August 22 revisited
Tuesday August 8, 2006
In today's Wall Street Journal (subscribers only edition), the eminent scholar of Islam Bernard Lewis warns the world to pay close attention to August 22. Excerpt:There is a radical difference between the Islamic Republic of Iran and other governments with...
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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Rod, what is your perspective on the fact that there are many Iranians who neither agree with Ahmadinejad or Khomeini, nor buy into the martyrdom career track. They are the same ones who somehow managed to elect Ahmadinejad's predecessor (whose name escapes me at this writing).
Rhetorically, I wonder what possible nuclear capability Iran could have by August 22nd, given the simplistic state of the art the currently have...
...unless the intelligence concerning their level of technology is similarly accurate to the Iraq intelligence concerning weapons of mass desruction. The irony would kill me.
(Perhaps literally, eh?)>
The Iranians who do are the ones in power. The Iranians who don't are their hostages. As are we all, I fear.
Like you, Franklin, I'm wondering what we don't know about Iran's capabilities...>
Sheesh. OF COURSE the US intelligence community gets things wrong. As far as I know no one at the CIA/NSA/etc. correctly analyzed the political/economic/social conditions in late-80s Eastern Europe, and predicted the swift collapse of the Communist Bloc. As far as I know no one at the CIA/NSA/etc. knew that India & Pakistan were about to test nukes in the early 90s. The list is darn near endless, I'm sure.
Remember the book from earlier this summer called "The 1% Solution" (as forgotten by now as "Fiasco" will be by Christmas)? The one where the title was taken from some (alleged?) quote from VP Cheney that if there was even a 1% chance that a country would develop & use WMDs against the US, that was justification enough to intervene militarily? The author obviously intended this to provoke Americans to outrage, when all it really did was provoke them (those few who noticed) to say "Duh.">
I don't know how to feel about this. Knowing what we know about Operation Ajax and the falsified terrorist attacks committed by agents of our own government in Iran (you gotta love de-classified US documents - nothing like having lies from the horse's mouth exposed by the horse that spake 'em) I don't know who to trust.
If something *does* happen on Aug 22, how do we know that it's not perpetrated by agents of our own government to justify an invasion of Iran (yet another vast oil field)?>
Um, because that would be insane? So where were our super-duper nefarious secret agents after OIF, when they should have been planting WMDs all over the place? Were they on summer vacation or something? And what color is the sky on your world, anyway?>
Hey man - just do the research. Operation Ajax was real. It's how we deposed the elected president of Iran and helped install the America-friendly Shah.
Ad-hominem aside, it's not *my* fault you don't know the history of your own country.>
Way to change the subject! I never said anything about Operation Ajax, did I? But nice try!
I merely pointed out that if we are to follow you into fairy-tale land and postulate that America Is Evil and anything that anyone else does evil must have actually been secretly done by America, it seems awfully strange that we're so incompetent that we didn't plant any WMDs in Iraq, doesn't it?
But that would be using logic & reason. Buh-bye.>
Bob,
I feel the same about the "we went into Iraq for oil" argument. If that was the case, shouldn't we have tapped their fields for all their worth by now...or at a minimum at least BEGUN to do as such?
Bottom line: our intelligence is spotty (as is everyone else's who even have ANY intelligence), we're paying through the nose for gas and everyone hates us. Sounds like the perfect results of a super top secret double whammy agency ploy......LOL>
Gee, god, if the "agents of our own government" are that freakin' evil, why in the hell did they not plant some WMD's in the Iraqi desert somewhere, thus saving the hideously evil or laughably incompetent (pick one, but you can't have them both) Bushitler a world of political hurt? Compared to pulling a Reichstag fire operation with Iran as the Reichstag, such an mission would be nursery school stuff. Paranoia, striking deep.>
I see a problem with all of the rhetoric over who should be "allowed" to have nukes and who shouldn't.
Why should one nation or supernational entity (like the UN) get to decide which nations are, essentially, given the right to bear arms (albeit of the nuclear variety), and which aren't? And by whom have they been granted the right to delegate such matters?
It's hard not to see the stance taken by the West towards allegedly "rogue" nations like Iran on questions like this as blatantly self-serving and hypocritical.>
I agree that this attitude can sometimes be self-serving and hypocritical. But when the president of one country (Iran) open proclaims that another country (Israel) should be wiped off the map, I think that's a clear indication that that country (Iran) shouldn't be trusted with nuclear weapons.
If one person goes around saying that another person deserves to be killed, you usually do what you can to keep him from getting his hands on a gun.>
Rod, you were terrified after 9/11 (and yes, I saw the towers come down in person, too) and made all kinds of wrong judgments. Now you're terrified of some apocalyptic bogeyman relating to Iran, because it jibes with the apocalyptic bogeyman lurking behind your Christian faith. And you're making all kinds of wrong judgments again. Are we going to have to be reading your blog in 2010, when you admit how your fear and trust allowed you to be boondoggled into supporting the U.S. and/or Israel's launching of a war against Iran, which has turned into an utter fiasco of historic proportions?
If you have your way, we will. Really Rod, grow a ______ spine.
-o>
David,
If the use of belligerent rhetoric and threats against enemy nations by one's head of state were enough to disqualify a particular nation from being "allowed" (again, what nation or entity is granting this said "allowance," and when did God appoint them to this post?) to own nukes, then I daresay no nation on earth should be allowed to own nukes.
By that criteria, just about all states (other than, maybe, Switzerland, Vatican City, and Bhutan) are or have at one time been "rouge" states.>
(I assume you meant "rogue" states"; but "rouge" states conjures up a very amusing image. ;-) )
You make a good point. But I don't think most advanced nations have very often engaged in the sort of rhetoric that Iran consistently directs against Israel -- coupled with the obvious effort by the Iranians to get their hands on an atomic weapon.>
Sorry, that was me, not "anonymous"; one again I'm using someone else's computer and forgot to double-check the settings.
The Great Powers have always taken it upon themselves to police the world. Yes, one can ask who appointed them to that post, and why should those particular nations have that power. But the world is generally better off when it is policed by self-appointed Great Powers than when it is policed by nobody. Britain's command of the seas in the 19th century made global commerce possible, as did America's power in the mid to late 20th century.>
Actually, I think some of the regular posters here wouldn't terribly mind living in a "rouge" state. So it's a felicitious typo. Then again, they probably wouldn't mind being ravaged by a swashbuckling "rogue" either. And a rogue wearing rouge would no doubt be ideal!
I'm straying from the subject, I know. I'm just struck by the irony of that misspelling, given my experience with certain characters who I know like to post here.>
Re Andy Nowicki's post about being ravaged by a swashbuckling rogue wearing rouge...
Does that mean we may be invaded by a horde of Rudolph Valentino impersonators? :-)>
About the argument cited above that it is unfair for the U.S. or the world community to say who can have nukes and who can't -- just as a practical point, as a greater number of the world's countries acquire nuclear capability, the chance that one of them will actually start a nuclear war, or that their technology will be stolen by terrorist, becomes exponentially greater.
A friend of mine who was (essentially) raised as a European made the same dumb (IMO) argument about the unfairness of denying other countries their chance to acquire nukes.
I couldn't believe that someone who claims to be against war (which he does) would argue for something that is so likely to increase the possiblity of a devastating war.>
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