centrifugal State

The Times threatens to become a drinking game.  DRINK every time you see a story wondering what sort of aggressive, warlike actions Iran will take if we start bombing Iran.  The Lady's ability to churn these things out, selfsame, with only the most minor variations in the ornamentation ("'Is 40 missiles on Tel Aviv nice?' the official asked, summing up the Israeli calculus. 'No. But it’s better than a nuclear Iran'"), is something to behold, a high-in-dietary-fiber regularity that suggests a ceaseless diet of grassy bullshit. And yet you find it makes some people totally deranged, even people who love to hoist the jolly roger and proclaim the end of liberty in a second-rate food columnist's suggestion that the government regulate fatty foods and sugar. Well, I also regret that the government wants to stick its long nose into my salad bowl, but to read a do-gooder's crusade to confiscate my ranch dressing as an intolerable affront to the principle of individual autonomy while simultaneously declaring that it is morally imperative for the world's most aggressive expansionist state and its Club-Med airstrip to launch a devastating air war against a nation that has not attacked anyone because that nation's sixth most influential politician has made jingoistic agitprop a cornerstone of his permanent campaign . . . well, I would like to call it insane, but it is worse: it's stupid.

Crispin tries to mock some leftists-manqués because they "dearly love a theocracy as long as santorum isn't running it," but let me suggest that if you can't even convincingly make fun of your own straw men, then you have found a line of argument in need of immediate retirement. And yet the comparison is apt, because divining the ultimate malevolence of the Iranian regime from what Ahmedinejad says is very much like taking Candidate Rick's pronouncements as the direct expression of America's national soul. Ahmedinejad is not an absolute monarch; he isn't even a Speaker of the House. Treating him as a Machiavellian prince is odd.

It's all fine and well to proclaim that it's somehow intolerable--and let me ask you to consider the real meaning of that word and then ponder if it actually applies at all--for Iran to have The Bomb. And I actually happen to agree: it is no counterargument to say that America has the bomb; France has the bomb; Israel has the bomb; everyone has the bomb. Its existence itself is undesirable; therefore its existence anywhere is undesirable. But it in no way follows that those states in possession of this intolerable object possess the right, let alone the affirmative duty, to launch an aggressive war in order to prevent the commission of a sin that they themselves have committed tens, hundreds, and thousands of times over. I do not believe that Iran is developing a bomb; everything about their actions suggests a program of general nuclear research with just enough ambiguity to deter the type of attack we find our nation contemplating. Even if Iran were to possess a bomb, its only benefit would be precisely that same deterrence.

Iran is not some fictive evil empire; its rulers are not Mings the Merciless. It's a nation full of people trying to lead decent lives in spite of the corruption and madness of their state, just as America is a nation full of people trying to lead decent lives in spite of the corruption and madness of their state, just as all nations and all peoples are, in their own way, such. War is an unmitigated evil. I'm going to repeat myself here. Accepting (and I don't) that some wars, sometimes, are truly necessary doesn't dissolve the evil or absolve people or nations from their participation in them; they can never fully be atoned for or forgiven. And I am talking about, you know, fighting the Nazis! Invading some country for the hell of it, supporting that invasion because you find yourself incapable of mustering sufficient skepticism toward the reporting in the New York Times, for god's sake? Good lord, don't quit your day job.