Iran will be shocked and awed
- and probably nuked
- US government trying to find ways
to improve America's image in the world
- Right-wing extremism desecrating
and damaging America's image
Deterrence is impossible, Krauthammer explains,
because Iran revels in a “millenarian fanaticism
glorying in a cult of death,”
In other words, there will be no stopping
these suicidal Muslims,
determined to wipe both Israel and the Great Satan,
the United States, off the map
First, Krauthammer lays out the cost of this action—astronomical gas prices, precipitating a vicious recession, attacks on occupation forces and the installed government in Iraq.
Next, he basically tells us all of this is necessary because “there is the larger danger of permitting nuclear weapons to be acquired by religious fanatics seized with an eschatological belief in the imminent apocalypse and in their own divine duty to hasten the End of Days.”
Deterrence is impossible, Krauthammer explains, because Iran revels in a “millenarian fanaticism glorying in a cult of death,” in other words, there will be no stopping these suicidal Muslims, determined to wipe both Israel and the Great Satan, the United States, off the map.
Or, to paraphrase Clinton’s Iron Maiden, Madeleine Albright, economically destroying America, to say nothing of killing hundreds of thousands of Iranians, is “a very hard choice, but the price … is worth it.”
Krauthammer’s use of the word “larger” is indicative because, for the Straussian neocons, wrecking America comes in a distant second to the fiction that Iran will possess nukes.
In fact, it can be argued that ravaging the homeland is precisely what the neocons have in mind—and thus unleashing the military might of the United States, including more than a few “mini” nukes, on Iran kills two birds with one stone.
For the neocon maharishi, Leo Strauss, all is well in society if there is perpetual war. “Man’s humanity, defined in terms of struggle to the death, is rescued from extinction,” Shadia Drury tells Danny Postel.
“But men like Heidegger, Schmitt, Kojève, and Strauss expect the worst. They expect that the universal spread of the spirit of commerce would soften manners and emasculate man.
"To my mind, this fascistic glorification of death and violence springs from a profound inability to celebrate life, joy, and the sheer thrill of existence.”
Strauss, according to Stefan Steinberg, “was convinced of mankind’s irredeemable wickedness which could only be restrained through a powerful state based on nationalism.
In a letter to his friend [Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt], Strauss wrote: ‘Because mankind is intrinsically wicked he has to be governed: Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united—and they can only be united against other people.’”
Steinberg quotes Drury:
In a commentary on Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political, Strauss agrees with Schmitt that liberalism has turned life into entertainment, and has deprived it of its seriousness, intensity, and struggle….For Krauthammer and the neocons, a little recession—or, depending where you are standing, depression—is a good thing, as it will get Americans in the mood to accept (or, as Norman Podhoretz would have it, “stomach”) perpetual war against perpetual enemies, beginning with the Islamic world, a pet project of the racist and fanatical strain of Israel-centric neoconservatism currently in control of the horizontal and vertical.
Strauss shares the controversial Nazi jurist and political philosopher’s view that the fundamental distinction in politics is that of friend and foe.
Schmitt admires the Nazis because they understood the importance of this distinction and they proceeded to exterminate their enemies, including internal enemies.
Like Schmitt, Strauss believes that politics is first and foremost about the distinction between WE and THEY.
Strauss thinks that a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat; and following Machiavelli, he maintains that if no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured.
Had he lived to see the collapse of the Soviet Union, he would have been deeply troubled because the collapse of the evil empire poses a threat to America’s inner stability.
Krauthammer and the neocons understand well Iran does not and will not pose a nuclear threat and all the End Days nonsense bantered around in the corporate media is scary nonsense designed to frighten those of us who are apparently incapable of comprehending otherwise.
And there are at least 100 million of us, glued to our brainwash machines, ready to believe Arabs and Muslims, like the Japs and Huns of previous generations, are biologically and genetically predisposed to murder and suicide.
Indeed, Iran will be shock and awed—and probably nuked—and Charles Krauthammer’s latest piece is evidence the neocons are certain their deadly agenda will go forward, probably late next month, but certainly before Bush exits office, if indeed, as the unitary decider who believes a dictatorship would be easier, he exits at all.
Kurt Nimmo/ADE
The Tehran Calculus
By Charles Krauthammer
In his televised Sept. 11 address, President Bush said that we must not "leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons." There's only one such current candidate: Iran.
The next day, he responded thus (as reported by Rich Lowry and Kate O'Beirne of National Review) to a question on Iran: "It's very important for the American people to see the president try to solve problems diplomatically before resorting to military force."
"Before" implies that the one follows the other. The signal is unmistakable. An aerial attack on Iran's nuclear facilities lies just beyond the horizon of diplomacy. With the crisis advancing and the moment of truth approaching, it is important to begin looking now with unflinching honesty at the military option.
The costs will be terrible:
· Economic . An attack on Iran is likely to send oil prices overnight to $100 or even to $150 a barrel. That will cause a worldwide recession perhaps as deep as the one triggered by the Iranian revolution of 1979.
Iran might suspend its own 2.5 million barrels a day of oil exports and might even be joined by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, asserting primacy as the world's leading anti-imperialist. But even more effectively, Iran will shock the oil markets by closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which 40 percent of the world's exports flow every day.
Iran could do this by attacking ships in the Strait, scuttling its own ships, laying mines or just threatening to launch Silkworm anti-ship missiles at any passing tanker.
The U.S. Navy will be forced to break the blockade. We will succeed, but at considerable cost. And it will take time -- during which the world economy will be in a deep spiral.
· Military . Iran will activate its proxies in Iraq, most notably, Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. Sadr is already wreaking havoc with sectarian attacks on Sunni civilians. Iran could order the Mahdi Army and its other agents within the police and armed forces to take up arms against the institutions of the central government itself, threatening the very anchor of the new Iraq. Many Mahdi will die, but they live to die. Many Iraqis and coalition soldiers are likely to die as well.
Among the lesser military dangers, Iran might activate terrorist cells around the world, although without nuclear capability that threat is hardly strategic. It will also be very difficult to unleash its proxy Hezbollah, now chastened by the destruction it brought upon Lebanon in the latest round with Israel and deterred by the presence of Europeans in the south Lebanon buffer zone.
· Diplomatic. There will be massive criticism of America from around the world. Much of it is to be discounted. The Muslim street will come out again for a few days, having replenished its supply of flammable American flags, most recently exhausted during the cartoon riots. Their governments will express solidarity with a fellow Muslim state, but this will be entirely hypocritical. The Arabs are terrified about the rise of a nuclear Iran and would privately rejoice in its defanging.
The Europeans will be less hypocritical because their visceral anti-Americanism trumps rational calculation. We will have done them an enormous favor by sparing them the threat of Iranian nukes, but they will vilify us nonetheless.
These are the costs. There is no denying them. However, equally undeniable is the cost of doing nothing.
In the region, Persian Iran will immediately become the hegemonic power in the Arab Middle East. Today it is deterred from overt aggression against its neighbors by the threat of conventional retaliation. Against a nuclear Iran, such deterrence becomes far less credible. As its weak, nonnuclear Persian Gulf neighbors accommodate to it, jihadist Iran will gain control of the most strategic region on the globe.
Then there is the larger danger of permitting nuclear weapons to be acquired by religious fanatics seized with an eschatological belief in the imminent apocalypse and in their own divine duty to hasten the End of Days. The mullahs are infinitely more likely to use these weapons than anyone in the history of the nuclear age. Every city in the civilized world will live under the specter of instant annihilation delivered either by missile or by terrorist. This from a country that has an official Death to America Day and has declared since Ayatollah Khomeini's ascension that Israel must be wiped off the map.
Against millenarian fanaticism glorying in a cult of death, deterrence is a mere wish. Is the West prepared to wager its cities with their millions of inhabitants on that feeble gamble?
These are the questions. These are the calculations. The decision is no more than a year away.