David Remnick has published a great piece at the New Yorker throwing cold water all over the idea of an attack on Iran as “a heedless attack that risks the whirlwind.” The piece is notable for beginning squarely in Jeffrey Goldberg’s psycho-historical territory– Israeli planes over Auschwitz– and ending in a good American space: the idea of containment after World War II that was pushed by wise man George Kennan.
A unilateral attack from Israel, however, would be a grave mistake for all the reasons made plain by Meir Dagan and so many others. It is terrible enough to imagine what might happen if Iran came to possess a bomb; but an attack now would almost certainly lead to a tide of blood in the region.
The Middle East today is in a state of fragile possibility, full of peril, to be sure, but also pregnant with promise. A premature unilateral attack could upend everything and one result of many would be an Israel under fire, under attack, and more deeply isolated than ever before.
“For Israel,” a columnist from Ynet, Yediot’s English-language Web site concluded, “the way to cope with the Iranian nuclear threat is to adopt indirect routes, by supporting tougher sanctions against Iran and also by securing an agreement with the Palestinian Authority that would minimize regional tensions.” This route—call it the route of rigorous containment—is the right one.
Where was this sagacious David Remnick when we needed him during the runup to the disastrous Iraq War? Well, then he was influenced by neoconservatives like Jeffrey Goldberg– not by the Kennan realists–and he urged that war on, probably in some strong measure because of his love of Israel.
There’s a lot of nonsense about Iran’s bomb. Or anyone’s. If Iran had a bomb, it would never explode it (e.g., over Israel) for fear of the retaliation. I almost believe it would refrain from doing so if Israel exploded ONE A-bomb (small) over Iran FIRST.
All this hoo-haw seems science-fiction. Perhaps Israel (and its citizens) who have been practicing real war-making “as if crazy” for many years are unable to imagine a country which — if armed with an A-bomb (or H-bomb) would not use it in a “crazy” way.
I just don’t get it. What I especially don’t get is the knee-jerk way that everyone (meaning pundits) in USA accepts the absolute undesirability of Iran getting nukes but have nothing to say about India and Pakistan in this respect, Pakistan being a rather undisciplined country (apparently) (to say nothing about the most war-like of all countries, except perhaps the USA, Israel, with its bombs).
I’m sorry but Remnick is still a turd for his stance on the Iraq invasion. If he (and George Packer, and Jeffrey Goldberg) had a scrap of integrity they’d move to Fallujah for, I dunno, just 6 months even, and write about the violence, chaos, destruction, lasting damage to the public health and environment that the war unleashed. Let these smart Ivy League guys write about the hospitals full of babies born with horrendous birth defects thanks to our depleted uranium shell casings poisoning the elements. Let these macho milquetoast laptop bombardiers drink the tapwater every, single, day and tell us how it tastes in Fallujah, in Sadr City, in Kirkuk. The New Yorker deserves to never live down their moral and intellectual failure that did so much to mainstream the ’03 Iraq war. At least Remnick unlike so many others seems to have learned a little something, but the guy should’ve been tossed out on his ass a long time ago and replaced with Amy Davidson or someone else who has less difficulty consistently writing like a human. Again and finally, it’s great that Remnick’s learned a little, but we have no right to forgive him and his sleazy little buddies for anything.
Remnick alludes to the Israeli attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor as an example of how Israel slowed down nuclear proliferation. In fact, according to Richard Wilson, a Harvard nuclear physicist who visited the bombed out site in 1982, there was no way the reactor could have been used in a weapons program. But it’s become a widely accepted myth among our pro-Israel chattering classes that Israel did the world a great favor with their attack on the Osirak reactor.
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That’s what I hate about most of our pundit class–even when they write a halfway decent article they nearly always include some flagrant falsehood, one which acquires yet more credibility because it appears in a piece that is critical of an possible Israeli attack on Iran.
What’s to “contain”? How many countries did Iran invade in the last few centuries? How many civilians did it nuke to oblivion in Nagasagi and Hiroshima?
None.
In 2003, Iran offered to make complete peace with the US and even to recognize Israel. This and many other Iranian concessions have been ignored, because Iranian ‘nuclear weapons’ are just an excuse for forcing regime change in Iran, just as “WMDs in IRaq” was just an excuse for a war.
http://www.iranaffairs.com/iran_affairs/2011/11/iran-offered-to-recognize-israel-in-2003.html