One of the scariest things I heard in Gaza was when I was walking away from the tunnels with a pack of the tunnel workers, somewhat marginalized figures to begin with, but intelligent, canny, and one guy with a flashy belt said, "We are waiting for World War III, that is what will save us." He explained that only with a world war, would a new superpower emerge that would at last stand up for the Palestinians.
Of course, Podhoretz, who likes the superpower status-quo, is also waiting for World War IV, to save Israel and the west.
And today in Haaretz, Netanyahu's national security advisor Uzi Arad also seems to be welcoming a world war. He speaks of Israel and Iran in very chiliastic terms, scorched-earth and Auschwitz and World War II. Strangelovian craziness about "feasible" nuclear wars:
above all I was drawn to Herman Kahn, with whom I worked at the Hudson Institute.
Kahn is the original Dr. Strangelove. He was a Jewish-American
genius who was a salient nuclear hawk and dealt with the planning and
feasibility of nuclear wars. Kahn was a towering figure. He was a
beacon of intelligence, knowledge and pioneering thought. He combined
conceptual productivity, humor and informality. He attracted a group of
devotees of whom I was one in the 1970s. But he also had bitter rivals
who criticized him for even conceiving of the idea of a nuclear war. In
the Cold War it was precisely those who talked about defense and
survival who were considered nuclear hawks. The doves talked about
"mutual assured destruction," which blocks any possibility of thinking
about nuclear weapons. Like Kahn, I was one of the hawks. One of my
projects was a paper for the Pentagon on planning a limited nuclear war
in Central Europe.
On the face of it, what is the point of this? Why execute the enemy
after deterrence has failed? But according to Dror, it is important to
ascertain that the deterrence will work, even if you yourself have been
destroyed. He sees this as a contribution to the repair of the world
[tikkun olam]. When we say "never again," this entails three
imperatives: never again will we be felled in mass numbers, never again
will we be defenseless and never again will there be a situation in
which those who harm us go unpunished.
And these guys have nukes? This is what the Cairo speech was all about: Obama, trying to resolve the narratives, and get us past this deathly opposition.
