The Future with Europe
The Swiss newspaper Junge Freiheit interviews VDH
...
JF: What is it that makes the U.S. and Europe so different from each other? From the outside, the two are often perceived as a monolithic unit: the West. Does this unity really exist, or are we talking about two separate worlds? Do you think the alliance between the U.S. and Europe is made to last, or is it no more than an illusion?
VDH: We have a common legacy, as the elections in France and Germany remind us. And we coalesce when faced by a common illiberal enemy — whether against the Soviet empire or radical Islam.
But after the fall of the Soviet Union, you diverged onto a secularized, affluent, leisured, socialist, and pacifist path, where in the pride and arrogance of the Enlightenment you were convinced you could make heaven on earth — and would demonize as retrograde anyone who begged to differ.
Now you are living with the results of your arrogance: while you brand the U.S. illiberal, it grows its population, diversifies and assimilates, and offers economic opportunity and jobs; although, for a time you’ve become wealthy — given your lack of defense spending, commercial unity, and protectionism — but only up to a point: soon the bill comes due as you age, face a demographic crisis, become imprisoned by secular appetites and ever growing entitlements. Once one insists on an equality of result, not one of mere opportunity, then, as Plato warned, there is no logical end to what the government will think up and the people will demand.
JF: Would you say many Europeans’ critical attitude towards the U.S. is rooted in legitimate concerns, or does it rather stem from a typically European bias against the U.S.? How would you describe the nature of this bias?
VDH: In part, the animus originates from innate envy, and jealousy over the loss of European imperial preeminence; in part, there is the old befuddlement that a mongrel population of European rejects in America has now created the largest and most powerful nation in history — as a sort of deviant Western answer to European notions of class exclusion and aristocratic pretension. But once you predicate status, as is done in America, in a Western liberal society on the acquisition of money rather than birth, then you see something enormously dynamic, but also crass, and that crassness apparently drives the Euros crazy. Finally, we are enablers: there are no consequences to vocal and cheap anti-Americanism. If we withdrew our troops, and cut the E.U. loose, then it would see that in a world without America at its side, creepy people like Putin, Ahmadinejad, and Dr. Zawahiri are not just bogeymen of a U.S. President.
JF: Is there a corresponding bias against Europeans in American society? How come nobody has ever thought to diagnose such a sentiment? Is it truly non-existent, or is it just that Americans are too wise, and Europeans too cowardly to mention it?
VDH: There has always been skepticism of Europe as a class-bound, hopelessly aristocratic static society, warped by Old World factionalism, and prone to dangerously wide springs between totalitarian fascism and totalitarian Marxism. Few note such suspicions of ours, since we are self-obsessed within our borders, and don’t translate these musings into some driving ideology. Nor do we feel that Europe per se affects our lives to any great degree, despite our ubiquitous Western heritage that we owe to Europe and the billions of U.S. dollars that are held by European governments.
The irony is that while Europeans periodically chest-pound and loudly vie with each other in hating the United States for various alleged sins (fill in the blanks from global warming to Iraq), slowly, insidiously we in the U.S. are drifting away from Europe, whether defined by commitments to its security (I doubt we would intervene again in the Balkans) to sort of a popular weariness. One article in Le Monde or a quip by a Chirac or Schroeder might pass over the heads of those in Iowa or Nebraska, but not a few hundred of these per day. So the Europeans have done the almost impossible: alienated a Western powerful ally, that kept it safe and free for the majority of the 20th century.
...
Pertinent Links:
1) The Future with Europe
Showing posts with label Victor Davis Hanson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Victor Davis Hanson. Show all posts
Friday, February 29, 2008
Thursday, August 2, 2007
MUST READ: GROW UP, MIDDLE EAST ! ! !
Grow Up, Middle East!
By Victor Davis Hanson
Radical Islamists love to scream about the "decadent" West. Everything from our operas to our attitudes about women outrage these loud pious critics.
As part of their condemnation, fundamentalist Muslims say they put a higher premium on family values and reverence for the past than crass modern Americans and Europeans do. But that is hardly true.
In Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, unforgiving sharia law administered by stern state clerics dictates the cutting off a hand for theft.
Is there less stealing then? Not at the highest levels at least. Sheiks from the ruling House of Saud are notorious for gambling and squandering abroad their nation's collective petro-wealth. But few such royals walk around Riyadh with missing limbs from "judicial amputation."
Recently on a British Airways flight to London, members of Qatar's royal house were outraged that its princesses had been seated next to male passengers who weren't related to them. Was this a clash of civilizations?
Not quite. The entire entourage was, in fact, returning from an all-day shopping spree in Milan, Italy. The angry members of Qatar's royal house may claim outrage at gender equality, but they seem to have no problem with the libertine West when it comes to splurging their kingdom's wealth on luxury items.
This type of hypocrisy in the Muslim world is not limited to supposedly devout oil-rich Gulf sheiks who cherry-pick Western sin. Terrorists -- with one foot in the 7th century and the other in the 21st century -- want it both ways, too.
How often have we heard Ayman al-Zawahiri, the mouthpiece of al-Qaida, damn the disruptive culture of the West? Yet he has no reservations about broadcasting his infomercials using video technology made possible by a secular science unique to Westernized culture. And does the observant Zawahiri object that his pals, the pious Taliban, are linked to heroin traffickers?
Jihadists champion sharia law, too. But when captured, they hire sophisticated secular Western nitpicking lawyers to sue over conditions in Guantanamo or incarceration in British prisons. Al-Qaida, of course, complains about everything from American troops once stationed in Saudi Arabia to even the U.S.'s failure to sign the Kyoto accords. Meanwhile, by blowing up religious shrines across Iraq, they show far less respect for mosques than we do.
There is a general pattern in these various paradoxes of fundamentalist Islam, both its violent and non-violent manifestations.
Supposedly Western sins, such as drugs, bribery and rampant consumerism, turn out to be as common in the Muslim world as they are here. In Saudi Arabia, homosexuality even seems to be tolerated as long as it is not overtly discussed in public. Indeed, the only real difference may be our Western tendency to talk freely in a secular context about controversial topics rather than hide or repress their presence.
Moreover, it is not always what we do in the Middle East, or even who we are, that infuriates the radical Muslim world. Its frustration also rises out of fascination with the West -- and the ensuing religious embarrassment over wanting what we enjoy.
It's worth noting that the United States is not hated in numerous other places, such as sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, where it has had a military presence or adopted controversial foreign policies.
In contrast, the peculiar furor at the U.S. in the radical Islamic world arises because our culture, when viewed on DVD, satellite television and the Internet, is judged to be incorrect in the ideal world of 7th-century Islam -- and impossible for conflicted Muslims to enjoy fully in the 21st.
...
What to do? The time is over both for coffee-table talk in the West about a pie-in-the-sky "reformation" needed in Islam, and the endless habit in the Middle East of blaming others for self-inflicted miseries.
Instead, right now we should hold the Muslim world to the same standards of tolerance that we demand of ourselves -- no more apologies for things like our insensitive cartoons or excuses for their insane anger against novelists. In turn, the Middle East must grow up and accept, like the rest of the world, that there are social and cultural costs and consequences for any who wish to embrace the benefits of modernism.
Pertinent Links:
1) Grow Up, Middle East!
By Victor Davis Hanson
Radical Islamists love to scream about the "decadent" West. Everything from our operas to our attitudes about women outrage these loud pious critics.
As part of their condemnation, fundamentalist Muslims say they put a higher premium on family values and reverence for the past than crass modern Americans and Europeans do. But that is hardly true.
In Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, unforgiving sharia law administered by stern state clerics dictates the cutting off a hand for theft.
Is there less stealing then? Not at the highest levels at least. Sheiks from the ruling House of Saud are notorious for gambling and squandering abroad their nation's collective petro-wealth. But few such royals walk around Riyadh with missing limbs from "judicial amputation."
Recently on a British Airways flight to London, members of Qatar's royal house were outraged that its princesses had been seated next to male passengers who weren't related to them. Was this a clash of civilizations?
Not quite. The entire entourage was, in fact, returning from an all-day shopping spree in Milan, Italy. The angry members of Qatar's royal house may claim outrage at gender equality, but they seem to have no problem with the libertine West when it comes to splurging their kingdom's wealth on luxury items.
This type of hypocrisy in the Muslim world is not limited to supposedly devout oil-rich Gulf sheiks who cherry-pick Western sin. Terrorists -- with one foot in the 7th century and the other in the 21st century -- want it both ways, too.
How often have we heard Ayman al-Zawahiri, the mouthpiece of al-Qaida, damn the disruptive culture of the West? Yet he has no reservations about broadcasting his infomercials using video technology made possible by a secular science unique to Westernized culture. And does the observant Zawahiri object that his pals, the pious Taliban, are linked to heroin traffickers?
Jihadists champion sharia law, too. But when captured, they hire sophisticated secular Western nitpicking lawyers to sue over conditions in Guantanamo or incarceration in British prisons. Al-Qaida, of course, complains about everything from American troops once stationed in Saudi Arabia to even the U.S.'s failure to sign the Kyoto accords. Meanwhile, by blowing up religious shrines across Iraq, they show far less respect for mosques than we do.
There is a general pattern in these various paradoxes of fundamentalist Islam, both its violent and non-violent manifestations.
Supposedly Western sins, such as drugs, bribery and rampant consumerism, turn out to be as common in the Muslim world as they are here. In Saudi Arabia, homosexuality even seems to be tolerated as long as it is not overtly discussed in public. Indeed, the only real difference may be our Western tendency to talk freely in a secular context about controversial topics rather than hide or repress their presence.
Moreover, it is not always what we do in the Middle East, or even who we are, that infuriates the radical Muslim world. Its frustration also rises out of fascination with the West -- and the ensuing religious embarrassment over wanting what we enjoy.
It's worth noting that the United States is not hated in numerous other places, such as sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, where it has had a military presence or adopted controversial foreign policies.
In contrast, the peculiar furor at the U.S. in the radical Islamic world arises because our culture, when viewed on DVD, satellite television and the Internet, is judged to be incorrect in the ideal world of 7th-century Islam -- and impossible for conflicted Muslims to enjoy fully in the 21st.
...
What to do? The time is over both for coffee-table talk in the West about a pie-in-the-sky "reformation" needed in Islam, and the endless habit in the Middle East of blaming others for self-inflicted miseries.
Instead, right now we should hold the Muslim world to the same standards of tolerance that we demand of ourselves -- no more apologies for things like our insensitive cartoons or excuses for their insane anger against novelists. In turn, the Middle East must grow up and accept, like the rest of the world, that there are social and cultural costs and consequences for any who wish to embrace the benefits of modernism.
Pertinent Links:
1) Grow Up, Middle East!
Friday, July 20, 2007
MUST READ: RIPPLES OF RETREAT
Ripples of Retreat
Dark predictions for a post-withdrawal world.
By Victor Davis Hanson
The present Washington parlor game is to argue over the consequences of a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq.
...
In fact, the military of the United States has never abandoned an entire theater of operations in its history.
...
In truth, this country has never quite experienced anything like the French collapse in 1940 or its precipitous withdrawal from Algeria in 1962, or the implosion of Soviet forces in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, much less the more rapid backpedaling of entire German army groups in 1944 on both the Western and Eastern fronts.
What would be the consequences of such a novel experience? Who knows? But the Left is probably correct — cf. the July 8 editorial in the New York Times — that we could probably redeploy without significant casualties. And it is likewise prescient to anticipate that mass killings in Iraq would probably follow — if not a Cambodia-like holocaust, at least something akin to the gruesome fate of the Harkis, those Algerians loyal to France, but left behind to be disemboweled after the French flight across the Mediterranean.
...
What would the effect be of all this televised carnage and chaos on the United States? Antiwar critics would turn on a dime — disclaiming their prior assertions that our presence ipso facto had been the chief cause of the violence in Iraq. Instead, when the mass beheadings of female reformers and serial shootings of “collaborators” appeared on our screens, American and European leftists would almost immediately blame our fickleness for the carnage.
...
A second effect would be a sort of psychological devastation of the U.S. military, particularly the army.
...
In other words, an exhausted American public and a defeated U.S. military would not for some time be either willing or capable to face another enemy...
...
Militaries that are beaten and flee take decades to reconstitute and regroup. Command, the mood of the rank-and-file, an army’s self perception — all that is recast in the shadow of recrimination, no more capable of quick resurgence than a boxer recapturing the championship after a surprised, terrible beating.
Indeed, even after the five-year withdrawal from Vietnam, the American military took twenty years to regain its own confidence.
...
In fact, “redeployment” is a euphemism for flight from the battlefield. And we should no more expect an al Qaeda that won in Iraq to stop from pressing on to Kuwait or Saudi Arabia than we should imagine that a defeated U.S. military could rally and hold the line in the Gulf.
...
In essence, the American military would be reconstituted for a generation — and recognized as such by our enemies — as a two-pronged force of air and sea power. The army at best would stay capable of fighting non-existent conventional wars but acknowledged as incapable of putting down increasingly frequent insurgencies. If Vietnam, Beirut, or Mogadishu left doubt as to the seriousness of American guarantees, Iraq would confirm that it is a dangerous thing to ally oneself with an American government and military. Aside from realignment in the Middle East, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines would have to make the necessary “readjustments.”
The “surge” would be our high-water mark, a sort of 21st-century Pickett’s charge, after which skilled retreat, consolidation, holding the line, and redeployment would be the accepted mission of American arms.
It is not easy securing Iraq, but if we decide to quit and “redeploy,” Americans should at least accept that the effort to stabilize Iraq was a crushing military defeat, that our generation established a precedent of withdrawing an entire army group from combat operations on the battlefield, and that the consequences will be better known even to our enemies than they are to us.
Pertinent Links:
1) Ripples of Retreat
Dark predictions for a post-withdrawal world.
By Victor Davis Hanson
The present Washington parlor game is to argue over the consequences of a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq.
...
In fact, the military of the United States has never abandoned an entire theater of operations in its history.
...
In truth, this country has never quite experienced anything like the French collapse in 1940 or its precipitous withdrawal from Algeria in 1962, or the implosion of Soviet forces in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, much less the more rapid backpedaling of entire German army groups in 1944 on both the Western and Eastern fronts.
What would be the consequences of such a novel experience? Who knows? But the Left is probably correct — cf. the July 8 editorial in the New York Times — that we could probably redeploy without significant casualties. And it is likewise prescient to anticipate that mass killings in Iraq would probably follow — if not a Cambodia-like holocaust, at least something akin to the gruesome fate of the Harkis, those Algerians loyal to France, but left behind to be disemboweled after the French flight across the Mediterranean.
...
What would the effect be of all this televised carnage and chaos on the United States? Antiwar critics would turn on a dime — disclaiming their prior assertions that our presence ipso facto had been the chief cause of the violence in Iraq. Instead, when the mass beheadings of female reformers and serial shootings of “collaborators” appeared on our screens, American and European leftists would almost immediately blame our fickleness for the carnage.
...
A second effect would be a sort of psychological devastation of the U.S. military, particularly the army.
...
In other words, an exhausted American public and a defeated U.S. military would not for some time be either willing or capable to face another enemy...
...
Militaries that are beaten and flee take decades to reconstitute and regroup. Command, the mood of the rank-and-file, an army’s self perception — all that is recast in the shadow of recrimination, no more capable of quick resurgence than a boxer recapturing the championship after a surprised, terrible beating.
Indeed, even after the five-year withdrawal from Vietnam, the American military took twenty years to regain its own confidence.
...
In fact, “redeployment” is a euphemism for flight from the battlefield. And we should no more expect an al Qaeda that won in Iraq to stop from pressing on to Kuwait or Saudi Arabia than we should imagine that a defeated U.S. military could rally and hold the line in the Gulf.
...
In essence, the American military would be reconstituted for a generation — and recognized as such by our enemies — as a two-pronged force of air and sea power. The army at best would stay capable of fighting non-existent conventional wars but acknowledged as incapable of putting down increasingly frequent insurgencies. If Vietnam, Beirut, or Mogadishu left doubt as to the seriousness of American guarantees, Iraq would confirm that it is a dangerous thing to ally oneself with an American government and military. Aside from realignment in the Middle East, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines would have to make the necessary “readjustments.”
The “surge” would be our high-water mark, a sort of 21st-century Pickett’s charge, after which skilled retreat, consolidation, holding the line, and redeployment would be the accepted mission of American arms.
It is not easy securing Iraq, but if we decide to quit and “redeploy,” Americans should at least accept that the effort to stabilize Iraq was a crushing military defeat, that our generation established a precedent of withdrawing an entire army group from combat operations on the battlefield, and that the consequences will be better known even to our enemies than they are to us.
Pertinent Links:
1) Ripples of Retreat
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
MUST READ: NUCLEAR IRAN
“Nuclear Iran?”
by Victor Davis Hanson
“The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land. As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map.” So rants Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
It is understandable why Ahmadinejad might want an arsenal of nuclear missiles. It would allow him to shake down a constant stream of rich European emissaries, pressure the Arab Gulf states to lower oil production, pose as the Persian and Shiite messianic leader of Islamic terrorists, neutralize the influence of the United States in the region—and, of course, destroy Israel. Let no one doubt that a nuclear Iran would end the entire notion of peaceful global adjudication of nuclear proliferation and pose an unending threat to civilization itself.
In all his crazed pronouncements, Ahmadinejad reflects an end-of-days view: History is coming to its grand finale under his aegis. In his mind, he entrances even foreign audiences into stupor with his rhetoric. Of his recent United Nations speech he boasted, “I felt that all of a sudden the atmosphere changed there. And for 27-28 minutes all the leaders did not blink.” The name of Ahmadinejad, he supposes, will live for the ages if he takes out the “crusader” interloper in Jerusalem. As the Great Mahdi come back to life, he can do something for the devout not seen since the days of Saladin.
For now, however, Ahmadinejad faces two hurdles: He must get the bomb, and he must create the psychological landscape whereby the world will shrug at Israel’s demise.
Oddly, the first obstacle may not be the hardest. An impoverished Pakistan and North Korea pulled it off. China and Russia will likely sell Tehran anything it cannot get from rogue regimes. The European Union is Iran’s largest trading partner and ships it everything from sophisticated machine tools to sniper rifles, while impotent European diplomats continue “ruling out force” to stop the Iranian nuclear industry. Meanwhile, Moscow and Beijing, for all their expressed concern, will probably veto any serious punitive action by the United Nations.
As for the United States, it has 180,000 troops attempting to establish some sort of democratic stability in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention a growing anti-war movement at home. An unpredictable President Bush has less than two years left in the White House, with a majority opposition in Congress that is calling for direct talks with Ahmadinejad and urging congressional restraints on the possible use of force against Iran. It is no surprise that so many in Iran see no barrier to obtaining the bomb.
But the second obstacle—preparing the world for the end of the Jewish state—is trickier.
...
What Is To Be Done?
We can argue all we want over the solution. Would it be wrong to use military force? Are air strikes feasible? Will Iranian dissidents rise up, or have most of them already been killed or exiled? Will Russia and China help us or sit back and enjoy our dilemma? Is Europe our ally in this matter, or is it simply triangulating? Will the UN ever step in, or is it more likely to condemn the United States than Tehran?
Clearly a poker-faced United States seems hesitant to act until moments before the missiles are armed. It is certainly not behaving like the hegemon or imperialist power so caricatured by Michael Moore and his ilk. Until there is firm evidence that Iran has the warheads ready, no administration will wish to relive the nightmare of the past three years, with its endless hysterical accusations of arrogant unilateralism, preemption, inaccurate or falsified intelligence, imperialism, and purported hostility towards Islam.
What, then, should the United States do, other than keep offering meaningless platitudes about “dialogue”? There are actually several measures that, taken together, might work to exploit Iran’s weaknesses and maintain a nuclear-free Gulf.
First, keep pushing international accords and doggedly work to ratchet up the watered-down United Nations sanctions. Even if they don’t do much to Iran in any significant way, the resolutions seem to enrage Ahmadinejad. And when he rages at the politically correct United Nations, he only loses further support.
Second, keep prodding the European Union, presently Iran’s chief trading partner, to apply pressure. The so-called EU3—Britain, France and Germany—failed completely in its recent attempt to stop Ahmadinejad’s nuclear plans. But out of that setback came a growing realization in Europe that a nuclear-tipped missile from theocratic Iran could hit Europe just as easily as Israel. Next, Europeans should adopt a complete trade embargo to prevent all Iranian access to precision machinery and high technology.
Third, keep encouraging Iranian dissidents. We need not ask them to go into the streets where they would be shot. Instead we should offer them media help and access to the West. Also highlight the plight of women, minorities and liberals in Iran—the groups that traditionally appeal to the Western left.
Fourth, we should announce in advance that we don’t want any bases in Iran; don’t want its oil; and won’t send American infantry there. That would preempt the tired charges of imperialism and colonialism.
Fifth, and crucially, we must complete the stabilization of Iraq and Afghanistan. The last thing Iran wants is a democratic and prosperous Middle East surrounding its borders. The sight of Afghans, Iraqis, Kurds, Lebanese and Turks voting and speaking freely could form a critical mass of democratic reform to overwhelm the Khomeinists.
Sixth, keep reminding the Gulf monarchies that a nuclear Shiite theocracy is far more dangerous to them than to the United States or Israel—and that America’s efforts to contain Iran depend on their own to rein in Wahhabis in Iraq.
Seventh, say nothing much about the presence of two or three carrier groups in the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean. Iran will soon grasp on its own that the build-up of such forces might presage air strikes, at which the United States excels.
Eighth, make it clear that Israel, as a sovereign nation, has a perfect right to protect itself. The United States should keep reminding Iran that 60 years after the real Holocaust, no Israeli Prime Minister will sit by idly while 7th century theocrats grandstand about wiping out the state of Israel and obtain the nuclear means to do it.
Ninth, keep the rhetoric down. Avoid threats to bomb many who could be our friends—while at the same time ignoring therapeutic pleas to talk with those who we know are our enemies.
Finally, Americans must gasify coal, diversify fuels, drill for more petroleum and invent new energy sources. Only that can collapse the world price of petroleum. At $60 a barrel for oil, Ahmadinejad is a charismatic third world benefactor who throws cash at every thug who wants a roadside bomb or shoulder-fired missile—and has plenty of money to buy Pakistani, North Korean or Russian nuclear components. But at $30 a barrel, he will be despised by his own people, who will become enraged as state-subsidized food and gas prices skyrocket, and as scarce Iranian petrodollars are wasted on Hezbollah and Hamas.
In conclusion, let me offer a more ominous note of warning. Israel is not free from its own passions, and there will be no second Holocaust. It is past time for Iranian leaders to snap out of their pseudo-trances and recognize that some Western countries are not only far more powerful than Iran, but in certain situations and under particular circumstances can be just as driven by memory, history—and, yes, a certain craziness as well.
The same goes for the United States. The Iranians, like bin Laden, imagine an antithetical caricature—which, like all caricatures, has some truth in it—whereby we materialistic Westerners love life too much to die, while the pious Islamic youths they send to kill us with suicide bombs love death too much to live. But what the Iranian theocrats, like the al-Qaedists, never fully fathom is that if the American people conclude that their freedom and existence are at stake, they are capable of conjuring up things far more frightening than anything in the 7th-century brain of Mr. Ahmadinejad. The barbarity of the nightmares at Antietam, Verdun, Dresden and Hiroshima prove that well enough. In short, there are consequences to the rhetoric of Armageddon.
So far the Iranian leader has posed as someone 90 percent crazy and ten percent sane, hoping that in response we would fear his overt madness, grant concessions, and delicately appeal to his small reservoir of reason. But he should understand that if his Western enemies appear 90 percent of the time as children of the Enlightenment, they are still suffused with vestigial traces of the emotional and unpredictable. And military history shows that the irrational ten percent of the Western mind is a lot scarier in the end than anything Islamic fanaticism has to offer.
Pertinent Links:
1) “Nuclear Iran?”
by Victor Davis Hanson
“The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land. As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map.” So rants Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
It is understandable why Ahmadinejad might want an arsenal of nuclear missiles. It would allow him to shake down a constant stream of rich European emissaries, pressure the Arab Gulf states to lower oil production, pose as the Persian and Shiite messianic leader of Islamic terrorists, neutralize the influence of the United States in the region—and, of course, destroy Israel. Let no one doubt that a nuclear Iran would end the entire notion of peaceful global adjudication of nuclear proliferation and pose an unending threat to civilization itself.
In all his crazed pronouncements, Ahmadinejad reflects an end-of-days view: History is coming to its grand finale under his aegis. In his mind, he entrances even foreign audiences into stupor with his rhetoric. Of his recent United Nations speech he boasted, “I felt that all of a sudden the atmosphere changed there. And for 27-28 minutes all the leaders did not blink.” The name of Ahmadinejad, he supposes, will live for the ages if he takes out the “crusader” interloper in Jerusalem. As the Great Mahdi come back to life, he can do something for the devout not seen since the days of Saladin.
For now, however, Ahmadinejad faces two hurdles: He must get the bomb, and he must create the psychological landscape whereby the world will shrug at Israel’s demise.
Oddly, the first obstacle may not be the hardest. An impoverished Pakistan and North Korea pulled it off. China and Russia will likely sell Tehran anything it cannot get from rogue regimes. The European Union is Iran’s largest trading partner and ships it everything from sophisticated machine tools to sniper rifles, while impotent European diplomats continue “ruling out force” to stop the Iranian nuclear industry. Meanwhile, Moscow and Beijing, for all their expressed concern, will probably veto any serious punitive action by the United Nations.
As for the United States, it has 180,000 troops attempting to establish some sort of democratic stability in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention a growing anti-war movement at home. An unpredictable President Bush has less than two years left in the White House, with a majority opposition in Congress that is calling for direct talks with Ahmadinejad and urging congressional restraints on the possible use of force against Iran. It is no surprise that so many in Iran see no barrier to obtaining the bomb.
But the second obstacle—preparing the world for the end of the Jewish state—is trickier.
...
What Is To Be Done?
We can argue all we want over the solution. Would it be wrong to use military force? Are air strikes feasible? Will Iranian dissidents rise up, or have most of them already been killed or exiled? Will Russia and China help us or sit back and enjoy our dilemma? Is Europe our ally in this matter, or is it simply triangulating? Will the UN ever step in, or is it more likely to condemn the United States than Tehran?
Clearly a poker-faced United States seems hesitant to act until moments before the missiles are armed. It is certainly not behaving like the hegemon or imperialist power so caricatured by Michael Moore and his ilk. Until there is firm evidence that Iran has the warheads ready, no administration will wish to relive the nightmare of the past three years, with its endless hysterical accusations of arrogant unilateralism, preemption, inaccurate or falsified intelligence, imperialism, and purported hostility towards Islam.
What, then, should the United States do, other than keep offering meaningless platitudes about “dialogue”? There are actually several measures that, taken together, might work to exploit Iran’s weaknesses and maintain a nuclear-free Gulf.
First, keep pushing international accords and doggedly work to ratchet up the watered-down United Nations sanctions. Even if they don’t do much to Iran in any significant way, the resolutions seem to enrage Ahmadinejad. And when he rages at the politically correct United Nations, he only loses further support.
Second, keep prodding the European Union, presently Iran’s chief trading partner, to apply pressure. The so-called EU3—Britain, France and Germany—failed completely in its recent attempt to stop Ahmadinejad’s nuclear plans. But out of that setback came a growing realization in Europe that a nuclear-tipped missile from theocratic Iran could hit Europe just as easily as Israel. Next, Europeans should adopt a complete trade embargo to prevent all Iranian access to precision machinery and high technology.
Third, keep encouraging Iranian dissidents. We need not ask them to go into the streets where they would be shot. Instead we should offer them media help and access to the West. Also highlight the plight of women, minorities and liberals in Iran—the groups that traditionally appeal to the Western left.
Fourth, we should announce in advance that we don’t want any bases in Iran; don’t want its oil; and won’t send American infantry there. That would preempt the tired charges of imperialism and colonialism.
Fifth, and crucially, we must complete the stabilization of Iraq and Afghanistan. The last thing Iran wants is a democratic and prosperous Middle East surrounding its borders. The sight of Afghans, Iraqis, Kurds, Lebanese and Turks voting and speaking freely could form a critical mass of democratic reform to overwhelm the Khomeinists.
Sixth, keep reminding the Gulf monarchies that a nuclear Shiite theocracy is far more dangerous to them than to the United States or Israel—and that America’s efforts to contain Iran depend on their own to rein in Wahhabis in Iraq.
Seventh, say nothing much about the presence of two or three carrier groups in the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean. Iran will soon grasp on its own that the build-up of such forces might presage air strikes, at which the United States excels.
Eighth, make it clear that Israel, as a sovereign nation, has a perfect right to protect itself. The United States should keep reminding Iran that 60 years after the real Holocaust, no Israeli Prime Minister will sit by idly while 7th century theocrats grandstand about wiping out the state of Israel and obtain the nuclear means to do it.
Ninth, keep the rhetoric down. Avoid threats to bomb many who could be our friends—while at the same time ignoring therapeutic pleas to talk with those who we know are our enemies.
Finally, Americans must gasify coal, diversify fuels, drill for more petroleum and invent new energy sources. Only that can collapse the world price of petroleum. At $60 a barrel for oil, Ahmadinejad is a charismatic third world benefactor who throws cash at every thug who wants a roadside bomb or shoulder-fired missile—and has plenty of money to buy Pakistani, North Korean or Russian nuclear components. But at $30 a barrel, he will be despised by his own people, who will become enraged as state-subsidized food and gas prices skyrocket, and as scarce Iranian petrodollars are wasted on Hezbollah and Hamas.
In conclusion, let me offer a more ominous note of warning. Israel is not free from its own passions, and there will be no second Holocaust. It is past time for Iranian leaders to snap out of their pseudo-trances and recognize that some Western countries are not only far more powerful than Iran, but in certain situations and under particular circumstances can be just as driven by memory, history—and, yes, a certain craziness as well.
The same goes for the United States. The Iranians, like bin Laden, imagine an antithetical caricature—which, like all caricatures, has some truth in it—whereby we materialistic Westerners love life too much to die, while the pious Islamic youths they send to kill us with suicide bombs love death too much to live. But what the Iranian theocrats, like the al-Qaedists, never fully fathom is that if the American people conclude that their freedom and existence are at stake, they are capable of conjuring up things far more frightening than anything in the 7th-century brain of Mr. Ahmadinejad. The barbarity of the nightmares at Antietam, Verdun, Dresden and Hiroshima prove that well enough. In short, there are consequences to the rhetoric of Armageddon.
So far the Iranian leader has posed as someone 90 percent crazy and ten percent sane, hoping that in response we would fear his overt madness, grant concessions, and delicately appeal to his small reservoir of reason. But he should understand that if his Western enemies appear 90 percent of the time as children of the Enlightenment, they are still suffused with vestigial traces of the emotional and unpredictable. And military history shows that the irrational ten percent of the Western mind is a lot scarier in the end than anything Islamic fanaticism has to offer.
Pertinent Links:
1) “Nuclear Iran?”
Friday, April 27, 2007
MUST READ: NUCLEAR IRAN?
Nuclear Iran?
by Victor Davis Hanson
Imprimis
“The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land. As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map.” So rants Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
...
In conclusion, let me offer a more ominous note of warning. Israel is not free from its own passions, and there will be no second Holocaust. It is past time for Iranian leaders to snap out of their pseudo-trances and recognize that some Western countries are not only far more powerful than Iran, but in certain situations and under particular circumstances can be just as driven by memory, history — and, yes, a certain craziness as well.
The same goes for the United States. The Iranians, like bin Laden, imagine an antithetical caricature — which, like all caricatures, has some truth in it — whereby we materialistic Westerners love life too much to die, while the pious Islamic youths they send to kill us with suicide bombs love death too much to live. But what the Iranian theocrats, like the al-Qaedists, never fully fathom is that if the American people conclude that their freedom and existence are at stake, they are capable of conjuring up things far more frightening than anything in the 7th-century brain of Mr. Ahmadinejad. The barbarity of the nightmares at Antietam, Verdun, Dresden and Hiroshima prove that well enough. In short, there are consequences to the rhetoric of Armageddon.
So far the Iranian leader has posed as someone 90 percent crazy and ten percent sane, hoping that in response we would fear his overt madness, grant concessions, and delicately appeal to his small reservoir of reason. But he should understand that if his Western enemies appear 90 percent of the time as children of the Enlightenment, they are still suffused with vestigial traces of the emotional and unpredictable. And military history shows that the irrational ten percent of the Western mind is a lot scarier in the end than anything Islamic fanaticism has to offer.
Pertinent Links:
1) Nuclear Iran?
by Victor Davis Hanson
Imprimis
“The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land. As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map.” So rants Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
...
In conclusion, let me offer a more ominous note of warning. Israel is not free from its own passions, and there will be no second Holocaust. It is past time for Iranian leaders to snap out of their pseudo-trances and recognize that some Western countries are not only far more powerful than Iran, but in certain situations and under particular circumstances can be just as driven by memory, history — and, yes, a certain craziness as well.
The same goes for the United States. The Iranians, like bin Laden, imagine an antithetical caricature — which, like all caricatures, has some truth in it — whereby we materialistic Westerners love life too much to die, while the pious Islamic youths they send to kill us with suicide bombs love death too much to live. But what the Iranian theocrats, like the al-Qaedists, never fully fathom is that if the American people conclude that their freedom and existence are at stake, they are capable of conjuring up things far more frightening than anything in the 7th-century brain of Mr. Ahmadinejad. The barbarity of the nightmares at Antietam, Verdun, Dresden and Hiroshima prove that well enough. In short, there are consequences to the rhetoric of Armageddon.
So far the Iranian leader has posed as someone 90 percent crazy and ten percent sane, hoping that in response we would fear his overt madness, grant concessions, and delicately appeal to his small reservoir of reason. But he should understand that if his Western enemies appear 90 percent of the time as children of the Enlightenment, they are still suffused with vestigial traces of the emotional and unpredictable. And military history shows that the irrational ten percent of the Western mind is a lot scarier in the end than anything Islamic fanaticism has to offer.
Pertinent Links:
1) Nuclear Iran?
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