Iran Hysterics, and those trying to reign it in
You just can't go a day without somebody saying something about Iran, for good or ill. Today Maureen Dowd had a little column playing off the hype of the lead-up to the Iraq War to show up the same kind of lead-up for Iran.
Newsbusters decided that she was being dishonest somehow and decided to try and set her straight:
Whereas Saddam's possession of WMDs was a matter of reasonable but ultimately erroneous surmise, no one doubts that Iran is assiduously going about developing nuclear capability.
Reasonable my ass, and they apparently hope their readers are too stupid to realize that there’s a difference between a nuclear program and nuclear weapons program. The weapons program the IAEA chief El Baradei once again came out to say there isn’t any evidence of.
Of course, we don’t want to listen to a guy like Baradei. After all, he’s been right before.
Besides, Bush has said he can't allow the Iranians the knowledge of how to build a nuclear weapon; actually having the weapon isn't quite so important anymore. And look! There are Iranians going to school, where knowledge comes from!
THE Foreign Office has cleared dozens of Iranians to enter British universities to study advanced nuclear physics and other subjects with the potential to be applied to weapons of mass destruction.
In the past nine months about 60 Iranians have been admitted to study postgraduate courses deemed “proliferation-sensitive” by the security services. The disciplines range from nuclear physics to some areas of electrical and chemical engineering and microbiology.
Additionally, figures obtained by David Willetts, the shadow secretary for innovation, universities and skills, show that in 2005-06, 30 Iranians were doing postgraduate degrees in subjects covering nuclear physics and nuclear engineering.
Bloody Brits! Its probably why they're all leaving Iraq now. They're selling the US out to mullahs in Teheran and don't want their guys caught in the crossfire.
Earlier this year, a leading security think-tank estimated Tehran was two to three years away from acquiring a weapon.
Yeah, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I can come up with quotes from think tanks and US and Israeli officials about Iran being two to three years away from a nuclear weapon since, let’s see, 1984, this might mean something other than the fact that some people have a vested interest in hyping Iran's intentions and capabilities.
That corollary to the Satayana rule I was talking about? It's the notion that each presidential election is an attempt to cure the ills of the preceding presidency. In the post-Watergate world of 1976, reliance on that rule brought us President Jimmy Carter. Let's see -- how did his Iran policy turn out?
Was it different from Nixon’s before the Revolution?
Admittedly, launching an attack with poor intelligence probably wasn’t the best idea, and I wish at least one of your Presidents would learn that lesson, but do you think it was better than Reagan’s idea to support and supply Saddam Hussein? How’d that work out for you?
Oh, and you must be delighted to find out that the administration has actually been calling Carter for advice recently.
Note: The Dowd crowd urges diplomacy with Iran. But as Ed Morrisey has noted at Captain's Quarters, an Iranian dissident discourages negotiations on the grounds that "it establishes [the Iranian regime] even more as legitimate and it damages the morale of those who work to rid Iran of oppression."
Hmm, does the name Chalabi sound familiar to anyone?
Of course, we can't try any of that diplomacy stuff with the Iranians. It would never work with those crazy bastards! All we can do is start bombing them and hope for the best.
Okay, sure, we talked to guys like Stalin and Mao, but they were far more reasonable than Ahmadinejad.
When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn't have a nuclear button yet and won't for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)
In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can't be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a "residual rationality," he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad, who has done what that compares? One of the bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers.
As the author of the last, Fareed Zakaria, finished off that article, "This would all be funny if it weren't so dangerous."
