Iran?

I've been at my cousin's wedding all weekend and change, hence no updates. Here's something! Thanks to Janani for pointing me to this fine website.

Commentary?

Is it just me, or is there some very special kind of arrogance that goes into giving your publication a name like "Commentary"? Is this word, unalloyed by any declamatory embellishment, meant to indicate that you will provide the reader with the definitive commentary on any subject appearing within its pages? Or am I reading too much into titles? Questions, questions.

The article I examine here comes courtesy of their editor-at-large, Norman Podhoretz.

Mr. Podhoretz begins by informing us that he considers the Cold War to have actually been World War III, and that this means that the current Global War on Terror is really WWIV. This rhetorical flourish bothers me, so Podhoretz succeeds in pissing me off in the first two sentences of his article. An auspicious start.

Forgive me for my ignorance, but I was under the impression that a "World War" required that a fairly hefty portion of the world be directly involved, and also that a war should be going on. I tend to think that the second requirement is more critical than the first--after all, World War I is undisputed as a World War, thought it was pretty much a European affair. So, calling the Cold War, which amounted to a lot of diplomatic posturing and arms racing plus a handful of proxy wars (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc.) WWIII might be exaggerating. By that sort of logic we can say that, due to the diplomatic maneuvering taking place prior to August 1914, WWI actually went on from ca. 1905 to 1921 (counting the Russian Civil War as a direct outgrowth).

As for the putative WWIV, America and Britain plus loose change versus a lot of Stateless Jihadists and also Iraq fall rather short of requirement number one, and requirement number two is foggy. If one subscribes to the notion that a cultural and ideological struggle constitute a war, then definitely we're in a bit of a scrap, maybe the biggest since the American Civil War of 1830-1877.

Kidding aside, Podhoretz is just engaging in a completely empty saber-rattling rhetorical exercise. By asserting that we're in a World War he instantly ratchets up the issue and escalates the language, which is always a good position to be in. When a fuzzy-headed liberal insists that we need to stop and think, then you can tell him that it's time to fight the Good Fight in WWIV. Maybe it's the lack of any direct American experience with the toll that a real war, on home territory, exacts on a nation that allows people like Podhoretz to make fatuous statements like this.

I've also noticed a marked strategy of the Neo-Conservatives to reference to long, hard struggles. Podhoretz informs us that WWIV is "likely to go on for decades." By speaking in long timescales and the language of hard struggle, they're achieving two goals. First, this is a long war, so Americans should not be dismayed if there are no results for five or six or twenty years. Second, this is a tough fight, and Americans always rise to the challenge.

Let's not lose our heads, Norman. I'll grant you that eradicating terrorism will be a long fight. The roots of this guerrilla movement within the Muslim world are deep, and while cutting the weed down helps (viz. our invasion of Afghanistan) it's going to take a long time to dig up the roots--economic, political, and ideological--that drive the Jihadists. But as unfashionable as it might be to say this, terrorism is not that great a danger to America in general. Terrorists are very scary--it's in their name, for Christ's sake!--and every death is a tragedy, but exactly how much damage did the 9/11 attacks do to America, to the sinews of its Great Power status, in the realistic analysis? It hurt us substantially less than the invasion of Iraq did, militarily, economically, and diplomatically.

For a long time people were afraid to say things like that, for fear of being accused of "making light of terrorism" or otherwise minimizing the threat. But I think it's beginning to dawn on a lot of people that they've been bamboozled. Certainly Osama bin Laden or any of his thugs would like to kill me if he met me in person. But the concrete likelihood of me, here in the Midwest, being killed by a Jihadist is substantially less than my likelihood of being struck and killed by a drunk driver. Get ready for WWV, the War on Alcohol.

Rather than semantics-mongering about World Wars Three and Four, maybe we should examine the problems of terrorism and radical Islamism on their face and come up with real solutions. Treating them as struggles of national intelligence and law enforcement and economic/cultural change, respectively, would be a start. Of course people like Podhoretz would insist that This is a War unique in human history, and that I'm being a flippant, unrealistic ivory tower liberal by saying that we can handle this with Kid Gloves--we must throw the full force of the immense American Military-Industrial complex behind WWIV. My feeling is that if your house is infested with rats, you should try poison and traps before grabbing gun and shooting holes in all the walls.

Moving on.

Podhoretz follows up this up with typical Iran-based fearmongering. To prove how dangerous Iran is, he cites a State Department annual report about terrorism that says Iran is the main sponsor of global terrorism. The State Department of course being an entirely neutral party as regards Iran. Being as Mr. Podhoretz is a leading neoconservative, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and member of some important neoconservative committees, and being as the Bush administration and State Department are shot through with neoconservativism, isn't there some rule against him citing them? Can I cite myself and my friends as a source as well?

There some kind of cognitive disease at work here, as well. Iran as the leader of global "Islamofascism" is hard to swallow, because Iranians are Shi'ites and most everyone else are Sunnis. And the jihadists of al Qaeda et al. are not only Sunnis, but super-Sunnis who foam at the mouth and so on. Are the Ayatollahs who run Iran sad when al Qaeda and other Sunni terrorist groups kill Americans? Clearly not. They probably pop open their non-alcoholic champagne on just those occasions. But the aims of Al Qaeda and co. are completely anathema to everything the Ayatollahs hold dear; what the radical Islamists want is one Muslim state, the Caliphate, which will encompass all Muslim countries from Morocco to Indonesia in one glorious, utopian superstate. For Persian Iranians, this means permanent occupation and horrific religious persecution at the hands of Sunni Arab zealots. Not exactly an ideal outcome, and reason enough to belief the State Department might be making more out of this than actually obtains.

Podhoretz then moves from this mind-bending on to Nuclear panic. For my part I subscribe to the leftist lie that Iran mainly wants nuclear capability for the purpose of generating power, and secondarily for bombs to make themselves even scarier. Iran, despite being a petroleum exporter, lacks refining capacity and has to import gasoline. Nuclear power would alleviate a lot of their problems. It's also hard to believe that Iran wants to attack anybody with nuclear weapons. There's a lot of mileage on the idea of The Bomb in the hands of a Madman, but I have my doubts. If nobody up till now (including Stalin and Mao, legendary for their mental stability) has deployed the nukes, why would Ahmadinejad be the first?

It's also egotistical to think that the Iranians would be willing to go down to certain annihilation in the face of America's colossal nuclear arsenal, irrevocably destroying a 4,000 year old continuous cultural history of which they are tremendously proud, just to maybe kill a few hundred thousand Americans. Do we really think that other nations want to commit suicide just to deal America a few grim but easily survivable blows?

Then there's the more concrete question of whether Ahmadinejad would actually have to power to exercise the use nuclear weapons in any capacity. The answer is no, for reasons that pretty much undo the entire thrust of Podhoretz article. Ahmadinejad is a popular figure in the western media. "Look at the crazy President of Iran. He wants to destroy Israel!" This springs, I think, from an American delusion that the office of President is the same in Iran as it is in the USA. It isn't. Ahmadinejad exercises executive power at the pleasure of the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollahi Khamenei, and his decisions can be overruled at any time. Ahmadinejad's role is mostly ceremonial.

Following Podhoretz, we then move into some kind of bizarre Cold War paranoid fantasy.

"And in the realm of domestic affairs, Finlandization would mean that the only candidates running for office with a prayer of being elected would be those who promised to work toward a sociopolitical system more in harmony with the Soviet model than the unjust capitalist plutocracy under which we had been living.

Of course, by the grace of God, the dissidents behind the Iron Curtain, and Ronald Reagan, we won World War III and were therefore spared the depredations that Finlandization would have brought."

Hippies and libero-commie politicians were all prepared to bring down the capitalist system and force us all to live under soft-pedal Stalinism, but Lech Walesa, the Gipper, and the LORD rescued us at the very doors of defeat. What a spectacular world these people live in, of narrow escapes and secret conspiracies.

The article continues to degenerate with a kindly reference to the nonspecific "British Press." Who does Norman indicate with that moniker? Is the Times of London? The Guardian? The Daily Mirror? The Sun? Or (my own guess) a letter to the editor from some East Anglian village newsletter? That counts as the British Press--it came out of a printing press located somewhere in Britain! A few paragraphs later, we run into "some observers". I am a great fan of "some observers", they always have such fascinating things to say. Already some observers are warning that the American government (or "Zionist Occupational Government" or ZOG as they call it) is controlled by a shadowy camarillo of International Jew Bankers whose sole objective is the mongrolization and destruction of the white race.

Only a quarter of the way through this trainwreck and already I'm tired of Podhoretz. It's late and time for bed. Perhaps I'll revisit him in the future, but don't count on it.

Evan