The cold war with Iran is a quarter century old and moving
toward a crisis. A crisis, says the wag, is when there are no good
options, and that describes the threat of the violent, ruthless,
hallucinatory Iran under the priest craft of the mullahs and the
non-rational talk of Ahmadinejad and his IRGC cabal. No good
options. The crash of nation states ahead is as inevitable as
fission. Meanwhile the EU shivers and feigns. The United States
State Department is a pitiable schoolmarm. The United Nations is a
fiction dreamed up by Cervantes.
What is to be done? Prepare for the dark ages. In the immediate
future I can turn my irony at those among us who apologize for
Tehran by doubting the threat. The blogometer at Hotline listed
three self-enamored Democrat voices yesterday, Atrios, Lean Left
and Matt Yglesias, who each contribute ignorant partisanship to the
debate. Lean Left regards Iran as organized crime, not as a nuclear
fuelled terror state with a stated desire to eliminate the State of
Israel. Atrios hears "Iran Talk" as propaganda to advance an
unstated domestic agenda by the Bush team or some imagined
controlling authority. And Yglesias points to the first world war
as a warning that preemption is futile.
The summary of these positions is that Iran is not a profoundly
potent and mass-murdering enemy of the United States of America and
its allies. The apologizing left now assumes the same blind role
evidenced by the out of power Republican minority in the 1930s, who
regarded FDR's looming confrontation with Germany and Japan as a
diversion from squabbling about deflation. As if Iran policy is
electioneering for '06 or '08, as if Iran is a Republican dirty
trick.
How far will the smarty-pants leftosphere go down the path of
appeasement to the Iran monster, and how many of the rightosphere
will follow? History offers examples that the day the argument ends
is the day none of us will much care about who is right. The EMP
will mark the end of the digital age and the start of the dark
age.
topics:
Iran, Israel, United Nations, NATO
