Israel, Iran and Nukes

A reader writes:

Krauthammer is shortsighted, of course. The Iranians are after larger game than the Jewish state. They understand that the Israelis would have no hesitation in leveling Tehran, Qum, Shiraz, the Natanz Enrichment Facility, the Arak facility, and the other military installations in an atomic attack that would make what Paul Tibbets did to Hiroshima look like a walk in the park. For example, Tehran sits in a valley, and is probably the best atomic target since Hiroshima itself. The Iranians aren’t stupid. They know these things. Yet they want an atomic arsenal. Why?

Their target isn’t the Israelis; it’s the Europeans and the Arabs. They have judged that Europe is weak and craven and can be browbeaten into appeasing the demands of a nuclear Iran. Further, they believe that they can dominate the entire Middle East from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush as long as they have the atomic bomb.

Then, they will be treated not as a regional power, but as a Great Power, like one of the Permanent Five who won the Second World War. This grates on Persian pride, of course, how they were one of the objects of 20th Century History. They want to sit at the Top Table, not exterminate the Jews.

If they try to exterminate the Jews, they will be exterminated themselves. Israel and the United States would make Iran a radioactive wasteland in a period of under three hours. The Iranians know this and are rational actors.

Understand this, however. Rational actors are quite capable of doing wicked things in pursuit of what they perceive to be their national interest, not what we perceive to be their national interest. Hitler, after all, did invade Poland, then France and the Low Countries, then Russia, when the “smart thing” according to foreign observers was for him to remain at peace and build up Germany’s strength. Indeed, there were many Western Europe and the United States who insisted that Hitler was misunderstood.

Andrew, right now most people in the West who are critics of Bush are almost certainly underestimating Iran’s atomic buildup and its general threat to any sort of long term peace. They do this for various reasons, one of which is, of course, antipathy towards the Bush Administration that the President’s clumsiness has done much to bring about. But the Iran issue exposes a long term issue that the Iranians are exploiting as part of their game.

Nevertheless, I think you do yourself no favor in casting Bush as the Devil and Barack as Jesus when they are actually bit players in the split between America and Europe that began after the Cold War ended that the Iranians are doing their best to exploit. The notion that an Obama Administration will fundamentally change an Iranian drive for regional mastery and a bid to be considered a Great Power is laughable and, sadly, not limited to Obama partisans. The Iranian drive for Wilhelmine Greatness is there and they believe that their time is coming. It started long before Bush, and sadly, Krauthammer and Podhoretz have been allowed by the right to hijack American thinking on this subject to consider solely the survival of the State of Israel. There are larger matters to contend with here. The American policy of building up an Iraqi Army and leaving behind a tripwire force is the best guarantee against regional adventurism by a nuclear armed Iran. The notion that a region absent of American divisions will be a region at peace is both puerile and foolish (Saddam knew this, which is why he wanted the bomb in the first place).

Perhaps the Iranians will be amenable to a general settlement, but first they must know that there is force behind all of that good intention.

Petraeus vs Sadr

Joe Klein picked up on something interesting in the Iraq hearings last week – a U.S.-Maliki military attack on Sadr was in the works for June before Maliki jump-started and bungled it:

An intelligence source told me that the operation had been planned for June.

That would have been extremely foolish. The U.S. would have been inserting itself into a part of Iraq that we don’t know very well—the south—and taking sides against what is probably the most popular mass movement in Shi’ite Iraq. But the Petraeus battle plan apparently includes an anti-Sadrist move, which may mean a spurt of violence as widespread and vicious as the worst of the Sunni insurgency. Is that why the general wants a "pause" in the U.S. withdrawal this summer?

What could possibly be the rationale for this? Perhaps it is that Sadr’s Mahdi Army is the most potent force opposed to long-term U.S. bases in Iraq—and that a permanent presence has been the Bush Administration’s true goal in this war.

That is, it seems to me, the main war-aim still extant: maintaining Iraq as a base for a permanent US occupying presence in the Arab-Muslim world.

Now He’s A Godless Commie

Bill Kristol, trained in the same politics as Hillary Clinton, now argues that Obama’s remarks in a fundraiser q and a are the "real Obama" – and that his voluminous writing and speaking about the sincerity of his own religious faith, and of others, are presumably "masks." The reason for inferring Obama’s Marxism is the following point Obama artlessly made about the way in which economic distress can alter people’s tolerance for others:

"It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Is this indistinguishable from saying, along with Marx, that all religion is an obviously false consciousness caused by the alienation of the world-historical class struggle? No, it obviously isn’t. It’s saying that economic distress does often in human history express itself in more rigid forms of religion, more reactionary cultural identification, less tolerance of "the other." Since large swathes of human history have shown this to be true – and perfectly arguable without any materialist understanding of religion – Kristol is deliberately distorting to paint Obama as a cynical manipulator of religious faith for political ends, rather than as a genuine Christian. He’s calling him a lying, Godless communist.

You could argue, as Kristol and others hilariously will, that Lou Dobbs has no base,

that fundamentalist Christianism has no problem with "the other" in a globalized world, that dozens of state constitutional amendments banning civil marriages that had never and would never have taken place were just spirited forms of civic engagement, rather than scapegoating or politicking on resentment. You could also argue, as others legitimately will, that spasms of economic distress and social discontent are unconnected. Hey: Weimar had nothing to do with Hitler. But Kristol is doing something much more pernicious: he is saying that Obama is faking faith, that his very profession of faith is a "mask" that is slipping, and that Kristol is the person to determine whose faith is genuine and who is a fraud.

A non-Christian manipulator of Christianity is calling a Christian a liar about his own faith. That’s where they’ve gone to already. And it’s only the middle of April. What are they so scared of?

How Bush Approved Abu Ghraib

Well in advance, at the highest levels: almost every vile interrogation technique you saw in Abu Ghraib was approved by the president in the White House. I know that’s not as newsworthy as an off-the-cuff remark at a San Francisco fundraiser, but it does seem to me to be a huge story:

Imagine if we had known this in the week the scandal broke.