bombast and the bomb
LETTING IRAN GO NUCLEAR
DAVID
SOLWAY
David
Solway is the author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism,
and Identity. His editorials appear regularly in FRONTPAGEMAG.COM
and Pajamas
Media. His
latest book, Hear, O Israel! (Mantua Books), will be
available Nov. 19th.
The most pressing
question for the world today is which atomic state will be the
second nation in history to use nuclear weapons. Will it be
Iran in its much-publicized threat to “wipe Israel off
the map” in a “single storm”? Will it be Israel
in a preemptive strike using nuclear-tipped bunker-busters?
Will it be a suicidal North Korea launching ballistic missiles
at South Korea, Japan, Hawaii, or Washington State? The most
likely nuclear prospect is that Iran, whether directly or by
proxy, will assume that tainted honor, and that Israel will
necessarily retaliate, becoming the third nation on the active
nuclear roster.
Perhaps
an equally pressing question is why the world’s major
chanceries should have allowed the situation in the Middle East
to deteriorate to such a degree that a nuclear exchange between
Iran and Israel has become a distinct possibility. The three
largest members of the European Union, France, Germany, and
Britain, have been engaged in negotiations with Iran since October
2003 without having made the slightest dent in Iran’s
determination to acquire an operational nuclear arsenal —
one, let us recall, that it has promised to use.
Sanctions
have been feeble and ineffective. Timelines for resolution have
been constantly moved forward while Iran marches inexorably
toward nuclear capability. Russia and China are demonstrably
abetting the Iranian project and the United States, especially
under Barack Obama, in its timid and indeed pusillanimous response
to the issue, behaves almost as a silent partner.
Aside
from the Russians and the Chinese, who are practicing a particularly
short-sighted version of realpolitik and whose intransigence
is to be expected, the Americans intermittently and the Europeans
consistently have implemented a policy toward the Middle East
that appears entirely counterproductive, one that almost seems
intended not to resolve but to exacerbate the state of affairs
in the region. What they have put on the table is the road map
to war.
The
folly of bankrolling the Palestinians to the tune of billions
of dollars to no beneficial effect, thereby contributing chiefly
to offshore accounts, arms buildups, and a condition of professional
mendicancy, appears not to have dawned on the ostensibly benighted
donors. The international backing for UNRWA, whose real mandate
is to perpetuate the manufactured refugee problem and to provide
logistical and moral support to Hamas, continues apace. The
ignorant or disingenuous attempt to portray the Palestinian
and Islamic carnival of terror as motivated by despair, frustration,
or exploitation only ensures that it will persist. The diktats
leveled at Israel to compromise its security without reciprocity,
to cede territory and shrink its borders to a state of indefensibility,
to surrender its capital city, and to refrain from answering
unprovoked attacks upon its civilian population, argue another
agenda apart from the declared intention to establish conditions
for a “lasting peace.” For it is patently undeniable
that no Israeli concession has ever resulted in anything but
escalating hostilities and mounting depredations. This is a
fact that only the dead — or the brain-dead — are
unable to perceive.
As
for the ongoing “negotiations” and “dialogue”
with Iran, these have led absolutely nowhere since day one and
can no longer be taken seriously. Six years of utter futility
would have had some impact on the Western mind — by which
I mean primarily, though not only, the European mind —
were it not bent to some other purpose. The Western reluctance
to punish or incommode the Iranian mullahcracy for the violence
it unleashed upon unarmed citizens protesting the 2009 rigged
elections also speaks volumes. It seems reasonable to infer
that Iran as it is presently constituted may serve a clandestine
function.
Chirac,
Schroeder, Robinson, Solana, Kouchner, Pillay, Ban, Carter,
the Clintons, Zapatero, Stoltenberg, Calmy-Rey, Brown, Miliband,
Blair, and now Obama, along with their ministerial colleagues
and like-minded, highly placed officials, commissioners, civil
servants, diplomats, and friends, cannot be casually described
as congenital imbeciles. These are people with university degrees,
with reasonably good IQs, with considerable experience in international
relations, with a dexterous ability to manipulate language,
and with an enviable shrewdness in managing their own fiscal
and electoral interests. Yet in their economic and political
policies, their diplomatic comportment, and their reading of
the geopolitical text, they give every indication of being retarded
from the egg.
There
are only two ways of making sense of such apparent myopia and
stupefaction. We can chalk up such self-defeating behavior to
the perennial human disposition to pretend that a crisis we
do not know how to handle isn’t really that critical and
will somehow filigree for the best. This tendency has been aggravated
of late, to quote Peter Sloterdijk in Terror from the Air,
as “modernity’s campaign against the self-evident.”
Or, no less saliently, we deduce that nobody can be that
stupid and posit an ulterior design that comes to fruition through
deception and misdirection.
In
other words, our political Illuminati may cherish a shadowy
blueprint of which the rest of us are obligingly ignorant. Daniel
Pipes makes a similar point in his 1997 book Conspiracy,
where he refers to the “double doctrine” of the
Illuminati, namely, “that the rank and file learn of anodyne
goals, while the supérieurs inconnus know the
organization’s true, and quite different, inner secrets.”
We happen to know who our supérieurs are but
we may not know their goals. And it is at least tenable that
those of us who are suspicious of the professed aims of our
political masters may not be suffering from galloping paranoia.
I am
now beginning to suspect that this second alternative may well
be the agenda furtively in play. If the Palestinians, the Syrians,
and Hezbollah fail to do the job of reducing Israel to inconsequence,
Iran remains the default option. I am coming to believe that
the actual strategy at work in the official European and Western
mind may be to encourage by every covert means, including endlessly
protracted and fruitless negotiations, a nuclear exchange between
Israel and Iran, thus getting rid of the perpetual nuisance
which is Israel, appeasing the Arab world, and moving in to
rebuild a devastated Iran for eventual, unencumbered oil and
trade. The loss in immediate economic advantage would be offset
in spades by future economic gains.
This
scenario would explain why Israel has been repeatedly warned
against initiating a preemptive attack on the Iranian nuclear
sites, why an Iraq overflight by the IAF has been turned down,
and why the Israeli request for the sophisticated military assets
and hardware it would need to facilitate the mission has not
been granted. This in the teeth of the manifest insanity of
the mullahcracy, its theological conviction in the imminent
return of the Hidden Imam who brings a universal conflagration
with him, its development of long-range solid-fuel missiles,
and its threat to visit nuclear holocaust upon the Jewish state.
Our only hope is that the Israelis will nevertheless find a
way to neutralize Iran’s nuclear factories and, once again,
do not only themselves but the world a favor, as in 1981 when
they bombed Saddam’s Osirak reactor and in 2007 when they
demolished Syria’s al-Kibar nuclear installation. But
their hands are being tied by the Western powers for whom Iran
looks like it has become the discretionary accomplice, the recourse
of choice.
It
is no secret that a nuclear attack upon tiny Israel would either
annihilate it totally or at the very least render it a non-factor
on the world stage for any foreseeable future. But as Ayatollah
Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, chairman of the orgulous Iranian
Expediency Discernment Council, has stated, Iran is sufficiently
large and populous to survive the harm inflicted by an Israeli
second strike and the Islamic world could well absorb the damage.
Moreover, from the Western perspective, a nuclear convulsion
in the Middle East would remain localized and the cost in world
panic and plummeting markets, as I have suggested, would be
gradually amortized by the removal of Israel and by a severely
weakened Iran, thereby killing a gadfly and crippling a pterodactyl
with one stony policy. I, for one, do not think a nuclear firestorm
could be so easily contained. But for our political elites,
scheming and devising in camera, it would be a calculated
risk presumably worth pursuing, clearing the decks for a “new
world order.”
Unlikely?
Nightmaring in Technicolor? Think again. On the face of it,
these are not stupid people and it is almost inconceivable that
European and Western heads of state, government officials, plenipotentiaries,
and diplomats could be so blindly unaware that this is the destination
toward which their policies, decisions, and enactments are inevitably
leading. Such a terminus should be glaringly obvious to even
the most frivolous and inattentive of observers and certainly
to anyone who has studied the tactics, statements, religious
culture, and actions of the Iranian regime.
Historian
of religion Emmanuel Sivan warns of precisely this danger in
Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics,
a discussion of Shi’a belief and thought. In what is known
as Twelver Shi’ite theology, God’s kingdom is to
be brought upon earth by the Twelfth or Hidden Imam (or Mahdi),
and “one should help precipitate its descent” (emphasis
mine). The mullahs’ intention may well be to provoke the
Mahdi’s arrival by kindling an act of apocalyptic violence,
and Ayatollah Rafsanjani, as mentioned above, has no compunction
against starting the nuclear ball rolling — even if his
plan is only limited to Israel. Why is it so difficult to connect
the dots that literally speckle both the Shi’a scripture
and the geopolitical map? Unless, of course, I am wrong and
our political authorities are indeed stupid people, abusing
by their irresponsibility and obtuseness the positions to which
they have been elected or appointed.
Our
leaders, naturally, would vehemently object to this allegation
of complicity in disaster, discounting it as merely unwarranted
hyperbole, conspiracy mongering, blatant cynicism, or outright
defamation. The reply to their indignation can be found in Matthew
7:20: “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”
Both
explanations for current policy that I have put forward may
appear implausible; notwithstanding, one of them must be right.
In any case, should the event come to pass, we will all pay,
whether for our leaders’ stupidity or for their canniness.
Perhaps we are the stupid ones. After all, we put them there.
