Lessons About Iran from Hitler
Hitler, by his own account, acted out of fear: fear that the German economy would collapse under the burden of his military expansion, and fear that he “could be replaced at any moment.” I quoted this speech in a 2005 essay, adding, “Within a generation, both Iran’s oil and demographic resources will be exhausted. Impending demographic collapse, I have argued in the past, impels Iran towards an imperial design (Demographics and Iran’s imperial design, September 13). Iran’s elderly dependent population will soar to nearly 30% from just 7% today by mid-century, the consequence of the country’s collapsing birth rate. The demographic disaster will hit just as oil exports dry up during the 2020s. To break out of the trap, Iran must make an all-or-nothing bet during the present generation.”
Just like Hitler, Iran has nothing to lose. Hitler was convinced that the Aryan race was doomed to corruption and extinction unless he restored its preeminence by force; Ahmadinejad knows with certainty that Persian will become an extinct language in a few generations given the present fertility trend. The UN’s “medium variant” forecast for Iran puts the present fertility rate at just 1.59 (which means about 1.35 for Persian-speakers given the higher fertility of Iran’s minorities), and the “low variant” at just 1.34. That’s as low as the baby-bust European countries. Iran is dying a slow death. In my book (How Civilizations Die) I report the horror and panic among Iran’s rulers over its prospective extinction.
What Hitler imagined in his nightmares, Ahmadinejad fears in the full light of day. Hitler told his commanders in August 1939 that they had nothing to lose; Ahmadinejad knows with certainty that he has nothing to lose.
In 2005, surgical strikes to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity would have been comparatively easy. After seven years of deep digging, the logistical requirements are quite different. Senior planners at the Pentagon say privately that it would be very difficult to destroy centrifuges in bunkers, and that aerial attacks would concentrate on killing the political and military leadership as well as destroying command and control. Perhaps there is a covert capability that could put suitcase bombs into the tunnels leading to the bunkers; I know nothing about such things. It seems likely, however, that stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons would be a messy and bloody business rather than a well-defined surgical operation. It is too bad the West did not have the good sense to correct the problem in 2005. However much it costs in Iranian blood and well-being, it’s still worth it.
Note: I have had to trash many posts in response to this story. Please be advised that I will approve any posts, no matter how hostile, provided that they have some substantive argument, and do not contain personal insults or obscenities.
Also Read: Israel Is Not Going to Attack Iran and Neither Will the U.S.
“However much it costs in Iranian blood and well-being, it’s still worth it.”
It isn’t Iranian blood that’s concerning. Israel’s high population density means modern conventional weapons could ruin it, in the same way North Korea could demolish Seoul without a single nuke, dragging them down with them. Artillery, fuel air bombs, rockets, etc.
Nuclear weapons for Iran would look like nuclear weapons for North Korea, a nationalistic display of irrelevant strategic importance. War with either country would hurt the West more than anything else, especially in light of potential domino effects. Let them sink.
Ron Paul 2012!
“Nuclear weapons for Iran would look like nuclear weapons for North Korea”
N. Korea, unlike Iran, doesn’t have an aggressive policy of spreading their influence and control into adjacent countries with oil and beyond.
But, I guess the “constitutionalist” RoPa will just take a leaf from Jefferson’s book and commission a fleet of six wooden frigates to protect us. Perhaps President Paul will appoint Alex Jones (http://www.redstate.com/leon_h_wolf/2011/12/20/yes-virginia-ron-paul-is-a-911-truther-and-a-coddler-of-racists/)as SecDef to deal with these matters.
Spill a whole lot of blood…. Iranians are sandni**ers anyway…. They are not entitled to life. If the USG has a beef with the Iranian government ….. let the blood flow , brains squished out and fried , children mangled , teenagers crushed under falling girders …. hose those camel-jockeys with flying lead…. burn baby burn Ron Paul in 2012 noPOTUS in 2016 99guspuppet
I see that President Paul’s future nominee for Secretary of State is out and about …
I really dont understand you people. Does that hatred come from your mother loving you too much or not enough? or maybe you watch bill o’reilly and you believe everything that comes out his mouth? or maybe your insecure about you’re sexuality? please let me know what it is because I just wonder how someone can spend what little time you have on this planet wanting to see “children mangled”. I wish you all the best in the future. Peace be with you.
If an Iranian-built nuclear weapon goes off in a Western city, I’d prefer that it happen in your town rather than mine. In fact, I’d prefer that the Iranians not have nuclear weapons in the first place. I don’t especially want to see children mangled, but I have a most particular aversion to seeing my children mangled.
“Israel’s high population density means modern conventional weapons could ruin it”
Not with conventional weapons. For example in the bombing of Dresden something like 2.7 million kg of bombs were dropped, half of them incidiary and it was the firestorm that created most of the damage.
Iran’s missiles can carry something like a 700kg HE warhead so roughly 3,800 missiles to drop that much ordinance on one Israeli city and those are explosive, not incidiary. It is estimated that Iran has ‘hundreds’ of missiles capable of hitting Israel.
The vast majority of the missiles aimed at Israel from Hezbolla, Hamas et al. are much smaller and not very precise, of the Katyusha or Grad type. You could not destroy a city with those.
Israel’s military assets are located well away from population centers so there is really no way to destroy Israel’s defense with missiles alone.
Sure they are a threat and can do damage however the important thing is that nobody has long range bombers or any real threat of breaking through Israel defenses with aircraft and aside from Egypt or Syria who are otherwise occupied, there are no ground forces capable of mounting a serious offense. Iran has no method to deliver an air fuel bomb even if they had one.
Attacking Israel with conventional missiles is like poking a tiger with a stick. It happens from Gaza but the tiger is being very patient right now.
Nuclear weapons are something else. You only need a few to get through to trigger the nost horrible catastrophe the world has yet seen given the Israeli response. Iran is bankrupting its country and has isolated itself politically in order to aquire those. If they were not a threat why go through all that trouble?
Paul says such dumb things. ‘Israel has 300 nukes so nobody is going to mess with them.’ They have had those since the 60′s and everybody messes with them. Hatred trumps reason every time. Hatred with nuclear weapons is not acceptable and Israel has every right to do something about it.
The Yom Kippur war was only started to get back the territory lost in the 6-day war. It wasn’t a war to wipe out Israel.
Them having nukes is a deterrent.
Obviously many people feel that muslims are completely insane and suicidal, and so Iran would not mind wiping Israel off the map even if they were obliterated in the process. But many of us don’t believe that.
Like it or not, you can’t really start a war with a whole religion, especially since we are broke and our military is not nearly as effective as the money we pour into it.
EVERY (Muslim) war against Israel has had the goal of “Wiping out the Jews”, and to think otherwise is delusional.
Jeremy, one more thing that we should have learned from Adolf Hitler is that when whackjobs preaching genocide come to power it’s best to take them at their word…. and strike first. Britain and France could have stopped Hitler cold as late as 1936 with less than 10 divisions. Instead, they listened to Socialists like you who just loved Hitler as long as Stalin said it was OK.
SDN,
Keep in Mind please that it was not just Stalin who loved Hitler. many affluent British and American personalities thought he was the cats meow as well. I will name just a few (since I cannot name them all); Franklin Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh, Joseph Kennedy, Neville Chamberlain. There were many more, both conservative and liberal(nothing new here, the western world has long been ruled by a single party system with 2 factions.)
It was Hitler’s use of the military that was despised in the west, not his ideology. Most politicians even today follow willingly in his footsteps, don’t be surprised when the politicians support for Israel drops off or even disappears completely when it’s no longer useful for them. If they see even a hint of gain in the use of force against Israel they won’t even hesitate to attack.
Actually, we’d be starting a war with at most, one sect of that religion … many of their theological opponents would quietly thank us for getting them and their business-threatening belligerence out of the way.
The war started when that particular “religion” was founded, it is, directly a declaration of war on all others. The ONLY thing that kept it in check was it’s military defeats starting at Vienna.
Grow up and realize that what you “believe” has nothing to do with the way the world really is. Their entire cult is about “submission” and it’s high time we gave them something material to submit to.
War has its own momentum. Israel did not start the six day war with the intent of capturing those territories to begin with. If the Israeli lines had collapsed there is no reason to think the Syrians or Egyptians would not have kept going.
In the case of Iran the intent is crystal clear and has nothing to do with recapturing territory.
Iranian pursuit of nukes is irrational. They have weakened conventional defense ahead of any deterrence they could achieve with nuclear weapons as a direct result of that effort. For that and other reasons it would be foolish to assume they would use them in a rational way. The whole stance of Iran vis. Israel has no rational basis.
Aren’t Muslims crazy, or is it just that the guy with his finger on the launch button is crazy?
Iran’s Ahmadinejad believes that he, personally, is to “pave the path for the glorious reappearance of Imam Mahdi, may Allah hasten his reappearance.” According to Shiites, the long lost 12th imam–Imam Mahdi– will reign on earth for seven years, before bringing about a final judgment and the end of the world.
After all, what are a few nuclear tipped ICBMs compared to this? Come to think of it, with such a belief system, launching a few nuclear tipped ICBMs by Iran against the infidels in Israel and the USA is actually coldly rational.
Many conservatives in America believe in the rapture and use this as a pretext for support of Israel. Should America also be attacked for its extremism? After all, unlike Iran, America definitely has tens of thousands of nukes and the will to use them.
I don’t actually believe this, but if you are going to use a stupid argument, make sure it doesn’t logically lead to your own country’s destruction first.
“Like it or not, you can’t really start a war with a whole religion”
Why sure you can.
I give you the example of Cortez and the Aztecs. By military force he extinguished a horrific religion and the world is a better place for him having done it.
Iran’s leaders have said it would be worth it to take millions of deaths tf they could wipe out Israel.
You’ve got to love how they eagerly volunteer other people – their fellow citizens – to die in achieving their own goals.
I’ll bet precious few of the zealots who call for the destruction of Israel actually plan to expose THEMSELVES to danger. They’re probably all counting on being all snug in underground bunkers while their countrymen make the supreme sacrifice….
I refer you to “The Yom Kippur War” by Abraham Rabinovich. Yes, the Egyptians and Syrians wanted to reclaim lost territory, but they would not have stopped there.
Obviously many people feel that muslims are completely insane and suicidal, and so Iran would not mind wiping Israel off the map even if they were obliterated in the process. But many of us don’t believe that.
Suicidal bombers tend to project that image that Muslims are completely insane and suicidal. Using children to clear minefields also doesn’t help that image
We don’t need to start a war with Islam. Islam has been at war with us, everybody who is not Muslim,for centuries. The intensity of the conflict ebbs and flows but it never stops.
I wish, I passionately wish, that a reform movement from within could transform Islam. That isn’t happening. I do not believe it will happen.
Therefore, since the increasing availability of WMD of all types will inevitably give people like the present government of Iran the capacity to destroy other nations,we must do whatever it takes to render Islam incapable of such aggression.
The territory Israel REgained in ’67 was territory it had lost to Egypt and Jordan in 1948. The Golan is the only exception, and Syria was never sad to be rid of it as the main population group there are Christian Druze, not Muslims, and therefore of no value to the regime.
No, Yom Kippur, like any other attack by her neighbours on Israel, had one purpose and one purpose only: the elimination of Israel and the extermination of its Jewish population.
“Like it or not, you can’t really start a war with a whole religion”
Really? Isn’t that precisely what Islam has done throughout its history?
If Israel (G-d forbid) gets attacked with incendiaries, the fact that wood used to be monstrously expensive in Israel is a blessing in disguise. The prevalent construction material there is reinforced concrete — not exactly the most combustible material.
Frankly, the Iranian dicktators (sic) cannot have a Ceaucescu moment soon enough for me. On second thought, a more karmic execution method might be the one they apply to the homosexuals that Ahmanutjob claimed don’t exist in Iran.
You make an excellent and often overlooked point. The reason Germany held up under the massive bombing campaign in World war II was because German construction was largely stone not wood. Japan, however, was largely wood and a much less extensive bombing campaign did tremendous damage there.
Israel can withstand a conventional explosive barrage, a nuclear attack would be very different. If there is any way they can stop or even delay Iran’s nuclear program for a few years, they should do it.
Hatred trumps reason…. I can see the warmongers “winning” this one….. And we will trudge on through the wasteland left behind.
what an excellent post
It isn’t only Israel that’s in danger from Iran. The Arab nations fear their expansionism too, which is why they (the Saudis in particular) would dearly love to see Iran reduced to rubble.
glad you went to north korea…
my takeaway is the more bellicose a country becomes towards an unbeatable opponent, the more adrift they have become.
sadly, in iran, not much tree bark to be eaten.
plenty of sand, though.
the more ahmadinejad and the mullahs rant, the more they cement my belief that the house of cards is crumbling.
“Let them sink. Ron Paul 2012!” (Higher Game). No matter what your position is, to be so flippant about this situation is amazing and, generally speaking, how Paul supporters treat it. We are talking about the potential obliteration of thousand and maybe millions of innocent people. Ron Paul and his supporters can go to …
David,
This was a good but short summary of your writings on Iran.
I thought it was interesting that SecDef Panetta recently indicated publically that even the most modern and powerful US conventional munitions cannot penetrate some hardened Iranian facilities (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203363504577187420287098692.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_News_BlogsModule). IMHO, if this was true it was scandalous to brief the Iranians on this weakness in our capabilities. If false, it’s another step in the efforts of the Obama and Bush (since 2005) administrations and significant parts of the national security establishment to throw cold water on the possibility of our dealing with Iran (they’ve given every excuse except that the Iranian WMDs have washed down Anduin to the Sea).
It’s amazing that both the French and Saudis seem to be significantly more aggressive than the US in this matter.
It would be interesting to hear your thoughts about the reluctance of the US security establishment to realistically address the matter for so many years.
I can’t credit it to just naiveté or a desire not to rock the regional boat. I suspect there has been a hope to use the current Iranian regime as a platform for US influence in Central Asia. I also expect that Chinese oil interests in both Iraq and Iran in recent years play a role.
Shabbat Shalom.
[...] it was scandalous to brief the Iranians on this weakness in our capabilities.
It’s my understanding from e.g. reading this scandalously titled article (which has some very good and informative comments) that this “weakness” is well known and something the Iranians would expect anyway. If you don’t have the energy of a nuke to work with, it’s a very hard problem (pun not intended).
At this point, our and Israel’s forceful options are limited: preemptively go nuclear, some big strikes followed by an unending campaign to keep the intact installations useless (and maybe with some semi-suicidal Special Forces action as our host speculates), nation un-building (e.g. destroy the power grid and keep it down, blow up their one? refinery and interdict the importation of the rest of their distillates (all this killing millions of civilians)), decapitation of the current leadership (if successful, hoping that the new regime won’t be compelled by the same basic facts to get nukes), lessor forms of some of these to put more serious pressure on the leadership, etc.
Lina Inverse wrote: “It’s my understanding from e.g. reading this scandalously titled article (which has some very good and informative comments) that this “weakness” is well known and something the Iranians would expect anyway”.
Actually the article you cite is mostly an extensive quote from the WSJ article which I cited previously.
The point is, that for the US Secretary of Defense to makes such statements gives the Iranians a clear signal that both the US capability and intentions are weak. That is scandalous.
Sigh. Without digging into what he said vs. other sources (which amount to a tacit statement that we can’t do it), adding his statement to the Washington Post about how he’s most worried about an Israeli strike on Iran (including the details he says) makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that this totally political animal’s overriding interest is in kicking the can past this year’s election.
I could not agree more.
Money or no money and regardless of demographics, Iran simply has nowhere to expand and so they have no imperial designs. Having nukes is not going to allow them to march into any polity next to them. The West and Sunni entities will not allow it. Iran has no experience with using their military to expand; their experience in operations, logistics, strategy and tactics is non-existent.
In fact Iran has a great deal to lose. They have nowhere to collapse into in this imagined scenario but into themselves. Since it would be gradual it would be a long way from a disaster. Throwing the dice could result in a real disaster and with what end game to aspire to; there is none.
What actually happened to Germany was far worse than Hitler’s fears and still it came back. Iran could not so easily come back from being pounded because of waging aggressive war. Presumably money would pour in from the outside to rebuild the country but I just don’t see any basis for this article whatsoever. Iran doesn’t want to be stepped on by the West and has no larger designs despite their absurd rhetoric. They simply can’t do anything.
Another adherent of Lindbergh-without-the-airplane, no doubt. Nowhere to expand? How about the Shi’ite majority regions of northern Saudi Arabia (the largest concentration of oil)? or Azerbaijan?
Whether Germany came back is a matter of debate. At present fertility, German disappears in a couple of hundred years. In 50 years it becomes a rest home.
By that reckoning an alcoholic never comes back to sobriety even if they do because they eventually die of old age. And nowhere to expand means Iran will not be allowed to do so. Sure, given no other world than Iran, Bahrain and Azerbaijan, Iran could invade. But there is a rest of the world and Iran knows damn well they can’t do so. The Fifth Fleet is at Bahrain for cryin’ out loud – how does that morph into a Saudi invasion?
And no, airplane or no airplane, I am not a Nazi-lovin’, Jew-hater, although my family is from the Little Falls area.
Not to mention the performance of Iran’s army during the Iran/Iraq, when their equipment and training were probably in better shape, was was abysmal.
The Iranian military juggernaut was fought to a WWI style trench warfare stalemate by the equally inept Iraqi army. Why is it going to sweep over the Middle East today? Where are its logistics?
It can cause problems with its terrorist proxies, but then again a lot of things are blowing up in Iran too. They’ve got opportunities, but they face a slew of problems as well.
And nowhere to expand means Iran will not be allowed to do so.
Don’t be so sure … we have plenty of candidates for the Neville Chamberlain Peace-Through-Paper award in positions of power and influence today, and I wouldn’t count on them to interdict Iran even if they pop off a nuke.
Analogy is always difficult.
An alcoholic or other addicted person only recovers by internalizing the raw truth of ‘this is what I am and will always be’ then adopting a lifestyle and moral principle to contain the beast within. This almost always happens after catastrophe Alchoholics do not return to sobriety, it is a new state of being. Anyway another discussion I think as a nation Germany has done that. So your point is well taken.
Spenglers point is a historical one. Germany now faces issues related to economy and demographics. The moral front holds.
The nazis faced a situation of ‘this is our chance and we took it.’ Iran may be in that situation now. They have sacrificed and are dedicated to a revolution which is collapsing. I think that if they acquire nuclear weapons now the probability of catastrophe is too great to ignore.
Ron Paul is a direct ideological descendant of Lindburgh without the plane. He will crash in this election. It is faux libertarianism.
lol your detractor saile doesn’t understand your “airplane reference. not surprising.
Iran has already made significant inroads to Iraq ..a bit like Germany and Austria of past.
Pwah-ha-ha. Actually I did understand the reference. You just didn’t understand mine. Not surprising.
David, I wouldn’t use trend projection into the future for more than about 20 years (hard to predict the future, etc.) because (as I suspect) all supreme leaders everywhere subscribe to the French(forgot his number) king’s quip about deluge after. And for such short period populations are static.
“They simply can’t do anything.” ??
They already have the proven capacity to put a small nuke 25 miles over neighbor Israel producing an EMP which will put Israel into the Dark Ages.
All they need is the small nuke. No big deal.
Given their expressed wish for chaos to usher in the 12th Imam and the 3rd ‘worldwide’ Caliphate, and given the decaying state of ‘world unity’, they can’t do anything but succeed!
As with the nearly unanimous chorus here of the Muslim Brotherhood taking over Egypt but mysteriously not doing so, what then is Iran waiting for? You’re right when you’re wrong is an equally mysterious type of reality.
The nuke, of course.
A Union with Syria?
Would that be a game changer?
Iran is only hemmed in if the major players, US/Russia/China, say they’re hemmed in.
And then only if they are willing to make it stick. If not, then none of the neighboring states is strong enough to resist an expansionist Iran. All of which is probably moot. As the Lunatics in charge of Iran are more than willing to test their brand new nukes in the US or Israel.
Or in both at the same time. And do it with a smile.
I would see Israel putting an EMP weapon over Iran. Centrifuges need electricity to operate. If Iran has any electrical motors left after that, they may choose to use them to pump water.
And there would be plenty of chaos in Iran to attract the 12th, through 12,000th Imans, so a win-win for all.
That might be a bit indiscriminate; do they have the data necessary to use one who’s coverage doesn’t extend too far into other countries?
More likely they’d use carbon fiber warheads against the electrical transmission system, utterly destroying long lead time replacement transformers and the like (which they could possibly interdict the replacement of). And/or blow out Iran’s one? refinery, eliminating half their distillate supply (the ruling class and their pet projects would try to take for themselves what they import (which could also be interdicted), but that would, I suspect, get ugly). Nation un-building as someone put it (check my other postings in this discussion).
Problems here are that attacks that indiscriminate would kill millions of innocent Iranians including plenty of non-Persians; Israel really needs to avoid provoking the sort of worldwide reaction that destroyed Rhodesia and that will sooner or later likely destroy South Africa (note how the left is already using the Apartheid metaphor), so I’d expect them to use more discriminating attacks, at least initially.
Iran is not interested in expanding, they have plenty of space, they are interested in creating chaos that will enable the mahdi to come. Iran may be islamic but they are not arabic. They are Persian which racially is Ayran. If I was an Israeli I would be very concerned since history shows how Ayranians act when they say they want to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth.
What’s expansion got to do with it? This is about power, about exporting fundamentalist revolution, about exterminating Jews and expelling the West from the region, none of which involve Iranian geographical expansion, only increased power, some willing thugs like Hamas and Hezballah and a few flying nukes.
Mr Goldman,
Comparisons between Iran’s leaders and Hitler are of limited use at best. 1939 Germany was the World’s most technically advanced industrial state, if Hitler had wished it, Germany could have become the World’s richest nation by trade alone, but of course Hitler did not see himself as a salesman. You remember the old toast of the German Navy; “Der Tag”, meaning of course the day when the German Navy would meet the Royal Navy in battle, and destroy it. What is “Der Tag” for the Iranians? What do they have as their number one aim, what do they discuss in private when all the totally committed get together and dream, what success do they dream of?
The destruction of Israel? I doubt it, although they would not be sorry if Israel were destroyed.
The defeat of the Great Satan? Closer I think. I suggest that the fundamental aim and the focus of their plan is the destruction of the House of Saud and the possession of the Saudi oil fields, a consolidation of Persian power in the ME and therefore an unassailable position of power and wealth.
Is this such a problem for us that we need to go to war to stop it?
Yes, it’s a shame about Germany; if only Hitler had gotten us Jews on his side, there’s no way he could have lost that war. If only Hitler had been rational, or the Germans had been rational enough to reject him…. Quatsch und Schwachsinn.
I still say “What does Emperor Putin know about Iran that no one else does”. Why would he let them have nuclear weapons? Why is he silent? I reiterate my theory. Iran is Putins bitch! The more he defends them, the more he can extort from them. Why did it take the Russians 20 years to build a nuclear power plant? They r milking the mullahs for all they got. The more the hawks scream for war, the higher the price of oil. Bibi and Putin are both in on this too. The louder Bibi screams the more Russia can extort. then they go back to the Kremlin and drink Stoli toether laughing at what a bunch of idiots the US and Iranians are! Putin can fix this…if he wants to. or indeed if it needs to be fixed.
..if you had ever been to Iran you would be surprised if they built a nuclear facility in 100 years.
the Russians think they can use Iran to further their interests against the west …and they seem to be pretty good at it.
long term the muslim problem for the Russians will be the same as everyone else ..with the exception that they will fight back when the time comes.
Well, the first people who got into the focus of Hitler and Co. were the communists and then the trade-unionists. These happened in 1933 and 1934. The jews were not among the first victims – except those who had been communists. In 1933 most Germans did not recognize the nature of the Hitler regime.
I suggest that the fundamental aim and the focus of their plan is the destruction of the House of Saud and the possession of the Saudi oil fields, a consolidation of Persian power in the ME and therefore an unassailable position of power and wealth. Is this such a problem for us that we need to go to war to stop it?
The leadership of Iran — a nation run by Islamist religious fanatics who consider the US and Israel its greatest enemies, who call the US “The Great Satan”, who want to wipe Israel off the map, who are the leading sponsors of international terrorism, who are developing nuclear weapons, who played a role in 9-11 and other terrorist attacks that murdered Americans, who sent unarmed teenagers to run through mine fields in order to clear them, who endorses suicide terrorist bombers, etc. — wants to control all of the oil in the Persian Gulf region (Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, Qatar) via military threat and the promotion of terrorism, and you don’t think this is enough to warrant taking military action if all else fails?
Why bother doing anything then? Just tell them we have no problem with their plans, ambitions, and goals.
And while we’re at it, hey, why not nukes for everyone in the region? What could go wrong? And why stop there? Why not nukes for all nations? What could go wrong with MAD on a worldwide scale? Human history shows that individuals and nations always behave rationally, right? Doesn’t history show that human behavior is almost always objectively rational?
The biggest threat to the US in the ME is Saudi Arabia. They fund the madrassas that promote islamic extremism and therefore terroism, and they funded the 9/11 terroists, most of whom were Saudis. The Sauds also fund the corruption of US politics, statecraft and education. All of this because we refuse (our political process has been bought) to develop our own sources of energy.
If Iran destroyed the House of Saud they would be doing the US a favor, although not for the political/bureaucratic class in Washington DC who are essentially on the Saudi payroll.
Beg to differ: the Saudis want stability, Iran wants to overturn the existing order. A lot of Saudis fund terrorism, but that is rather easy to discourage, given that the KSA is run by a few thousand people and we know where all of them live. The KSA’s corruption of American elites is a real problem, to be sure. But I don’t expect Saudi-originated nuclear weapons to go off in American or allied cities in the foreseeable future.
Mr Goldman,
With the greatest respect:
If the Saudis want stability why do they so assiduosly fund islamic fundamentalism/terroism?
I would agree with you that they certainly want stability in their financial situation, but if that could be achieved and the US dominated by islam, oh and the Israelis (and all other Jews) all dead, the House of Saud would be well satisfied.
Roger,
That’s the best question I’ve had in a long time. The broader question is: can any Islamic society be stabilized? Try to modernize and educate, and the result is anomie, infertility and demoralization. That’s what did in the Kemalists in Turkey (Erdogan represents the old backward Anatolia getting even with the secular metropole), as well as the Shah. Try to keep traditional society intact through the madrassah system and sharia, and you end up spawning terrorist crazies. Saudi Arabia is crawling with terrorist crazies, and the royal family tries to keep them under control, either by paying them off or by killing them off (we have the means to encourage them to do the latter). But ultimately, modernity will encroach on every Muslim society and disrupt it, and many Saudi efforts at stability will backfire.
DPG wrote: “The broader question is: can any Islamic society be stabilized”?
Can any modern society? Islam does seem to have a huge problem in embracing modernity (although I saw a lot of Muslim names on the list of medical specialists during a recent visit to a doctor) but they aren’t alone. I particularly liked your line from 2009: “I needed to tell the Muslims that nothing would alleviate the unbearable sense of humiliation and loss that globalization inflicted on a civilization that once had pretensions to world dominance. I needed to tell Asians that materialism leads only to despair. And I needed to tell the Americans that their smugness would be their undoing”.
My sense is that while a majority of Muslims are traditional and a large minority is radical there is also a small but potentially strategically significant minority who are groping for a way to embrace modernity and moderation w/o feeling that they have entirety abandoned their traditions for consumerism.
I don’t think that the West will do well in coping with the Muslim world w/o engaging that minority of “gropers”. I concede that that engagement may require a big dose of Spenglarian humiliation and defeat for the radicals “pour encourager les autres” (Iran would be a very good place to begin).
On the other hand, I think your Virgil/Dante “walk on by” approach is insufficient (if I understand you correctly). IMHO, our approach also has to include building alliances with and otherwise aiding the “gropers”.
I’m with about developing our own energy resources for many reasons.
However, our interest in the ME and Saudi Arabia will not substantially diminish even if we significantly reduce our dependency on foreign oil. The world economy is dependent on oil, wherever it comes from. Oil is fungible and any disruption in the supply and/or the price affects all consumers of oil. Domestic US producers of oil are not going to sell it for $50/barrel to domestic customers when the world price is $200/barrel. That’s basic economics.
The House of Saud is not a heterogeneous entity. Thousands of males share the wealth of the Kingdom and do with their portion as they will. A few likely finance terrorists, and we are always trying to find out who they are. That does not make this the policy of Saudi government.
The Saudi government is neither fully friend or fully foe. It is something in between, but at this time more friend than foe. Like most countries we ally with, we share some common interests and we also share some interests that are at odds. Such is life in the real international world.
Whatever interests SA has that are not in our best interest, Iran is currently by far the greater enemy and threat to our interests.
We and SA and all of the states bordering the Arabian Gulf have an interest in regional stability and the free flow of oil. Iran wants to destabilize and dominate the region. It wants to control the flow of oil. It wants to undermine and overthrow governments in the region and replace them with Islamist governments friendly to, and dominated by, Iran and hostile to the US, Israel, and the West.
Perhaps when Iran is no longer a threat to the US we will find ourselves in a position where the friend-foe balance with SA leans towards foe. But we are not there now. It’s often repeated, but we had common cause with Stalin and the Soviet Union during WW II.
If SA becomes a clear enemy in the future, we will deal with it then. For now, it is best to maximize our allies in the region and focus on the greatest present danger, Iran.
farsighted,
We could seriously undermine the power of the Sauds, Kuwaitis, Qataris, Iranians, etc. if we produced hydrocarbon fuels from coal and biomass. Ceratinly the price of oil fuel is set by world demand, which price would drastically fall if more production comes online hence Saudi interest in stopping the keystone pipeline, amongst many other things.
I believe that in the long term we would be better off with a strong Iran in the ME than the current crop of islamic thug states. Iran is temporarily under the control of islamist madmen but the pressure is building to overthrow the theocracy, the resultant Iran is likely, with the right encouragement, to be strongly pro-western. Nothing of the sort can be said about the Arab states. Incidentally the pursuit of nuclear power and weapons is very popular right across the Iranian people, there is no conceivable govt. forthcoming in Iran who would not pursue nuclear status. That is something to consider, attacking Iran on this issue means picking a fight with the entire Iranian people rather than with the ruling clique.
Der Tag for Iran is when the Sunnis accept the leadership of the Shi’ites of Persia. Just as Al Queda sought to gain that acknowledged leadership by attacks on the US, the Shi’ites seek to gain that acknowledgement by attacks on Israel.
The Shi’ites are heretics to most Sunni. The Shi’ite mullahs extended religious recognition to the Syrian Alawite heretics, thus justifying their rule in a majority Muslim country.
Kurds are usually Sunni, but more Kurd than anything else. Sunni Arabs invented the whole Muslim religion to justify their rule back in the 7th Century.
“The vast majority of the missiles aimed at Israel from Hezbolla, Hamas et al. are much smaller and not very precise, of the Katyusha or Grad type. You could not destroy a city with those.” Spindok, Misha the Tie Eater fired hundreds of Grad rockets at Tskhinval, and it’s still there. So some comfort to Israelis under the guns of Hezbollah.
And Thenachash also has a point.
“The louder Bibi screams the more Russia can extort. then they go back to the Kremlin and drink Stoli toether laughing at what a bunch of idiots the US and Iranians are!” Well there are drones from time to time stopping by these blogs insisting FM Lieberman is a Russian agent, simply because he’s presided over a rapprochement between Russia and the largest single Russian-speaking country outside of Russia. Wow, what a conspiracy it would require to create such a thing, what with the lots of money to be made in Moscow by Israelis born in Soviet times with high tech skills…
“Paul says such dumb things. ‘Israel has 300 nukes so nobody is going to mess with them.’ They have had those since the 60′s and everybody messes with them. Hatred trumps reason every time. Hatred with nuclear weapons is not acceptable and Israel has every right to do something about it.” Yes the Israelis were attacked after the Yom Kippur War but the Syrians/Egyptians were counting on the U.S. and perhaps the Soviets to prevent the Samson Option.
I am not sure with the USSR gone and Russia indifferent to most of the Middle East save for avoiding outside-forced regime change (aka invasion) in Syria and Iran how that 1973 scenario would repeat. In fact according to Gen. Wesley Clark (consider the source, a Clinton crony) that’s what Paul Wolfowitz allegedly told his colleagues after the Gulf War and collapse of the USSR, that with the Soviets gone it was time for the U.S. to overthrow multiple regimes from Iraq, to Syria to Yemen, Sudan and Iran. They were all on the hit list, pre-9/11. But of course to repeat what a U.S. commander who led a pretty popular war with neocons and Democrats alike says makes me a conspiracy theorist nutter, I get it.
Also (and perhaps Mr. Goldman would care to comment on this), I am far less concerned by the raw number of missiles Hezbollah has. When the Allies occupied Germany, they captured many completed but unlaunched V2 rockets, unused jet aircraft and, I’m sure a lot of stockpiled conventional materiel.
And that’s the key: It’s not just how much weaponry you have, it’s how much you can use before the enemy overruns you. In 2006, Olmert dithered and dallied, spared infrastructure and eventually acquiesced to international pressure (including, shamefully, from Bush and Rice) not to pursue victory. I suspect that Netanyahu will be, shall we say, less accommodating, especially now that Hezbollah is part of the Lebanese government. 50,000 missiles or 500,000, I would be surprised if Hezbollah were able to launch 10,000 before Israel crushed them. I also see (and suspect that Hezbollah sees) the possibility of some serious blowback: the more missiles Hezbollah launches, the more damage they do, the more Israelis they kill, the more ruthless the Israelis will be in pursuing and imposing victory.
Indeed, for reasons of all of the above, it would not surprise me if Hezbollah stayed out of any war between Israel and Iran. What could they possibly gain?
Gene Schwimmer wrote, “it would not surprise me if Hezbollah stayed out of any war between Israel and Iran.”
These decisions, to go to war or to remain on the sidelines, are made on the information that dominates the chatter at the moment the decision is made. If Hizb’Allah sees the possibility of gaining land in the Galilee, enough to ensure a bargaining position, it will dive in. Jordan lost Judea and Samaria in ’67 based upon false claims of early victory by Egypt. Information is always incomplete, and, thus, deceptive. My best guess is that Hizb’Allah will indeed be able to invade Northern Israel successfully, but they will have little left to return to when they are ultimately pushed out. They will be setting themselves up for failure by providing Israel sufficient justification to use its most devastating conventional weapons.
“Whether Germany came back is a matter of debate. At present fertility, German disappears in a couple of hundred years. In 50 years it becomes a rest home.” David, ‘Lindbergh without airplane followers or not’, if the U.S. continues printing and spending itself into financial oblivion the inevitable consequences for the military industrial complex twenty years down the line would create a sort of new Rapallo…particularly if Russia remains in your words the leper with the most fingers in Eastern Europe while tiny (neocon/CIA client state) nations like Latvia flirt with national extinction.
There are of course, very very few people even in Russia itself these days who can think that far ahead. But you wrote in Putin for President and the other related essay that this may be the long term game plan in mind. If Latvians keep fleeing for the UK Russia won’t have to reconquer the Baltics, it can just send its poor like Mexico.
“I suspect there has been a hope to use the current Iranian regime as a platform for US influence in Central Asia.” Go look up Z. Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard, or look at his remarks bragging about how he provoked the Soviets to invade Afghanistan (a disastrous move on the Sovs part, but my point is Z. Big’s hands were not clean). And the larger point is there is a subgroup in D.C. that sees the Muslim Brotherhood as useful allies against the likes of Assad or Iran, and in the long run cannon fodder to be deployed against the perpetual enemies in Eurasia and Eastasia…er, Russia and China. David and those who care about Israel’s long term survivor must be wary of that tendency, it is an elitist, globalist one and not tied to any particular nation state. After all, when Z. Big was asked about 9/11 and whether his backing of the muj in 79′ eventually inadvertently led to that event, he said what was a few Islamic fanatics compared to the end of the Soviet Bloc? David might agree, or he might not long term if those fanatics do get their hands on nukes. In that case, a police state, bombed out, depopulating and impoverished West would forget it ever defeated the Evil Empire.
“I also expect that Chinese oil interests in both Iraq and Iran in recent years play a role.” Yes, definitely, the Chinese have been expressing their displeasure in numerous ways, but buying a lot of gold and setting up these no-dollars-necessary currency swaps (which the Indians are copying with buying Iranian crude with gold and rupees) is the big message to D.C. ‘You can do what you want, but we’re not obligated to keep accepting your toilet paper.’
The analogies re Hitler and Islamists are false and hysterical.
The real analogy is Stalinism- Stalin killed many more people than Hitler.
It is not in fundamental American interests to attack Iran-and we will not do so unless we are attacked by Iran-which will not happen–the Iran regime may be crazy-but it is not stupid .
Israel can do what it wants- but not on the American dime nor on the American brand.
A friendly divorce is the reality of the US/Israel relationship moving forward.
We tried to help out– now it is time to move on.
US current interest and focus is Asia and the Pacific.
So the US, in its competition with China for influence in Asia and the Pacific, is going to give the Chinese a free hand in the Middle East? Unless the Middle Eastern oil wells run dry, it won’t happen.
It was an excellent analogy.
Mr. Goldman…
I suspect that the modern audience has no conception of just how tight the economic box was becoming for Hitler.
Namely, he was having his feet kept to the fire WRT RUBBER. Between Britain and France — between a rock and a hard place, he was.
I concur with your estimate that the mullahs will surely double-down rather than back-off.
Witness their crazy ‘war games’ in the Gulf.
They simply don’t follow Western ‘logic’ at all.
——
BTW, there is a ‘tell’ WRT their atomic program: their missiles.
No sovereign power has ever built such an array of ballistic missiles WITHOUT providing them with atomic warheads — since the dawn of the atomic age.
They have, otherwise, no military-economic value.
Speer recounted in his memoirs that if he’d known in 1943 what he knew by 1950 — he’d would’ve canceled the A-4/ V-2 project in a heartbeat. (BTW, he cancelled the vast bulk of Hitler’s fantasy weapons during the winter of 1943.)
So the idea that the mullahs are not pursuing the Bomb doesn’t pass the smell test.
None the less, we still see vapid claims that Western fears are but fantasy.
—–
Under an atomic shield all manner of asymmetric mischief will be set loose by the mullahs. And, you’d better be thinking of anti-asset attacks in Shi’ite KSA and what must follow.
As far back as the Shah, Iran built a ‘cross-gulf’ navy. As you scan down their order of battle it’s impossible to miss their build up of ‘instant invasion’ assets.
For those unaware: the highest victory of their conflict with Saddam was an amphibious flanking attack that got behind his right, riverine flank along the Shatt al-Arab. They surely have not forgotten it.
It triggered a wholesale retrenchment by Saddam — and a massive withdrawal from Iran.
Such histories are the fount of dreams.
Surely todays mullahs dream of ‘out flanking’ the West and driving the USN into the deep blue.
—-
As to why it is in our interests to throw capital ships in harms way… I haven’t a clue. I’d keep all of my big toys out of reach — reminding the mullahs that a blockade run from the Indian Ocean will still be as effective as one at the Strait.
—-
Which brings me to another point: the Strait is but 2 miles wide. (ish) You have to subtract the waters that are TOO SHALLOW for VLCC traffic. When you have done so you’re left with a lane so tight it needs buoys to mark the slot. And IIRC, this is actually the case!
The only strait worse: the Straits of Malacca. It’s so tight you need a number to get through.
—-
As against this: Iran is a serious food importer — and gasoline importer.
So it’s bluster and bluster — to get crude prices up. But under no circumstances will Tehran actually pull the trigger first. She’s playing for time — and atomics. If fear didn’t pay so well, she’d long since shut-up.
a interesting analyse on the german “Miracle” of Hitler, and of Germany today, from a Chinese:
http://www.fourwinds10.net/siterun_data/history/european/news.php?q=1237059344
Interesting, thanks for the link. I do believe I have read Henry C K Liu over at Asia Times, after I had finished reading Spengler’s/David Goldman latest article that is. He really does not like the US.
Rifle308
yes it does seem so, though his analyse for Germany is accurate
blert,
There was no blockade of Germany in 1939.
German industry had achieved massive growth and prosperity during the Wiemar inflation.
France was Germany’s largest trading partner in 1939.
The Soviet Union offered an insatiable market for German goods and was enthusiastically offered as such by Stalin, who was prepared to trade food, oil, minerals and just about everything else for German industrial goods.
Germany was in no “economic box”, had Hitler wanted it he could have achieved huge and lasting prosperity for Germany without firing a shot, but he wanted war, and he got it.
I do not believe that the regimes rhetoric regarding the 12th imam is so easily dismissed. Iran may have strategic aims but they lack the conventional military to invade other countries. Except for some of the revolutionary guards, their military is lacking in all aspects.
Thus they need the nuke and/or asymmetrical warfare. There will be no “M.A.D.” scenario with Iran, they truly accept martyrdom in their irrational plans.
Hitler did not seek martyrdom, The mullahs do.
I’m sorry, but this is a re-hash of the whole Iraq war re-up. What a disaster that turned out to be. Do we really need to start another futile war in the middle east?
Even if it works, what of the consequences? It just means our “friends” the Saudis and Pakistanis will ratchet up their brand of militant Islam to fill the void.
I would suggest that taking Iraq and converting it to a democracy without the loss of a US city and for fewer casualties than the allies suffered in taking Sicily would count as a success.
Throw in the fact that terrorists were sucked in from all over the mideast and killed by us and by our allies, and it is even more of a success. The Trillion dollars spent over 6 years seems like wise money compared to what 6 Trillion spent by Obama in the last 3 years bought us.
One small point.
The translation of Hitler’s speech has him warning of the possibility that he could “be replaced by an idiot or criminal”.
A better interpretation is that he “could be eliminated by a criminal or lunatic”, ie. assassinated.
The first implies that he might somehow be replaced by democratic means, while the second – catching a bullet or a bomb – is more like the actual threat he was evoking.
Likewise, however, Ahmadinejad, who quite plainly feels the urgency of his mission in the light of his own mortality, and how urgently any number of foreign and domestic factions would love to take him out.
The sanctions strategy is a loser. Forget about using bunker busters. Three or four tactical nukes would decisively terminate Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Then we could dispatch Jimmeh to Teheran to grovel. On second thought it would be better to send him just before we attack.
After all, that’s what tactical nukes are for. If the enemy makes you use them, then using them is justified.
The greatest scandal in the history of the West will turn out to be our reluctance to nuke Tehran when they took the hostages. We would have lost a handful of admittedly innocent people, but how many would have been saved, since, all over the world?
There are savages afoot in the world. Failing to deal with them adequately is the oldest (and usually last) mistake of a dying civilisation.
There is no such thing as a toothless tiger in Nature. There’s a reason for that.
“Hitler told his commanders in August 1939 that they had nothing to lose; Ahmadinejad knows with certainty that he has nothing to lose.”
Well, yes and no. Remember, in 1939 Hitler and Germany were not threatened with nuclear extermination. If Iran tries to attack Israel, Israel WILL respond with a nuclear strike against Iran and Iran WILL be at the losing end of that war. I don’t think the Iranian people fully comprehend the disaster Ahmadinejad and the mullahs are leading them into. Iran may destroy Israel, but Iran will certainly be destroying themselves as well, whereas Hitler in 1939 really thought he could win the war (and almost did, if he didn’t attack Russia).
But I’m not sure where we are headed with this. Leon Panetta said just the other day that Israel will attack in just a few months from now. I’m not sure if that will or will not happen. Perhaps that was a signal to the people of Iran to revolt or rebel against the mullahs right now. It may be their last chance to overthrow the mullahs before they lead the country into a nuclear war. Maybe. But if Israel really is going to attack this spring, I do know two things. First, the price of oil will be about $7 or $8 a gallon. Second, that may not really matter if the world is pulled into yet another World War. And my biggest fear is that the world will just stumble into it, like it did at the start of World War I, NOT World War II. Bad days are coming, my friends, unless the Iranian people can change their own government. And fast.
Would that it were so. There is noone on the American scene who would have the cojones to nuke anybody over anything.
I’ll believe it when I see it, and I’ll never, ever see it from the weenies running things today. They wear helmets to ride bicycles, for chrissake!
“Bad days are coming, my friends, unless the Iranian people can change their own government. And fast.”
Slight edit, cfb:
“…unless the AMERICAN people…”
…and I suspect “bad days” should read “Dark Ages”.
Something I find fascinating in this whole discussion is how little attention so many people are paying to what the Iranian leadership itself is actually saying about their intentions.
They have been saying, in highly unsubtle language, that it is their intention to destroy the “Zionist cancer” and the “great Satan” for Allah. Their openly stated religious beliefs (that they give every indication of taking seriously) instruct them that they are to prepare the world for the coming of the “Twelfth Iman” by means of world-wide chaos.
Do you suppose that maybe we should believe them?
Yes, we should believe them. It has irritated me for years that our politicians, generally on the left, think that these Muslim people don’t mean what they say. They DO mean what they say and we better start listening and taking what they say to heart.
Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, made a speech a couple years ago in which he said this (not a direct quote): We have Western Europe. We are working in Eastern Europe. Now we will turn our attention to the Americas. And we say they don’t mean what they say. In 1991, the Muslim Brotherhood wrote a document in which the takedown of America by undermining it from within is a primary stated goal. When are we going to wake up?
Will sanctions persuade Iran to stop building nuclear weapons?
I want to say “Yes, if the sanctions actually threaten the stability of the regime and, thus, the power of those in charge. And the saber rattling indicates that those in power are indeed afraid.”
But the real answer is “NO” because the mad mullahs can’t back down, they’ve got nowhere to go. If they admit that the sanctions are having the desired outcome then the Iranian people will go “Ceausescu” on them and the mullahs would be hanging from lampposts. The mullahs saw what happened to Gaddafi and Mubarak, they know what awaits them if they lose power. They can go quietly like Mubarak, go on trial, and then be hanged; or they can go like Gaddafi and go in a blaze of sodomy. There is no graceful exit from the hole they’ve dug themselves.
Sanctions can, and do, work to change specific behavior in a truly representative government. The sanctions hurt the people, the people make changes and the sanctions are lifted. However, against a despotic regime sanctions are about over-throwing the regime. Those in power aren’t hurt by the sanctions, they’re despots, they steal for a living but the people are hurt. Unfortunately, the people won’t do anything until the pain from the sanctions is greater than the fear of the despots. The despots know that the first sign of weakness will be their last official act, they won’t even get to choose whether to be sodomized before or after death. That’s why you always see people running around demanding that the “sanctions be lifted”, they don’t want the regime to fall for their own reasons. Oh sure, they say it’s “for the people” but it’s really to keep the despots in power.
Oh good, another doughy old man making lazy comparisons of Ahmadinejad to Hitler. It must be good knowing that you won’t be the one murdered in a senseless war. I remember when George Bush Sr. was making this comparison for Saddam and Noriega. Try some new propaganda. Maybe the leader of the next oil rich, non-US client state we bomb could be the next Stalin or a Genghis Kahn or something.
But no, you’re right, clearly Iran is the threat to peace in the Middle East. It couldn’t possibly be that other country. You know, the one that regularly props up tyrannical dictators, death squads and warlords and has waged 3 major military campaigns and a whole lot of minor ones in the region. The one with multiple military bases in every country surrounding Iran. No, clearly Iran is the aggressor here.
Only Zionists and Dittoheads are going to believe this nonsense. Iran doesn’t have the resources to do anything and even if they did they’re up against the two most militarized nations in the world. They would be obliterated
The Israelis know that there are not enough buses available to accommodate all those politicians and governments who will want to throw the Jews under as a matter of Realpolitik, while secretly breathing a sigh of relief. Somehow, Mr. Obama comes to mind in this scenario.
You conveniently omit the Soviet Union in your little “history” lesson. Both Stalin and Hitler attacked Poland, yet the allies only declared war on Germany. You also forgot to mention the Brit/American take over of the Iranian government in 1953, installing the depraved Shah. Meddling in the affairs of other nations does no good. Why didn’t we attack Israel when the French gave them access to nuclear weapons? Oh? The Israelis are not belligerents? Tell that to the crew of the USS Liberty.
Mr. O’Keefe, are you the same fellow who supports breaking the Israeli blockade of Gaza? If you are the same O’Keefe, then I understand your position completely. You hate Jews and their country, Israel! You are also a demagogue and propagandist for the Muslim view. As you know, or should know, the USS Liberty was passing Israeli tank positions and strength levels to the Egyptians. The Liberty was inadequately flagged, so they were fair game. (Source: John Loftus: “The Secret War Against the Jews”) Fortunately, Mr. Loftus is an American with an unassailable reputation as an American patriot, so he was merely telling the truth to help America do the right thing. And President Nixon did; he resupplied Israel with supplies they had exhausted.
You’re proposing to kill millions of people, people who have offered us no harm, in a pre-emptive strike.
You made the same claims about Iraq – and it turned out that they were all lies – and yet you have learned nothing.
Do you have no conception of how evil that is?
Regarding the assault on Iraq, I suspect that Saddam bears SOME responsibility for faking everybody out. I believe he said that the intent was to convince Iran that he DID have the weaponry. Well, he was successful, EVERYBODY believed him including the Iranians. Now, as to the Iranians. ALL of the evidence points to their want of nuclear weapons. This is not just their own words, but the actions in actively acquiring overkill in the equipment necessary to construct WMDs, up to and including missile technology. A bomb you can’t deliver very far is worthless. The AQ Khan connection with Pakistan was not just a foreign currency exchange. Additionally, the North Koreans did NOT go to Iran just to see the “sights”. The sites visited were connected to the ONLY thing they have for sale; nuclear and missile technology.
Evil is what it is. Iran has for more than thirty years threatened the US and Israel AND Russia like some mad dog terrorizing the neighborhood. If someone stepped off their porch and shot the SOB would you scream “He shot a puppy!?
I think not. You as well as everyone else would secretly be thankful that somebody owned a gun and had the balls to use it. Iran has all of the options in the world to join this confederacy of nations. It prefers not to. Someone else (above) mentioned the vulnerability of the mullahs and their need for a straw man to preserve their power. It could be. I don’t know but for Israel to put their chips in the pot (pop. 4 million) they had better be holding a royal flush. Iran has been dominating ME politics and trade for thirty years with their bluffs and threats.
No one WANTS war. No one WANTS to risk the lives of “million” but if Israel wants to step off their porch, I’d cheer them on. And it would NOT require nukes. Their refineries are vulnerable. Their capacity to provide fuel for their population is nonexistent. Shut off the ability of the population of 80 million to feed itself and they WILL rise up against the mullahs. THEN THE WEST CAN TRADE FOOD AND FUEL FOR INSPECTION AND DESTRUCTION OF THEIR NUCLEAR FACILITIES.
It would also have the beneficial effect of shutting Syria down as well as giving the Shi’ites pause in Iraq. In addition, Hamas and Hezb’ollah would be marginalized if not subdued. Perhaps, at that point, the Palestinian Authority would say “Oh, OK. We’ll take the deal that was offered to us by Clinton 14 YEARS AGO”.
What he said.
It could be an effective and relatively non-destructive response to a specific problem.
We still have the larger problem of the madness that is Islam, but maybe (check out those demographics) the problem will disappear.
“He shot a puppy”
That’s funny!
I think the biggest historical comparison between today’s Iran and 1930s Germany is this:
During the 1930s, Hitler consolidated absolute power. Time after time, he made aggressive moves that could’ve easily been countered. The West did nothing but talk. Violate and reject the Treaty of Versailles? Talk. Annex Austria? Talk. Go after Chechoslovakia? Not only talk but give them a big hunk of the country.
All during this time, an out of power Winston Churchill spoke against the rising power of Hitler and the inaction of England and France. He was not merely ignored, he was ridiculed. Ultimately, Hitler was powerful enough and he plunged Europe into the most destructive war in history. Churchill often called WWII “The Unnecessary War” because it could’ve been prevented.
For years, the rest of the world has either engaged in talk against Iran or has actively helped them. Are we heading for another “Unnecessary War”?
On what legal basis would France and Britain have attacked Germany back then? We know only in hindsight how truly bad Hitler was; before the war actually started, one could argue that he was merely blustering.
Recall that a similar analogy was made between Hitler and Saddam — and the US still had a devil of a time making its case for invasion. And given the failure to find a meaningful WMD capability, many believe the US had no case at all.
Britain and France could have attacked Germany based on their remilitarization of the Rhineland. The US could have sent in a few Marine regiments as stiffeners, and in response to that the Wehrmacht would have Hitler politely bumped off.
Japan could have taken notice, and cut back on their mass murders in China.
Mussolini would have been glad to suck up to socialist FDR rather than socialist Hitler.
And 50 million lives saved. Of course the usual suspects would have insisted on impeaching FDR, and FDR would have attempted to continue his failed socialist policies (which he only dumped when he needed some actual war production).
If Mr. Goldman is really convinced that Iran is a new Hitler, then he is declaring that it is an existential threat to himself and Israel. Ergo, Mr Goldman, if he is anything more than a typical cowardly armchair warrior, would nominate himself and his children to become soldiers on the frontlines of an US battle with Iran. Let’s see if he does that. I bet $1000 that he doesn’t, and that his children don’t either. He wants others to die for his bad feelings toward Iran. He wants others to die for Israel and its 200 nuclear warheads (in violation of Nuclear Arms accords). He wants others to die in the same way that they died in misguided military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. How does he sleep at night knowing he was so wrong?
Islamism is nothing more than a variation of national socialism. I agree with Mr. Goldman The west specially U.S.A missed the opportunity to remove the Iranian threat 5 years ago. Is anyone out there who thinks Iranian leadership is any saner than Hitler? Regardless what the pacifist west wants the middle east is pregnant to a very violent future. We are starting to see the early signs of birth pains such is North Africa, Egypt, Syria. And The Iranian mullahs are aware of what is coming. I wished the peaceniks in Washington knew that.
From Haaretz:re: the lame Hitler analogies. I’m sure if an American wrote this, you’d be screaming anti-Semite(!) from the top of the mountain.
That’s because he’s right. Persecution even unto death has been a threat against the Jews since their time in Egypt, and by extension it has been with us Christians since Pentecost. Sadly, in far too many of those cases it’s because we were fighting each other (we are all well aware of the Jews killed in pogroms in Europe by those professing Christ, but neither should we forget the Christian martyrs whose blood was shed by the orders of the Sanhedrin- there is no numerical equivalence between the two, but there is a moral equivalence between each murder).
I take the long view. Iran (and Islam) is doomed. Thy don’t have and aren’t capable of acquiring the technological capabilities to succeed against any enemy; the West, China, or marxism.
No doubt they know this. And they know they are a small country with a demographic problem and shrinking resources.
On top of that, they are compelled by their religious ideology to strike at the infidels, who are everybody else in the world.
So what would you do, if you knew your civilization was doomed and your religion compelled you to hate the rest of the world and one people in particular?
Israel better take their nukes out now, because destroying Israel is the the only victory Iran can achieve.
In many essays inclusing this one I see reference to a demographic doom as the population ages. Be it Iran, Europe, the US, China.
There is an assumption that people will live longer but there productive life will not.
If one were to make a wild guess, wouldn’t you guess that if people live 10% more years there productive years might also extend 10%? And considering how much work that we have to accomplish is no longer manual labor the proportion may turn out to be favorable.
ALso, if it is true that we will all be old geezers then the prejudice against employing us will be reduced. And our idea of the onset of unemployable old geezerdome will increase. the downside is that we will have to get to be much older before we can get away with being grouchy old geezers.
Do try to read Spengler’s book (How Civilizations Die); it’s fantastically insightful and concise, and it includes an answer for the question you posit, at least WRT to the Muslim world. According to him (and I’m inclined to believe it) outside of Turkey the Muslim world (at least in the Middle East, but I’d be surprised if this wasn’t true for the rest of it) doesn’t have any quality universities. In the Middle East they’re producing scads of graduates who are only fit for “stamping papers” in a bureaucracy.
As long as these societies are overall fantastically unproductive (e.g. importing too many of their calories; as he says they are Banana Republics without the bananas) that extra 10% won’t count for much.
You’re assuming that people are living longer in good health, and not merely because medicines are making it possible to survive with chronic conditions for a decade when they used to be fatal within a year or two. Sure, such a person might be able to do some work, but not nearly enough to pay for their own medical treatments, let alone food and clothing. We support them because we are compassionate, but compassion is limited by what is possible, and it’s not possible to demand more from the workforce than it has to give.
Iran learned the lesson of Libya and North Korea. Libya gave up its nukes and Qaddafi was sodomized and executed in the street. North Korea did not give up its nukes and gets away with anything it wants.
Now of course there are differences. North Korea has its patrons but so does Iran. Iran does not want to use its nukes except as a threat. It will rattle sabres, raise oil prices, and do anything and everything short of using its limited nukes to throw its weight around in the region.
Whether we want Iran to have a larger role in the ME or not is another question. It would be moot if we were not dependent on oil from the region. The real answer to this problem?
‘Drill baby, drill’.
An earthquake , and nothing else will be needed. Nuclear material in bunkers in the highest sismic activity are of the world? Wise
Spengler has an interesting point: that the Iranian regime faces an economic deadline similar to Nazi Germany’s situation in 1939.
The Iranian regime is much less unified than the Nazi state; Khamenei, Ahmedinejad, and factions within the IRGC are openly at odds and strike at each other’s henchmen. Plus the Nazis had the approval of a great majority of Germans, thanks to Goebbels’ propaganda and the Nazis’ welfare programs, which had offset the Depression. (Part of that 1939 economic crunch was that Germany been using foreign credits to pay for guns and butter, and those credits were exhausted.) The mullahcracy has only grudging submission at gunpoint.
But even the Nazi state had factions. Goering was the most prominent of the “Wilhelmine imperialists” who wanted Germany to rebuild her armed forces, and regain her Great Power status and lost territories, but did not want to start an apocalyptic conquer-the-world-or-die war. They wanted to enjoy the perks of power, too. However, they went along with Hitler, who was after all The Leader.
In the Iranian regime – there are many who shy at war which could cost them their cushy deals, and there are mystical fanatics who want to “immanentize the eschaton”, by starting an immense war that will bring the Twelfth Imam from concealment. Both groups want the Bomb.
The question is which group will control use of the Bomb if Iran gets it. Personally I think that the “moderates” will control – there are not enough Twelvers who believe so strongly that they would support the enormous step of actually using the Bomb.
However, as Spengler has shown, Iran can’t sit in peace either, even if the “moderates” prefer not to take any chances.
What is most likely is “a new set of regional wars under a nuclear umbrella.” With the Bomb in hand, Iran will threaten its soft neighbors with invasion and terrorist subversion, secure from US retaliation, and with the promise that they will outlast the US.
And Iran does have “imperial ambitions”. Persia was a great civilization when the Arabs were mere nomads. Iranians have long resented dominance of the Middle East by upstart desert barbarians.
This will not end well, as Saudi Arabia will probably move to acquire the Bomb in self-defense. They’ll have to buy it, rather than build it, but they have the money. A Bomb from either arsenal could leak to independent terrorists, or the confrontation could escalate to nuclear war.
I have the solution:
Convince Valeri Jarrett that attacking Iran gets votes for Obama.
Any Administration incompetent enough to expend over a hundred cruise missiles in the pointless media kabuki that was Libya is certainly capable of killing several thousand Persians while failing to effect Iranian nuclear capability.
Won’t happen. The administration is doing everything to delay Israel’s attacks on Iran until after the election. An attack leads to a huge jump in oil prices and the end to the fragile US economic recovery. Economic recovery is the key to their re-election.
You know, for the 30+ years of my adult life, I have witnessed the threat and implementation of “strong sanctions” as a deterrent. And I am trying my best to recall when sanctions have actually worked as a deterrent.
I’m no military strategist, diplomat, historian, demographic expert, or religious cleric. But a little horse sense tells me that “strong sanctions” can not and will not work with totalitarian regimes, because the sanctions themselves only punish the ordinary folk, further strengthening the hand of the despots.
I say that with some certainty, because as long as the despots and their band of military thugs hold the political power and the weaponry, these thugs will allocate to themselves what is necessary and starve the unnecessary masses as casualties of war, allowing the thugs to frame and propagandize the real enemy as those who facilitated the sanctions.
I would think Cuba’s Castro has proven “strong sanctions” don’t work as once promised. Have Cuban people suffered on account of sanctions? I’m sure they have. Has Castro relinquished the iron grip of Communism in 50 years? Not that I’ve read.
Without further evidence, I submit that these sanctions world leaders have suggested to combat Iran would be the wrong course of action. I would suggest we not waste time with sanctions and take another course of action while we still have the chance.
You have stated the obvious, which is the highest form of wisdom.
There is a way to stop all the work at the iranian nuclear plants. Tactical nukes. One on each “protective mountain”. The bunkers could resist, but nobody could go there for a long time.
It would be very fast.
The heavy conventional bombs could be used against the CCC+I. And the barracks and refinery(ies). And the ports and the pipelines.
I don’t think that hizb’allah would move after watching such a show.
And the answer to any move from South Lebanon could be as convincing as the first strike on Iran.
If the Israelis have the will, the way is there.
But we could be at the beginning of the Nuclear Winter…
Let us pray. We need it anyway, perhaps we are going to need it more than ever.
PS The iranian leaders have stated that their goal is the genocide of all the Jews, therefore Israel is already OK with the international law.
Let’s set the record straight here. The US quest for total hegemony, along with the Zionist regime controlling Israel (and influencing US policies in the Middle East), are the real problem here – NOT Iran.
Fact: The only rouge nuclear nation not a member of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in the region is Israel. The Israeli Government does not allow inspections of there nuclear sites (weapons), and they have been caught selling nuclear weapons to other countries.
http://www.nti.org/country-profiles/israel/nuclear/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/23/israel-south-africa-nuclear-weapons
Iran allows inspections, has ongoing participation by the IAEA in their nuclear energy program (including live monitor equipment) and they have never used tested or offered nuclear secretes to other countries like Israel. Russia offered to take spent fuel from Iran and the US and Israel blocked this proposal.
Fact is Israel and US benefit from a War with Iran, who sell oil in various currencies. The US bought off the Saudi Arabia, who still sell oil in USDs (with the largest arms deal in history)
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/critics-slam-obama-administration-hiding-massive-saudi-arms/story?id=12192558
The double standard and Hypocrites of Israel and the US continue to beat the drums of WAR. http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/pentagon-israel-increasingly-likely-to-attack-iran-1.248907
Hey you forget to say “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud!”
The U.S.A. is an obstacle to Iran; in fact, the only obstacle between them and Israel … so wouldn’t it be more likely for Iran to attempt to do something crazy to the U.S. first?
Andimanutjob is “between a rock and a hard place” … for a second there I thought that the comment was about Obama. Heh! No joke though … “we’re the ones that we’ve been waiting for” sounds exactly like a synopsis of the Hitler speech mentioned. Hank Jr. was right! Obama IS like Hitler! Heh!!
Iran will attempt to attack the U.S. or Israel … but they will not succeed. I would not like to be in Adminanutjob and Assad’s shoes at this point in time; so I’ll just say this to them … Adios Amigos!!!
Curious, but the Japanese were essentially making similar calculations for going to war with the Americans over the American oil and steel embargo under FDR. Actually, in both the German and Japanese examples regime change was required, and taking out Iran’s nukes would only work in the long run in conjunction with regime change.
Thedangerousmusingsofafrightenedlittlechild
David Goldman, your blatant disregard for human life is appalling. For you to justify spilling any country’s citizen’s blood, is a true reflection of your inhumanity. How you are not embarrased by your words in this article is unbelieveable. Shame on you.
“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
–George Orwell
There will be a war, because the Islamic jihadists want one. That is their goal, not terrorism per se. Terrorism is goading. No amount of appeasement, sanctions or threats will do any more than delay the day. Hitler gave up only after his nation had been pounded into the ground, totally unable to function, had lost all its ability to resist. The same with Japan: Emperor Hirohito, a demigod, hung in until total destruction of the nation was the alternative. The Mullah’s will not stop until Tehran is flattened and the cyclotrons stop spinning, and millions of innocents have perished because of a few true believers. As in both these cases, the U.S.A. will come in late, not early.
The Israelis know this and have no intention of being another Poland. They have drawn their own line in the sand and when Iron crosses it, they will attack, fully aware that, after it is all over, they will be blamed for starting the war.
Germany had a vast war machine by 1939,Hitler had overwhelming support from within Germany and from without.
Iran have a pathetic military,could not even defeat Iraq,are going bankrupt,spend less on the military than all of it,s rivals,5 times less than Saudi,are surrounded on all fronts by the military might of America who spend 580 billion dollars compared to 12 billion the Iranians pay.It is the USA that look like 1939 Germany,it is Obama that sounds like Hitler,it is the corporate owned Senate that look like the Fascists.
Get this absolute fact,the IAEA have launched the most intrusive inspections in history,on Irans nuclear sites and continue to confirm that Iran have broken no laws of the NPT but merely chastise Iran for failures to comply with safeguards or protocols.Iran has no fissile material,there is no bomb,they cannot wage war on Israel or their neighbours.Reading the garbage on this page you are trying to convince that Iran have a death wish and the military might to enact that death wish.You all need psychiatric help.
Some good points have been made here about sanctions and even having countries partially destroyed not stopping fanatical regimes. For want of a better way of putting it, we have seen how cultures and nations in the 20th somehow went insane, usually because of some nationalist faddist ideology of relatively short duration. Short duration I say because their ambitions were out of touch with reality or norms of human conduct.
Iran would seem to fit this definition. In WW II the issue of how on board the civilian populations were with the wars of naked aggression their leaders in Japan and Germany became irrelevant; the Allies and U.S. pounded them with bombs, perhaps on theory they had tacit guilt for allowing such regimes to come to power in the first place. At the very least civilian populations in the Axis Powers supplied soldiers and worked in weapons factories.
No matter how out of sync the Iranian people are with their own regime they will nevertheless eventually bear the brunt of the casualties as has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even with clear examples in history it seems that people never learn. In the end the Iranian people would be better off sacrificing their bodies now and take out the regime or take 10 times the casualties if Iran crosses a line they seem determined to cross.
With Iraq and Afghanistan basically out of the way Iran is the next Muslim entity firmly in the cross-hairs of the West yet the similarities to the run ups to regime change that took out Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya seem entirely lost on the Iranian people. The Iranian people better wake up and stop relying on the West to support regime change. If regime change from the West comes, that “support” will be falling out of the sky on their heads.
Hitler was not the only one. I recall that Japanese leaders relied on a similar rationale (embraced enthusiastically in our generation by government historians at the Smithsonian) for bombing Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt imposed sanctions on Japan, including a ban on the sale of scrap steel and perhaps oil as well. The Japanese leadership ran the numbers and concluded that without those raw materials their economy would run out of steam in fairly short order. So they decided to annex the raw materials after destroying our Pacific Fleet. Ergo, Tora! Tora! Tora!
It does not matter whether Hitler or the Japanese were correct in their economic calculations. The point is that they acted on those calculations. Mr. Goldman rightfully fears that the Iranians will do likewise.
The Japanese leadership ran the numbers and concluded that without those raw materials their economy would run out of steam in fairly short order.
“Run out of steam” as in starvation would begin in the medium term, and of course their fleet would be crippled without fuel to run it (as I recall when this went down they had only a few months at normal consumption). Because of the fleet they had a good handle on their oil needs; we put them in a position where they had no choice but to take Indonesia’s oil. (They had previously put themselves in an inflexible posture on agreeing to our demands WRT to their … excesses in China by allowing the development of a culture of politician assassination after the turn of the century.)
Their fixation with fighting us directly, though, I have to wonder about. What if they’d just seized the oil and said, hey, you left us with no choice? I can’t see us declaring a total war on them on behalf of the exiled (by the Nazis) Dutch government.
Read: The Great Pacific War, ISBN 0-312-06364-4
Yamamoto followed Hector C. Bywater’s fictional ( Tom Clancy style ) scenario almost to the letter.
This fictive account, published in 1925 drove Japanese decision making in 1941, 1942.
After reading it, you’ll sit back in astonishment.
This book established IJN strategic thinking, without a doubt.
As for America…
Read Day of Deceit, ISBN 0-684-85339-6
Stinnett’s take on the war is accepted by today’s Japanese as being pretty much definitive.
America HAD to get the atomic bomb FIRST.
It would take wartime conditions for such an achievement.
Ergo, America had to get into the war — by the back door — since Hitler kept ducking FDR’s provocations.
All this chatter about Iran and nuclear weapons. That may be the real danger – maybe not. I’ve often thought that Iran or some other country or organization may be working on biological weapons. Costs are much less than with nuclear weapons if they can secure a sample of biological material. Is there any reason to think this hasn’t happened yet?
Small Pox should be easy to get hold of and not many humans alive today are immune to that virus. There are other dangerous viruses that may be altered to kill humans that aren’t currently able to. The Chicken Flu for one. You just don’t know what some evil forces are doing in the dark of a lab in a far away land. From a small sample of some dangerous virus its easy to propagate more and just as easy to find a delivery ‘vehicle’ for these viruses. Infect the ‘vehicle’ and send them to Israel or the USA – all that is needed is a single willing walking ‘vehicle’ (one sacrificial human). Something islam seems to have no problem recruiting. By the time we become aware of the magnitude of the problem it’ll be too late for a very large percentage of the population.
I believe that if humans are able to destroy our current civilization it probably will be through biological weapons – not nuclear. The beauty of it (in the eyes of our enemies) is it destroys most of the population yet leaves the cities intact. Like taking out your neighbor and moving into his home and taking as your own only on a large scale. And your own people (at least the ones you vaccinate) are immune to the virus.
Of the stuff that is publicly known about (i.e. not hidden in the archives and freezers of ex-Soviet germ warfare labs) smallpox is the only one with devastating potential.
Problem is, while we would have been in not great shape around 9/11 today we have enough full strength vaccine for everyone. Counterwise, the Iranians couldn’t use such contagious weapons without first inoculating their not small (not yet) population, which is something that can’t be hidden.
Pretty much the same holds for anything they or anyone else might develop: maybe we’d get caught flat footed, although few nations are in a better posture to deal with such a plague than ours. And we’d in theory avoid getting caught out by noticing the inoculation program and getting samples.
The language is called “Farsi” jack@ss!
as in farsical?
I’m having trouble following your logic. You write “Ahmadinejad knows with certainty that Persian will become an extinct language in a few generations given the present fertility trend.” So you think he will launch a suicidal war, and this will have a better outcome for the Persian population?
Also “The demographic disaster will hit just as oil exports dry up during the 2020s.” If their oil resources are about to expire why wouldn’t they be looking at alternative energy sources, for example nuclear?
The alternative energy sources they are looking at are Bahraini oil and Saudi oil.
If they aren’t interested in nuclear weapons then there is no explanation for their attempts to develop long range missiles. And their attempts to enrich uranium to 20%. And their refusal to accept Russian offers to provide them with nuclear fuel rods in exchange for them giving up their enrichment program. And etc. If they aren’t developing nuclear weapons then they are trying to make the world believe that they are.
And then there’s their statements that they’re going to wipe Israel off the map. How could they do such a thing without nukes?
A very significant difference between Israel and the European Jews is that the latter did not have nuclear weapons and the technology to deliver them.Iran’s technology may or may not work but you can bet that Israel’s will.I predict that an attack on Israel by the mullahs will result in at least 30 million dead Iranians and the disappearance of the Iranian state
Yes but David true to Spenglerian form only mentions Hitler’s obsession with the population and racialist dynamics, particularly the vast population of the USSR being against Germany in 1939. He does not mention the real reason the key players AROUND HITLER were in such a hurry for Germany to get a ‘limited’ war of conquest to take Poland after the Reich absorbed Czechoslovakia and Austria. And that is of course that the Nazi Reich had been in an expansionary, inflationary monetary policy for years, and without war both Hagmar Schacht and Walter Funk (the Nazi economists of autarky par excellence) believed Nazi Germany would suffer a bout of severe inflation that would bring back memories of Weimar very quickly. That would be even more likely had the UK and US been able to come to some sort of agreement on economic warfare against Germany, but as it was a very significant but influential minority of the ultra wealthy in both the US and UK were supporting Hitler via the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil, the British Royals, IBM providing the punch cards that enabled the Holocaust, Margaret Sanger’s admiration for Nazi eugenics/sterilization of ‘the feeble minded’, etc etc.
But it’s funny how out of all the Nazi figures one hardly hears a peep about Schacht and Funk, even though the former was hanged at Nuremberg, and the latter coined the term Europische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft or the Nazi Economic Union for Europe. Perhaps given the parallels with the Germans now basically demanding Greece’s national patrimony in return for a few miserable weeks worth of loans the parallels would be too disturbing. I sincerely believe the threat to EUrope is not ‘Putin’s Russia’ but a resurgent Germany using debt and bailouts to save its own banks to accomplish what two world wars could not.
Of course Iran is indeed facing economic ruin, both due to the mullahs policies and the noose of Western sanctions tightening. Though it appears for now that noose has been loosened thanks to Russian and Chinese intermediaries, as David’s old Asia Times co-contributor Pepe Escobar points out.
You will notice however that despite China also vetoing the UN resolution calling for the overthrow of Assad that all the vitriol both at PJM (Roger Simon) and in mainstream media is directed against Russia. There’s a reason for that. The Russians might have been willing to play ball on Syria but after Iraq and getting an ‘are you in, or out on your oil contracts?’ offer they couldn’t refuse regarding Libya they’ve had enough. And I say this as no fan of Assad, but Roger and the neocons and basically the entire Western media doesn’t give a damn if the people fighting the Assad regime ARE Muslim Brotherhood hardcore Islamists. They really don’t.
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/02/04/clinton_and_lavrov_square_off_over_syria
“I sincerely believe the threat to EUrope is not ‘Putin’s Russia’ but a resurgent Germany using debt and bailouts to save its own banks to accomplish what two world wars could not.”
I’ve written about that very subject here more than a few times. Germany is stringing along Greece and other countries with ‘just enough’ to keep on the edge of disaster but not enough to solve anything. Other than that I’m not quite sure what their long term strategy is but it can’t bode well for Greece or the other countries that are in economic decline.
Financial servitude? Maybe…
The last and only chance we had to rectify the question of Iran was in 1979, and we failed to do so. Any thought of action against them now will be pre-empted by Israel, who, inside of a year, will have lost the relative comfort of being surrounded by secular states and will act out of mere survival and, ironically, seal its own fate at the same time. It’s not as if we didn’t see this coming and Obama pandering to the collective Arab states was just another page from the history of WWII and the feckless Chamberlain’s attempt to appease the aggressor. This new chapter of the Middle East, like the proverbial snowball, will gain speed and size rapidly and, if we’re not careful, will suck us all into the maelstrom.
You might send a note to Jimmy Carter and thank him for at least some of blame for the mess that is Afghanistan and Iran.
He deserves nothing less.
Save your ire for Baldwin…
All of the key dropped balls were made with Baldwin as PM.
Chamberlain was playing for time… and spending on defense like a maniac.
Churchill fought WWII with Chamberlain’s weapons. (!) He never initiated any strategic spending, himself.
Chamberlain started up: Chain Home radar, Spitfire, Hurricane, the bomber fleet and the factories to produce them.
Chamberlain started up: a revived RN battle fleet. King George battleships and such…
What Britain and France were absolutely counting on was their joint economic blockade vs Hitler WRT RUBBER.
Stalin blew all of their schemes clean out of the water with his war initiating Pact.
In one of histories greatest ironies, Stalin chose the start date for WWII in Europe, not Hitler. Adolf was ready to go any old day — it was Stalin that picked September 1, 1939.
The Pact documents have finally been released to scholars — and they show that the Red Army was stipulated to attack at the EXACT SAME TIME AS GERMANY.
Instead, Stalin made excuses as to his army not being ready. This lie later came back to haunt the Red Army. His ‘slow’ mobilization for Poland was a contributing factor in 1941. Hitler figured anyone unable to walk over the Poles in 39 would be easy meat in 41.
There’s still the terrible optics at best of Munich and what he said about it, but you’re largely right, e.g. Churchill was totally without power prior to the outbreak of war and there’s a number of reasons the latter insisted on Chamberlain being a part of the War Cabinet until he was felled by illness.
Also don’t forget the Red Army’s terrible performance against the Finns in the Winter War of 1939-40. Demonstrably lousy tactics and strategy (there are consequences to being so internally focused you wipe out your officer corps as a potential threat) plus the lousy logistics you point out made the USSR tempting target when it was found that the Greater West European Co-Prosperity Sphere’s productivity was food limited.
(An insight from the fantastic recent economic history of Nazi Germany, The Wages of Destruction; the plan was to starve the captured cities and send the resultant surplus west.)
The Wages of Destruction – Thanks for the reference. Now on my Amazon list.
The parallel being that if Nazi Germany had printed too many Reichsmarks to finance an armaments-industry driven industrial build out (with a lot of help from American technology, as did Stalin), the Poles and Czechoslovaks wouldn’t be able to refuse acceptance of such once the Skoda and Brno works were in the hands of the Reich. Prior to the absorption of Czechoslovakia the Nazis were chronically short on tanks and explosives.
Even the economic underlying motives behind WWII are not universally understood or appreciated 70 years on, including why Germany’s Junkers and top magnates (Krupp, IG Farben, et al) believed they could control Hitler for so long even as his ambitions continued to exceed his means, and only the incompetence and divided nature of his enemies in 1939 saved him.
Now let me ask you all this: why is some alternative newspaper in the U.S. the only web source for Russia’s amendments to the UN resolution mentioning ‘armed groups’? Shouldn’t the New York Times at least carry the cliffs notes version?
As a point of reference, NAZI Germany circa 1937 was an existential threat to Europe. The NAZI’s had an army as large as the rest of Europe, connected by land to all of the target countries. Iran today has the physical paupers army of general cannon fodder they had 30 years ago when they fought the Iran-Iraq war and lost.
Cutting to the absolute end of the argument: Iran has exactly One, 1, One less than 2, shots at Israel. Hit, miss, close or far, if they actually fire the rocket with a nuclear tip, then 3000 years of Persian history will come to an end within the hour. The US aimed weapons will be launched from the Persian Gulf and 15-25 minutes later Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s mailbox will explode with 150-odd kilotons. Iran will become the glass topped parking lot.
The American people, myself included, are tired of the “continuous war”. We are ready for a break. After 10 years or mid-east war, I need a little more than, “the Mullahs are nuts”. We all know their nuts. And John Bolton has been saying the mushroom cloud over Telaviv is 3 months away for 8 years.
Instead, what the author, and others advocates is a pre-emptive strike, that will kill 1 or 10 or 100 thousand Iranians, because they MIGHT successfully launch a nuclear weapon.
The bottom line is: If we do what the author asks, what will happen in the region after we have bombed them for say 6 months? Will the Syria’s, Jordanian’s, Turks’, Saud’s, like us more? NO. Will Isreal be safer? No because the Mullah’s have buried stuff to deep.
OUTCOME: Everyone hates the US. Israel is still in the crosshairs. And we’re involved in yet another land war in Asia. (See “Princess Bride”)
Your account of the scenarios is too narrow. More likely: Iranian regulars attached to Hizbollah launch missiles tipped with chemical weapons at Tel Aviv, or attempt to blow up the Haifa refineries; or, Iranian irregulars infiltrate Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, or Basra in Iraq, and seize oil fields; or, a dirty bomb goes off in Washington and makes the Mall radioactive. Iran escalates behind a nuclear umbrella. The Iranian have shown themselves adept at forcing the burden of uncertainty upon us. That is why I railed for years against a nation-building deployment in Iraq. It just turned our soldiers into hostages. Sadly, we are going to have war for the indefinite future, whether we like it or not, but it does not need to be the sort of war that requires a substantial deployment of ground forces. The Balkans, said Bismarck, were not worth the bones of one Pomeranian Grenadier, and I feel the same way about the whole of the Muslim world. But we do need to neutralize threats. More air power, more drones, more special forces, more cyberwar, more sabotage, and so on will do the job at a fraction of the human and financial cost of the Iraq misadventure.
This is war mongering, plain and simple. The writer has no stake in the game and seems to believe in some fantasy that we can make the world in to whatever we wish by military force. Oh yeah, and not pay for it. The drumbeat for war with Iran is truly sickening.
I don’t think we can make the world into whatever we want. But we can prevent certain parts of it from turning into things we don’t want them to be by military force. I do have a stake in the game. I live in New York and don’t want dirty bombs going off in the subway.
Yes. It is an imperative of warfare that there are no safe zones, once either side has violated them. At that point, all rules change. That is why we have a Geneva Convention: to set out the acceptd rules of war. They do not apply once they’re broken, however, and that’s where we go astray.
Churches are inviolet up until the point that someone violates them. Then, if you contiunue to play nice while being shot at from the church, you are a fool, and won’t be one for much longer.
Arabs love hiding behind women’s skirts, when it suits them, and then love to cry, “foul!” when caught out. We all feel bad when the woman is killed, yet somehow, we don’t feel sorry for all the other women that the hiding miscreant later kills because he got away.
We must stop letting ourselves be played. War is hell. Best to have it out quickly, instead of playing nicey-nice with scum.
Slightly more thoughts:
Can the Iranians close the Straights of Hormuz? No. They have tried it off-and-on for 30 years. Iranians can launch all the less than effective missiles they want. When one of their rockets actually hits a ship, BOOM, the US Navy wipes that site out, to the foundation.
To me, as an American, the question is how many people am I willing to kill in my name, before an enemy actually kills anyone. I’m good to kill lots of people if the country in question actually tries to kill someone. But a country talking HUGE SMACK is not a reason to kill thousands of people.
The answer I would suggesty is“asymmetric” warfare. In Iraq and Afghanistan it means little guys blowing up bombs killing US soldier’s 1 at a time. We, the US, apply huge amounts of firepower to kill large numbers them. They in return kill us 1 at a time. With Iran I would flip that. Iran$ Iran? Are you paying attention? Fire any weapon that passes your generally accepted western boundary, and you will not like the result.
“But a country talking HUGE SMACK is not a reason to kill thousands of people.”
11/4/79–US Embassy was invaded & its personnel were taken captive. Allowing the taking of this Embassy was an act of war against the US. Since then Iran’s militant theocracy has been funding and inspiring Islamist jihad against the West. Thousands have died including many Americans. To those of you who wish to understand how wrong StewartInGA’s statement is, please read Winning the Unwinnable War by Elan Journo.
We are in an existential war with these people, StewartInGA, whether you and many of those who might agree with you choose to acknowledge it or not. They wish us death. All of us. The evidence is unassailable.
might be time to haul yr fat ass out of yr lazyboy, keyboard warrior, and go explore the real world. You might be amazed to see it isnt populated by the bogeymen intent on yr destruction that the media you bookmark keep terrifying you with.
9-11
I do not fear the Iranian bomb as much as Spengler. It is the Iranian’s ‘big stick’ not their ‘Final Solution’. However, Iran is at war with us. They have been since they took our embassy. They still issue stamps commemorating the event. They call it ‘Breaking the CIA spy ring’ or something like that (it has been years since I’ve seen one of the stamps).
They produced and provided IED’s to kill our soldiers in another country, not Iran. They provide safe-haven for people who kill American soldiers. Certainly they have been training killers and even in some cases sending them to our soil.
Whatever military response they get from us, they have called it on their own heads. Right now, they are Libya or Syria. Two years from now they are Pakistan without India to counter-balance them. Saudis cannot protect themselves. It doesn’t matter how much hardware they purchase or how many mercenaries they hire, Saudi’s defense against Iran is entirely in our hands. The threat of an American response is all that keeps them from the oil fields.
Give them nukes and the threat of our intervention to anything the Iranians does drops drastically. We put up with Pakistan harboring Binladen for years. Do you think we would have done the same without their nukes?
I do not think we should get into a ground war with Iran, but who said we needed to? We can remove their nuke capabilities without putting anything but a few special forces on the ground to spot targets.
Hitler had a defanged Europe, which made it low hanging fruit. Israel and America are two of the best armed countries in the world. Not even a fair comparison. Iran can rattle the sword but they are impotent. Even with nukes they don’t stand a chance in hell. Nukes just make it more complicated to fight them.
True; we could neutralize Iran easily. Hitler presented a problem of a different order. But Iran still could take a lot of us with it, unless preempted.
David, the best argument your opponents bring up is the day after. And no I don’t just mean the $200 a barrel oil, since Iran’s production might be made up by Russia, Africa, South America, and surging North American output etc. And the Straits could be promptly reopened after Iran’s air force and Navy are bombed into oblivion, even if a supertanker gets sunk to block the narrowest point of Hormuz.
Rather what I mean is this — not only are the bunkers too deep, as Panetta has already admitted, for the U.S. much less Israel to take out from the air (a suicide mission by Israel’s best group of Farsi speaking specops soldiers probably wouldn’t work out very well and would hand Iran a huge propaganda coup when one or two of the Seyeret Metkal survivors are captured).
But EVEN if you do succeed in taking out a couple of those mountainside installations, killing a bunch of Iranian nuke scientists, and crippling the Iranian military and Revolutionary Guards capacity to attack anyone outside Iran….EVEN then, the mullahs are still there, furious for vengeance.
And on top of that, having confirmed Pakistan’s most paranoid fears, we cannot rule out the Pakistanis offering Iran nuclear insurance for a cool half billion or so, and neither the U.S. nor Israel being able to prevent Pakistan supplying Iran with a pocket nuke or two by land short of an overt act of war against Pakistan. And this scenario rules out the Iranians buying a single missile-ready nuke from the Norks (something at least one ex-Pentagon analysts suggests they have already done) since the air or sea routes from Pyongyang to Teheran can be interdicted.
At the end of the day, to suggest that the regime would fall in my estimation is about as optimistic as the neocons projections that Iraqis would be shocked and awed by the overwhelming U.S drive to Baghdad in 03′. And as the pseudonymous Spengler you have railed against such overoptimism about the Middle East for years. Yet as the public intellectual David P. Goldman you are ready to see Assad toppled and seem all too assured his replacement will not be an MBO junta eager to turn Israel’s quiet Golan Heights border hot, and one unlike in Egypt that cannot be starved out. How much worse then for a post-strike on Iran environment!
This is of course, exactly what the Russians know, what the ousted ‘early retired’ Mossad chief who likely presided over the assassinations of several Iranian scientists/Stuxnet sabotage knows.
Funny how we never EVER hear him mentioned much at PJM or even in the New York Times/Washington Post!
IF ONLY…Ron Paul could have made this argument, I think he could have run circles even around the likes of Newt Gingrich, no slouch in the debating department. Rand if briefed by Andrew Bacevich most certainly could by 2016. But I suspect this will all be moot as the U.S. by hook or crook will be drawn into war with Iran, perhaps even before Obama wins reelection over a stunned GOP.
Personally, I think the Russians and Chinese are doing us a favor by prolonging Basher Assad’s tenure in Damascus. Neither the pro-Iranian Alawites nor the Muslim Brotherhood are compatible with US interests, so the best outcome is none of the above, which is what we have at the moment. As far as the “after” scenario goes in Iran: a defeated regime is easier to beat than a triumphal one. My view is that the US should deal with problems as they emerge. A nuclear-armed Iran threatens Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan and the rest of the region, not to mention Israel. Without nuclear weapons in Iranian hands, the problems are all far easier to control. The Pakistani angle is far-fetched.
a STRATFOR article on Germany today
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/germanys-role-europe-and-european-debt-crisis
corroborated by this french article
http://lecercle.lesechos.fr/economie-societe/international/europe/221142252/quand-allemagne-siphonne-liquidites-voisins
In other words, Rand knows, unlike his father, that the winningest arguments are not based on principal but simply on plain prudence.
As I’ve been warning David and PJMers for months, if you think one frail 76-year-old man was a mortal threat to the GOP and the Republic who had to be denounced at all costs, imagine what will happen four years from now when the U.S. is even more broke, the dollar worth less, and more Americans are dead after fighting in Afghanistan, Syria or elsewhere. Strike the old man down like Obi Wan Kenobi and he’ll come back at the Empire more powerful than they can yet imagine.
At any rate, the oil embargo was basically an open invitation to Iran to go ahead and choose war, just as it basically forced the hand of the Japanese in 41′. The fact that the Iranians haven’t taken the invitation yet proves they know their position is far more weak than Japan’s was in 41-early 42, and it hints at a greater rationality/lack of desire to welcome the Hidden Imam with a mushroom cloud of glory than David would care to admit.
Viktor (not that Victor) wrote: “Strike the old man down like Obi Wan Kenobi and he’ll come back at the Empire more powerful than they can yet imagine”.
As long as Rand Skywalker can avoid the temptation to go postal the next time an Imperial Stormtrooper or TSA clerk questions his toothpaste.
I get the sense that this chap who calls himself Viktor is not accustomed to thinking that he could be wrong about … anything.
“It is too bad the West did not have the good sense to correct the problem in 2005. However much it costs in Iranian blood and well-being, it’s still worth it.”
And how many Jewish lives would a strike on Iran cost? The latest reports say that 200,000 missiles are aimed at Israel. Would Mr Goldman care to tell us why Iranian lives are worth so little?
We had to kill a lot of German babies to stop Hitler. If you have a regime that makes genocidal threats while acquiring weapons of mass destruction, don’t take chances. I doubt Iranian collateral damage would add up to more than a few thousand civilian casualties now; if we actually get into a war with a nuclear-armed Iraq, we might be compelled to kill millions. Preemption probably is the merciful solution. And, yes, some Israelis surely would die, and some Americans as Iran seeks vengeance.
‘pre-emption is the merciful solution’
Q: Why is it that keyboard warriors are always so casual about mass slaughter? A: Because they cant recopnise their own sociopathic mindset because their world hums along to the tune of trite psuedo-intellectualism (i.e Hitler analogies).
Have you enlisted yet, to save your loved ones from the inevitable dirty bombs that the entire Muslim population of the world are constructing in every one of their kitchens as we speak?
Hey Pat – If your nose is bent out of shape that an internet columnist is writing a short opinion column on the war instead of enlisting, then surely you objected in 2008 when Sen. Obama, who never served in the armed forces, sought the position of Commander-In-Chief in time of war?
“We had to kill a lot of German babies to stop Hitler”. Really? Hitler was already dead when most of Germany’s children died. For example, four of the older siplings of my husband (none of them older than 5 years).My husband was born in Denmark, his youngest sister in North Germany. They survived because they got food from South America. Furthermore,a relative of mine travalled across S.America and in a small church in Chile he found a letter on the wall written in German. The City of Bremen thanked the community there for food. I persume we owe South America quite a lot. I simply wonder why our media never mention this reality. No, we in Germany do not forget the past. However, our past is very different from that of the US. For example, we have no problems to see in the Iranian children our own. And they are just as innocent as any other child on this earth. It is easy to define the past with the knowledge of today. Nobody seemed to know the future more than my oncle did when he predicted that the Amis would occupy Germany forever. Oh yes, he was an enemy of Hitler too and he said so in every letter. And he did not hate the Russians.He had a Russian girl-friend named Olga. This is part of our reality. We do not think the way you want us to do.
Dear Marianne(Germany),
There’s really no need for you to thank the U.S. for sustaining and re-building post-war West Germany with the Marshall Plan, Berlin Airlift, etc. It was the least we could do. After all, the Western Allies were such brutes as to declare war in 1939 after the negotiations at Munich had gone so well.
hmm Latin america feeding the Germans? it rings a bell , weren’t Nazis fled there with Vatican help?
You do not surprise me. But that is my argument: South America is only seen as a Nazi restplace, nothing else. South America deserves better. On the other hand, I do not see the role of France in Europe very positive. The only reliable factor in regard to the French is that they are somehow not very reliable. Except …but that is another story. Regarding the past: You should focus on your sins towards Algeria. Plenty of work to do. To the Euro: It was your idea and there is a treaty that rules out any bail-outs. You cannot pretend that treaties do not matter. We take treaties very serious. No, we do not want to dominate others.But we do not allow others to dominate us any more. WE – the people of Germany. Oh, we fools would even bail out whole Europe – if we could.But we faced 20 years of misery – nothing more. No money left – only debts and the allowance to make even more debts. What a mad world. The Chinese and the Indians will take over the world and we can do nothing to avoid it. The only link between my parents’ Europe and the Europe I live in is the notion of desperation and the feelings of helplessness.
But this time we simply refuse to take over the role of the guily ones. We are fed up, simply fed up with everything and everybody. (This is the mood of the average persons in Germany). Why should we wish to take over Europe? We never profited of the Euro. That is a fairy tale. We only had two options. We could stop the jobs going to the East by accepting lower payment(American investors wanted the place with the a low payment and good and reliable work).There we are and we try not to hate you, all of you. Hate is not a solution, but a further step to misery. That is one of the conclusions we have drawn from the past.
“Why should we wish to take over Europe?”
Well, the last time it was because you were looking for some lebensraum…and some slav slave labor.
“On the other hand, I do not see the role of France in Europe very positive. The only reliable factor in regard to the French is that they are somehow not very reliable.”
oh that must be a compliment then for not complying to the german diktats !
“Except …but that is another story. Regarding the past: You should focus on your sins towards Algeria.”
Hmm Algeria war wasn’t a genocidal expensive war, it was a civil war on a french territory (you surely are aware that Algeria was a french department unlike Marocco and Tunisia)
Besides collateral dammages were never as high as the FLN propaganda displayed, half of the victims were due to FLN slaughtering its own population
http://necrometrics.com/20c300k.htm#Algeria
“To the Euro: It was your idea and there is a treaty that rules out any bail-outs. You cannot pretend that treaties do not matter. We take treaties very serious. No, we do not want to dominate others.
No the euro wasn’t a french idea, it was a far older EU project !
“France didn’t impose the euro on Germany, it’s what the german medias that liked to display this “lie” to their frustrated readers !the euro was in the EU books goal since the beginning, and was quite a few times delayed because of economical inconveniences, the first, was the 1973 oil shock ! Do you think that France could impose it, when we watched how Germany refused any of France’s propositions to solve the euro crisis since it started, the euro was quite convenient for the german corporations, which couldn’t rely on their eastern part to buy their merchandises !and see where the BCE is settled, in Germany with the Bundesbank rules, see what is the euro, a DM copy, at lower rate, convenient, otherwise Germany, like Zwitzerland did with the Franc, would have had to freeze the DM value”
oh and rigidly hiding behind treaties doesn’t concern Germany when she need printing money, like Super Mario did, becue poor Bundesbank is full of junk bonds, and was on the verge to implode as it couldn’t provide any further insurance for the markets, of course, this ECB courtesy was made behind the curtains !
“But we do not allow others to dominate us any more.”
LMAO, so far this sin was generally attribuated to your country !
“WE – the people of Germany. Oh, we fools would even bail out whole Europe – if we could.But we faced 20 years of misery – nothing more. No money left – only debts and the allowance to make even more debts. What a mad world”
yeah, and you expect that the people in the “Mediterranean club” will cry for your misery ?
“The Chinese and the Indians will take over the world and we can do nothing to avoid it. The only link between my parents’ Europe and the Europe I live in is the notion of desperation and the feelings of helplessness.”
oh, the scaring China and India, are they going to manufacture german goods at a lower price?
That’s the argument to keep the european sheep into the Brussels/Berlin stable !
“Why should we wish to take over Europe? We never profited of the Euro.”
not the german people of course that was condamned to part-time jobs at less than €5/hour, and to HartzIV programs, so that their big corporations could make surpluses and benefits.
If you want to not be the object of the countries that are forced into a grave recession because of Merkel’s austerity diktats, then vote her out, and quit the euro, you’ll be applaussed by the whole popole of EZ !
Besides we aren’t going to vote for Sarkozy, that want to ride on the german horse for keeping his position !
“59. Ed Snate
I get the sense that this chap who calls himself Viktor is not accustomed to thinking that he could be wrong about … anything.” Ed, don’t you wish someone had asked the American public in 2003, ‘So we go into Iraq, and after everyone’s happy that Saddam’s gone…our boys drive around, get the $hit bombed out of them with IEDs, and we lose 4,000 fine young men and a trillion dollars minimim with probably two to three til more lifetime caring for these crippled guys for life. At the end Iraq has a government quite friendly to Iran with most of its 1 million Christians fleeing to Syria or Jordan. How’s that sound?’
Just an attempt to ask ‘what’s next’ when it comes to Iraq, er Iran.
And 200,000 is probably an exaggeration. It’s probably something like 20,000 missiles owned by Hezbollah, Hamas, et al…mostly Katyushas, of which perhaps a few hundred will actually hit anything even if they’re volleyed all at once.
Dear Viktor (not that Victor),
Thank you for the video.
I would have thought that in my comment responding to your umpteenth comment intoning, “Strike the old man down like Obi Wan Kenobi (w/RoPa in the Obi Wan role) and he’ll come back at the Empire more powerful than they can yet imagine”, it would have been understood if I used a bit of hyperbole.
Since you seem not to have gotten it, I’ll explain that, no I didn’t intend to convey the first definition of “postal” (i.e., that Rand Paul was a postal worker who shot up his place of employment or anything close). What I was intending to convey was what is clear from the news story in the clip to which you linked, that Rand Paul refused to follow a simple and basic procedure so that he could proceed through TSA pre-flight screening and allow them to insure a safe flight.
I fly a fair amount. I often fly one-way, have frequent Middle Eastern travel recorded on my passport (and presumably on any electronic record which TSA accesses), and have had some munitions residue on my carry-on luggage due to my work. Despite this, I’ve never had a problem passing through TSA when traveling in normal civilian status, w/o any special ID. It doesn’t require a constitutional scholar to pass through TSA, just patience and courtesy towards the TSA agents.
I don’t know what motivated Rand Paul’s actions but based on the clip, I expect it went down like this:
(Rand Paul (RP) passes through electronic screen and an alert is sounded)
TSA screener: Sir, the machine detected an anomaly. Procedures require that I pat you down. May I proceed?
RP: I don’t want you to follow the procedure; I want you to process me through the electronic screener again.
TSA screener: I’m not permitted to deviate from the procedure. You must be patted down before you can proceed.
RP: I refuse to submit to the pat down. BTW, I’m Senator Rand Paul.
TSA screener: Sir, we are required to apply the same procedure for all passengers. Please sit in this comfortable chair. I will call my supervisor to resolve this matter.
I don’t writing that you were dishonest regarding RoPa’s newsletter, although I think RoPa has been a four-flushing liar in this matter. In addition to being a liar, the newsletter business shows he’s either a racist or a money grubbing opportunist, although I will concede he could be both (as our host called him, “a poltroon”).
Maybe my problem is I have a hard time joining you in envisioning RoPa as Obi Wan Kenobi. He seems to me to be more of a Jar Jar Binks type …
serious question for Mr. Goldman.
if an Iranian blogger suggested a dirty bomb strike on NY as a ‘merciful’ pre-emptive strike to lessen inevitable nuke casualties, would you consider the writer sane?
gee. no reply. no surprise there. I guess sabre-rattling from a safe distance is a-ok when its dog-whistling American exceptionalism, right?
Truly pathetic stuff.
Replying to you would be a waste of perfectly good electrons.
MarcH — here’s the video of Rand ‘going postal’ from The Tennessean newspaper’s website:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgUG4m0OwF0
You once accused me of being dishonest regarding Ron Paul’s newsletters and whether Brother Ron authored them. I replied that I care far more how a person actually treats black people and other minorities (for example in giving them donated health care over many years) in judging whether they’re racist than something they’re alleged to have written twenty years ago (in fact, Scott McConnell at AmCongMag makes a very good case that the true author was one Lew Rockwell, who has since distanced himself from his own stuff). Care to stand corrected regarding TSA’s weak smears against Rand then?
David, thank you for taking the time to reply. I hope you’re right about Syria. The gnashing of teeth at Russia hopefully is just for PJM and the other useful echo chambers’ consumption. It sounds like you’re not drinking the neocon koolaid that Assad’s overthrow will usher in sweetness and sunshine.
MarcH
Dear Viktor (not that Victor),
Thank you for the video.
I would have thought that in my comment responding to your umpteenth comment intoning, “Strike the old man down like Obi Wan Kenobi (w/RoPa in the Obi Wan role) and he’ll come back at the Empire more powerful than they can yet imagine”, it would have been understood if I used a bit of hyperbole.
Since you seem not to have gotten it, I’ll explain that, no I didn’t intend to convey the first definition of “postal” (i.e., that Rand Paul was a postal worker who shot up his place of employment or anything close). What I was intending to convey was what is clear from the news story in the clip to which you linked, that Rand Paul refused to follow a simple and basic procedure so that he could proceed through TSA pre-flight screening and allow them to insure a safe flight.
I fly a fair amount. I often fly one-way, have frequent Middle Eastern travel recorded on my passport (and presumably on any electronic record which TSA accesses), and have had some munitions residue on my carry-on luggage due to my work. Despite this, I’ve never had a problem passing through TSA when traveling in normal civilian status, w/o any special ID. It doesn’t require a constitutional scholar to pass through TSA, just patience and courtesy towards the TSA agents.
I don’t know what motivated Rand Paul’s actions but based on the clip, I expect it went down like this:
(Rand Paul (RP) passes through electronic screen and an alert is sounded)
TSA screener: Sir, the machine detected an anomaly. Procedures require that I pat you down. May I proceed?
RP: I don’t want you to follow the procedure; I want you to process me through the electronic screener again.
TSA screener: I’m not permitted to deviate from the procedure. You must be patted down before you can proceed.
RP: I refuse to submit to the pat down. BTW, I’m Senator Rand Paul.
TSA screener: Sir, we are required to apply the same procedure for all passengers. Please sit in this comfortable chair. I will call my supervisor to resolve this matter.
I don’t writing that you were dishonest regarding RoPa’s newsletter, although I think RoPa has been a four-flushing liar in this matter. In addition to being a liar, the newsletter business shows he’s either a racist or a money grubbing opportunist, although I will concede he could be both (as our host called him, “a poltroon”).
Maybe my problem is I have a hard time joining you in envisioning RoPa as Obi Wan Kenobi. He seems to me to be more of a Jar Jar Binks type …
Every so often I read in the media about the exchanging of personal letters between Pope Benedict & Ahmadinejad. I think they also met in Rome. I get the impression that Ahmadinejad is very respectful of the pope. Is there any significance about this “weird” relationship? (I am not in any way implying that the pope likes this man.) Is the pope’s cordiality towards Ahmadinejad, slowing down the Iranian president’s nuclear ambition?
This is paranoid breast feeding propaganda. Stay away from Iran. You’ve been warned.
From the Timothy McVeigh Fan Club, Iranian covert ops, Bellevue Hospital, or all three? I’ve had to spam a couple of dozen lunatic rants like this one. Must be the Hitler analogy that bothers them — it’s one thing to trash-talk the Iranians, but St. Adolf? Evidently I went too far.
Iran poses absolutely no threat to the USA.
If Israel feels threatened by Iran, let Israel start a war and let Israel deal with the consequences.
The USA should stay out of it. It’s none of our business.
“Marg bar Amrika!”
Look it up – it’s in Farsi.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu once asked a Holocaust survivor what he had learned from his experience. The man answered “When someone says he is going to kill you, believe him!”
Even someone with no way to do it, cuz that’s the rub ain’t it?
Given that this whole topic is on when (almost certainly rather than if, absent vigorous military action) Iran gets nukes, they’ll have plenty of capability sooner rather than later.
“If Israel feels threatened by Iran, let Israel start a war and let Israel deal with the consequences.
The USA should stay out of it. It’s none of our business.”
Well great. I was “our” business when Israel was ready to go in 2008 before they buried everything inside a mountain. Bush refused to let Israel overfly US controlled airspace. It would have been much easier then.
Now it is none of “our” business when Obama still thows up barriers to Israel protecting themselves while they dig in deeper.
Just like it was none of “our” business when Saddam sent Scud missiles to attack Israel in GWI, a war Israel did not participate in or desire. Then he would not allow the IAF to respond. The planes were in the air and daddy Bush would not give them a corridor.
It is too late for the US to just stay out of it. We have already screwed up their best chances now you want to wash your hands of it?
Your analogy with hitler is justified but we know that
thanks to Winston Churchill iron’s will the bad start of
WW II could be reversed.Now your conclusion rings a defeatist tune : Why the ” west ” has not started yet – since 2005 – to stop Iran nuclear weapons drive ? So my question is why do the west keeps on producing only those weak-meek-pathetic leaders ? Bush Jr.endorsed in 2007 a grotesque N.I.E report stating that Iran was NOT pursuing nuclear weapons ! Since then the IAAE ( the Vienna watchdog on nuclear activity ) has finally admitted that Iran was actually running a covert nuclear weapon program.Then what has done – what you call the ” west “- something to stop it ? Sanctions, wich barely dent a single second the mullahs ruling the Teheran regime from keeping on the same game .So the whole world (your so-called ” west ” and also Russia China etc..) is slowly but surely dragged by the west inertia and fear towards the first stage real confrontation the iranian clerics want : Israel pre-emptive attack versus Iran. At that point let’s analyze the Obama’s administration very strange behaviour: Obama-Panetta-Clinton knows very well that Israel left alone,betrayed by the actual US president , will be cornered into a pre-emptive attack.If it succeeds then Obama will try to stands out as a ” true friend of israel ” and as a champion of the ” West ” but he will have little dividends for the USA because by his own nature Obama does not want to play the old US imperial game . If it fails , Obama will plays the role of the schoolmaster who told the destroyed and unruly Israel he should have stayed good instead of playing bully and he will join the arab camp against the remains of Israel. This is hypocrite but in both cases the economic damages ( oil reaching 250 $-ormuz straits blocked – the Mideast in full war of reprisal lebanon-Syria reprisal against Israel-Egypt reneging the peace treaty with Israel-nuclear proliferation with Saudi,Turks,Egyptian also building-buying nuclear weapons ..) will be heavy for the ” west “.So my conclusion is that the Obama administration runs a very short-sighted policy by trying to neutralize or submit Israel into accepting the Iranian nuclear program and its final aim ( destruction of Israel- then expansion of the shiite power over the Iraq-Syria and safeguards emirates and saudi arabia).This Obama posture very cynically considers the desruction of Israel as a collateral damage in the ” grand strategy ” of placating the shiites ( you had your cake with Israel destroyed so now keep cool, we the USA shares with Iran the mideast the US-Saudi-Emirates vs The Iran-Iraq-Syria and let’s try to do business..) .The Obama’s does not see that far from accepting a new statu-quo the iranian clerics will run for
the second jugular of the oil route :the Suez canal .It may take 10 more years but the shiites will replay what once the mahometan armies did ; reaching Europe
.This is the aim , the green pastures, the tree shades, the gentle rivers and the water ressources.Obama-Zbig are ready to any alliances with the criminals in Teheran.The cop has made a deal with the mob: too bad for the single citizen..
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Note in passing, Iran does have a bit of space capacity. Lookie…….
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1202/03iran/
The ongoing wackiness of Iran. You just can’t make this stuff up. In addition to Barbie, the cartoon characters The Simpsons are now banned in Iran
From Ynet:
An Iranian government-affiliated agency has banned dolls of the Simpsons cartoon characters, who join Barbie and others on a toy blacklist, an independent newspaper reported on Monday.
The report said that the Simpsons were banned to avoid the promotion of Western culture. But Superman and Spiderman were allowed, because they helped the “oppressed.”
Heh, I wonder if they know that Superman and Spiderman were both created by Jews.
The Thing (Ben Grimm) from the Fantastic Four, another Stan Lee creation is overtly Jewish
http://www.adherents.com/lit/comics/Thing.html
What a load of uneducated drivel. Iran has had a war in 100 years and yet her aggressors haven’t stopped warring, invading and killing in LONGER than 100 years, if ever.
The lessons we can learn is that after defeating Hitler the West shouldn’t have adopted Nazi policies which apparently we didn’t learn since that’s exactly what we have in the West now, fascist rules.
I find it very hard listening to the people shooting and killing daily calling the people shooting nobody criminals and a danger to the world. Maybe the West should look in the mirror?
You might look into some of the promising new treatments for your Alzheimer’s. I seem to recall something about young boys marched across the minefields holding plastic “keys to heaven” and a million dead in the war with Iraq, not to mention all the Iran-sponsored terrorism from Iraq to Argentina.
We did not strike Iran when it was easy because of Bush’s plan to spread democracy by force of arms instead of simply removing Saddam and verifying the WMD programs were disabled. The extended and changed U.S. policy meant that by 2005 after the 2004 elections, politcal opinion and will would not support escilation of action against Iran. Not ethje CIA and congressional opposition, culminating in loss of the House and Senate. Democracies have a hard time fighting without a perceived existential threat. Moreover, our misguided foreign policy seems designed to accelerate regimes to acquire nuclear weqapons as that appears to be the only credible shield against U.S. power aid in overthrow. e.g. Libia vs. North Korea.
Luckily the U.S. has a screen — something to take the dirt from the blowback caused by our illogical policies — Israel. In terms of a Islamic driven nuclear threat, I don’t think that we in CONUS have to worry as long as Tel Aviv is still standing. Israel seems placed to suck up the first real WMD (over 10,000 casualties)and Tel Aviv is a much easier nuclear target than anything in the U.S.
Notwithstanding the above very cold and callus thoughts, I generally agree with Spengler and wish we would have done something earlier. Today, I am not sure that we have the political will for the extended campaign necessary to take out Iran’s nuclear capacity. While I do not have access to the planning intelligence and estimates, it is easy to hide and fortify centrifuges, much easier than to fortify a reactor. I fear that it may already be too late for the easy and quick strike to destroy what Iran has spent a decade hiding and protecting.
Iran could also be wanting nuclear weapons to deter us from invading them. Before you say I am a crazy Paulist (I am not, I prefer Romney), look at some history.
N. Korea has caused us trouble for years, but we have never invaded them. In fact we frequently give them aid to pacify them. They have nuclear weapons.
Both Iraq, and Libya renounced their nuclear weapons, and we invaded both of them. Libya was the worste case there, because Kadaffy explicitely renounced nukes, and invited in UN inspectors to verify it, expressely because he wanted to normalize relations with the west. And the west applauded him when he renounced his nuclear program, and declared what a wise leader he was. His reward, invasion.
Resulting lesson we taught everybody, if you irritate us and do not have nukes, we will invade you. But if you have nukes, you can bug us all you want and are safe. No wonder that Iran wants nukes so bad, it is the only way they think they can be safe from invasion from us.
Mind you. that does not mean I am comfortable with Iran having nukes, because even if they are geting them to deter invasion from us, they are also crazy enough to use them in other than an invasion deterance role. But we must also recognize that the drive by dictators to get nukes is partly caused by us, because we constantly invade dictators without nukes, and appease those with nukes.
The problem with that whole analysis is that the Nuke issue is the only reason we care about Iran at all.
Nobody is even thinking about invading Iran. That was never on the table.
If they dropped the nuclear program tomorrow we would leave them to their self imposed misery again.
Why does Iran hate Israel who has never done anything to them and used to have good relations in the days of the Shah? Why do they hate them so much that they would risk all of this? The answer to that provides a lot of insight into what is motivating this irrational behaviour.
You’re wrong about fertility in the middle east. Here’s the real reason it’s happening:
http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/3306.htm
Americans are unaware that a huge proportion of Germans–if memory serves as much as 40%–were homeless at the end of World War II, and there surely were civilian deaths from malnutrition and disease in the aftermath. Nonetheless I have great difficulty believing that these exceeded the deaths from the bombing of German cities prior to Hitler’s death.
Germany wasn’t the alone bombed country, France had her lot of destroyed cities too, and of homeless, Malnutrition was implemented on French population since the beginning of the occupation, whereas Dutch were allowed 1200 clories pro day, the French were of 800 calories, complementary food came from debrouillardise and marché noir, only for those that could afford it though !
http://archives.investir.fr/2007/jdf/20070901ARTHBD00071-l-occupation-de-l-armee-allemande-va-ruiner-la-france.php
I don’t see the connection between Hitler’s Ostpolitik and Iran’s current foreign policy. Hitler believed that eastward expansion was essential to Germany’s future. Hitler’s worldview required that Germany invade the Slavic countries to the east. I see no similar expansionistic policy with Iran. Iran is Persian. They are an ancient and complex nation. But their interaction with surrounding nations is more related to their status as a regional power, as opposed to acquiring additional territory. It is very unfortunate that Iran has fallen under the control of a fanatical, paranoid leadership, but we are not making things any better by demonizing the entire population of Iran. We have managed to contain many undesirable nuclear regimes (Korea, Pakistan, Libya, India, South Africa, Israel)without resorting to massive destruction of innocent civilians. I think that we should learn from history that the military option should be the last, not the first, resort.
It is not necessary to have bombs that will penetrate down to the underground Iranian nuclear facilities. It is only necessary to fly a TV guided bomb, into the entrance, and bury all the equipment and personnel. That could be followed up by attacks on anyone attempting to dig the facility out.
No matter what you think, say or act. Remember, there’s one Almighty who is Very Aware of every move and whisper in your heart. Also remember that you will be brought to life again after death, what face (full of hate or love) will you have to show your creator? Plan as much as you can, do everything you can do BUT! remember Allah is always and always with the righteous soul and indeed they shall over come you with His help alone. May be peace be with you!
Man tracht und Gott lacht. At least we agree about that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSk3TG5czcg
I don’t really understand your parallel. Hitler’s economic dilemma in 1939 was soluble (in his view) by looting the countries of Eastern Europe, and ultimately, by appropriating the Ukraine from Russia- warped as it was, it was a plan. But what kind of parallel conquests are available to Iran? What does Israel have to do with it? What resources are they able to appropriate? They certainly can’t march on Tel Aviv. They haven’t said a word about conquering Kuwait or Dhubai. And if that was their target, how would attacking Israel advance it, or even have a peripheral relationship to it?
If they are, like Hitler, planning to break out and loot their neighbors- wouldn’t Israel be a logical ally against the big prize- Saudi Arabia? What on earth would it avail them to prod a country so far out of the way with so little of interest to them to steal? For all the good it would do them they might equally well threaten Nepal. The distance is about the same.
So I don’t see how your parallel makes any sense.
Israel is in less immediate danger from Iran than Iraq, Saudi Arabia or even Azerbaijan, agreed. But Iran’s ability to project power depends upon subversion, and maintaining the means of subversion requires Iran to adopt the mantle of defender of Islam against the Jewish presence in the Middle East. I doubt Iran would simply sent a nuclear-tipped missile flying towards Israel; rather, it would encourage a gradual campaign of escalation via Hizbollah, Hamas or other proxies, including the use of chemical weapons, and so forth; Israel’s capacity to retaliate would be limited by Iranian nuclear weapons, and so forth. Meanwhile Iran would use provocations against its neighbors to project its influence, with Basra being the obvious target.
Go Iran Go! Build a huge nuclear arsenal, strike fear into Israel and everyone else! Hey, if it works for the US and Israel, it works for Iran.
Nobody is any better than is anyone else. So there is no scientifically valid reason why anyone should have a monopoly on anything. This is why it’s perfectly all right for everyone to go armed at all times.
Including children.
I couldn’t have said it better myself if I was sane.