William Kristol writes “kill the deal“. What’s his alternative? It’s to start a war with Iran. I quote
“But we will also say openly that, if it comes to it, airstrikes to set back the Iranian nuclear weapons program are preferable to this deal that lets it go forward.”
Iran doesn’t have a “nuclear weapons program”, but that doesn’t stop Kristol’s warmongering. Of Iran, Kristol writes
“So Iran, a state-sponsor of terror, an enemy of the United States, an aggressive jihadist power, a regime dedicated to the destruction of Israel, will become a threshold nuclear weapons state.”
Kristol is busy imagining phantasms. His thinking is divorced from reality.
“State-sponsor of terror”? This is a strategic concept that leads to wars that do not solve anything and make matters worse. “An enemy of the United States”? This is strictly in the eye of an empire that battens on designating one enemy after another. “An aggressive jihadist power”? This is simply false in all respects.
“A regime dedicated to the destruction of Israel”? What, by military means, by developing a nuclear bomb and using it on Israel? This is absurd, given Israel’s arsenal of nuclear weapons. Rouhani’s views on Israel and Palestine are a lot more nuanced than Kristol’s simple-minded take on them. See here, here, here, and here for some examples. See here too where Rouhani says “Some think that we should either fight … or we should surrender to other powers. However, we believe none of that. There is a third path. We can cooperate with the world.”
“A threshold nuclear state”? This is a novel threat manufactured in the feverishly fearful mind of Kristol. To him, the U.S. has the right to go beyond international agreements unilaterally; at will, by war if it chooses, the U.S. may prevent any incipient power from augmenting its capabilities and reaching even a threshold where it might actually bring more advanced weapons into existence. He believes that world order depends on a U.S. monopoly of power and advanced weaponry that it maintains by keeping incipient powers weak. He believes in superpower U.S. All of this thinking is fantastic, remote from reality. There is no way that the U.S. can dominate the whole world. The more that it tries, the more that its weakness and inability to accomplish this become evident to all, except ideologues like Kristol.
To me, Kristol sounds very much on the defensive in this opinion piece. He trots out the same tired and false charges and arguments that we’ve heard so much of in the past. He brings up the “Munich agreement”. What neocon argument would be complete without comparing some imagined foe, like Saddam Hussein and Mouammar Khadafi, to Hitler in the 1930s? Lately Vladimir Putin has become the favored whipping boy. In Kristol’s fanciful eyes, Iran becomes “one of the world’s most dangerous regimes…”
Kristol and Netanyahu are on the same page with that kind of language. Why should Americans adopt the embattled, one-sided, confrontational, warlike psychology of Netanyahu? His approach will never succeed in ending the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Kristol’s approach of bombing Iran will certainly not resolve the conflict. The consequences of doing that would be extraordinarily far-reaching and harmful. Thus we can conclude that William Kristol has nothing constructive to offer on Iran.
11:10 am on April 6, 2015
