via The American Conservative » Netanyahu Calls the Shots.
We are seeing something awful unfolding before our very eyes – an essentially phony case for going to war being driven by a foreign country and its domestic lobby with the political class too terrified to say no and a complicit media beating the drum.
Philip
You’ve well argued the standard criticism. However, the practical reality is that the risk to Israel is simply too high that after an election that Obama may win, the next four year window is too tempting for Iran, and too threatening to israel. It’s a practical decision for them. There is nothing irrational about their actions.
That the intelligence agencies argue that no decision has been made is an argument that I have trouble comprehending as rational. That they have conducted a multi-decade program of enablement is evidence enough. That the elimination of israel is a stated objective, and the laurels that will christen Islam’s leading state is enough of an objective for any political leadership.
Iran has long desired to become the core state of post-ottoman islam, and has the population, military and economy to do it. A syrian, iraqi, irania, afghani, pakistani islamic block cum-civilization with two nuclear armed states given their internal fragility is strategically irrational for the USA to tolerate without total energy independence, and some evidence of a developing middle class that will engage in and have an interest in, the international system of specialization and trade.
Moral arguments are nonsense in the face of strategic threats.
3 responses to “The American Conservative: A Phony Case On Iran?”
Of course doubtless Curt Doolittle supported also the Iraq War which turned Iraq over to Iran.
This is what’s “irrational,” Curt: the belief that whoever owns the oil wouldn’t sell it to us at market prices IF we ceased meddling and overthrowing governments in the Middle East and subsidizing Israel’s dispossession of its natives.
Ken,
Thanks for the comment. And I understand that I don’t hold the majority opinion among libertarians. But this is one of those things where I’m not as comfortable as you are with the ascendency of a pre-modern, non-commercial society obtaining nuclear weapons as well as control over oil fields.
Of course I think democracy is ridiculous. And for that part of the world, more so. It is more suited for the tribal monarchies and our religious attachement to consumer democracy is certainly not helping us. That said, I’m not quite sure that simply allowing this process to progress unhindered is a good idea. We prevented them from going into the desert of world communism. I”m not sure that if we don’t spend another two generations at this that they won’t bypass this phase – largely driven by the despotism of their rulers. Rulers we would rather have had that marxists.
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