Facing down the madness


You can't give ground when the other side perceives it as weakness
Lee Harris makes an important point.

There is an important law about power that is too often overlooked by rational and peace-loving people. Any form of power, from the most primitive to the most mind-boggling, is always amplified enormously when it falls into the hands of those whose behavior is wild, erratic, and unpredictable. A gun being waved back and forth by a maniac is far more disturbing to us than the gun in the holster of the policeman, though both weapons are equally capable of shooting us dead. And what is true of guns is far more true in the case of nukes.

That is why nuclear weapons in an Iran dominated by a figure like its current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad make us more nervous than nuclear weapons in the hands of the Swiss. Both could make big explosions; but the Iranian bomb would tend to keep us awake thinking in the night, while the Swiss atomic bomb would be as threatening as a cuckoo-clock This does not mean that Iran has to use the bomb; it doesn't. All Iran has to do to make people wonder if it might use it -- and many of us are already pondering that question, thanks to the disturbingly bellicose rhetoric of Ahmadinejad.

It is an immense form of power simply to make other people wonder if you might not do something bad and unpleasant to them. It can be done in the form of an explicit threat, as in "Israel should be wiped off the map," or it may be done by a strong personality, like Ahmadinejad, who gives off an aura of impulsiveness and self-willful independence: the kind of guy who lets nobody tell him what to do, and who is generally admired for this quality, especially by the poor and dispossessed who would love to be able to exercise that kind of self-assertion. That is the source of the populist appeal of such figures: they are living out the common man's fantasy of being able to defy the establishment. In Ahmadinejad's case, the establishment he is defying is America, Israel, and the West in general -- and the more vociferous his defiance, the greater becomes his populist base of appeal among those in the Muslim world who look upon us as their oppressors.

It's become a race. Can the Iranian regime establish itself as a nuclear power before internal pressures force a change? If the Iranian government blinks, they'll lose face and probably all power.

Iran is probably a tipping point, I won't dispute that. At the same time, Israel can not afford a nuclear Iran. Neither can the other Muslim states in the Gulf, although they can't publicly admit it.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - February 3, 2006 at 04:25 AM  Tag


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