Niall Ferguson
Unbelievable that Newsweek and Daily Beast are running Niall Ferguson’s promotion of a war with Iran. Israel’s war or the U.S.’s, I’m not even sure which– but he’s for war. The Nazi analogy comes in with the word “appeasement,” and the piece ends with a finial of foolishness that will tag Ferguson for the rest of his born days, as Condi Rice’s description of Israel’s onslaught on Lebanon in ’06, “the birth pangs of a new Middle East,” will haunt her. Ferguson:
War is an evil. But sometimes a preventive war can be a lesser evil than a policy of appeasement. The people who don’t yet know that are the ones still in denial about what a nuclear-armed Iran would end up costing us all.
It feels like the eve of some creative destruction.
The kind of “creativity” he and other worshipers of the right have produced tends to maim babies for generations to come. Be that Agent Orange or Depleted Uranium. Or in this case the possibility of first strike nukes. He’s like Hitchens here, he’s found a fauning audience of Americans, where he didn’t have such in the UK.
The US is lost….the media stinks to high heaven…no journalism what so ever….
just go along what ever the media masters want…
Is Iran a Threat?
by David R. Henderson, February 06, 2012
Through the government of Switzerland, Iran’s government made an overture to the Bush administration in 2003, in which it asked the Bush administration to meet Iranian officials to discuss ending the sanctions and bringing Iran back into the community of nations in return for Iran’s forswearing any attempt to build nuclear weapons. According to Parsi, the Bush administration, at the behest of Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, rebuffed them. Moreover, the Bush administration verbally attacked Tim Guldimann, the Swiss ambassador to Iran, for being the bearer of good news. Interestingly, Parsi quotes none other than Efraim Halevi, the former head of the Mossad (Israel’s version of the CIA) saying of the Iranian government in 2006, “I don’t think they are irrational, I think they are very rational.”
http://original.antiwar.com/henderson/2012/02/05/is-iran-a-threat/
I just read the Daily Beast version of Ferguson’s article, and am glad to see MW addressing it so soon. The comments at that version are even more critical than what Phil W has to say here, and I recommend readers go to The Daily Beast and read them.
One can hope that Phil W is right that the shortcomings of Ferguson’s essay “will tag Ferguson for the rest of his born days,” as they should. It is probably more likely that the article will instead lead to a new fellowship or two for Ferguson at some far rightwing-funded “think tanks.”
Of particular interest in the comments are the three responses by RepStones to “Ferguson’s inference that Six Day war was legal and just by Israel….”
Others address the author’s reference to Israel as “the most easterly outpost of Western civilization.” Apart from the simple fact that people in Moscow, Melbourne and Auckland might disagree, more and more, the government of Israel is being increasingly dominated by people whose world view has less to do with a “Western” legacy than do the cultural, educational and diplomatic policies of the governments of India, Singapore, South Korea or Japan.
It feels like the eve of some creative destruction
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Funny that he makes the argument using capitalist terminology…….
( I KNOW HE’S “IN THE LOBBY” – OK, I KNOW)
To judge by what Craig Murray reports on his blog, there’s a lot of support for an attack on Iran in British government circles.