This video
along with the following piece by Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria screams for the immediate impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney. They are nuts! Do it now! Before it’s too late. Note the name Norman Podhoretz as the
central figure pounding his big bass war drum into our slow witted and evermore insane President. Norman Podhoretz is at present
Rudi Giuliuani’s top Foreign Policy Consultant. Secretary of State to be?
At
a meeting with reporters last week, President Bush said that "if you’re
interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be
interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to
make a nuclear weapon." These were not the barbs of some
neoconservative crank or sidelined politician looking for publicity.
This was the president of the United States, invoking the specter of
World War III if Iran gained even the knowledge.
The
American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality.
Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has
consulted on this topic, has written that Iran’s President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad is "like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to
overturn the going international system and to replace it in the
fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the
religio-political culture of Islamofascism." For this staggering
proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.
Here
is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s and an annual
defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country
since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68
times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater.
Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or
actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is
about to overturn the international system and replace it with an
Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?
When the
relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran,
American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real
power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and
police, was wielded by the unelected "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is
on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn’t have a nuclear button yet and
won’t for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which
point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just
facts.)
In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that
while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war,
Iran can’t be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a "residual
rationality," he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered
the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and
revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational
folk. But not Ahmadinejad, who has done what that compares? One of the
bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have
become surprisingly charitable about two of history’s greatest mass
murderers.
If I had to choose whom to describe as a
madman, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il or Ahmadinejad, I do not think there
is really any contest. A decade ago Kim Jong Il allowed a famine to
kill 2 million of his own people, forcing the others to survive by
eating grass, while he imported gallons of expensive French wine. He
has sold nuclear technology to other rogue states and threatened his
neighbors with test-firings of rockets and missiles. Yet the United
States will be participating in international relief efforts to
Pyongyang worth billions of dollars.
We’re on a path to
irreversible confrontation with a country we know almost nothing about.
The United States government has had no diplomats in Iran for almost 30
years. American officials have barely met with any senior Iranian
politicians or officials. We have no contact with the country’s vibrant
civil society. Iran is a black hole to us—just as Iraq had become in
2003.
The one time we seriously negotiated with Tehran
was in the closing days of the war in Afghanistan, in order to create a
new political order in the country. Bush’s representative to the Bonn
conference, James Dobbins, says that "the Iranians were very
professional, straightforward, reliable and helpful. They were also
critical to our success. They persuaded the Northern Alliance to make
the final concessions that we asked for." Dobbins says the Iranians
made overtures to have better relations with the United States through
him and others in 2001 and later, but got no reply. Even after the Axis
of Evil speech, he recalls, they offered to cooperate in Afghanistan.
Dobbins took the proposal to a principals meeting in Washington only to
have it met with dead silence. The then Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, he says, "looked down and rustled his papers." No reply was
ever sent back to the Iranians. Why bother? They’re mad.
Last
year, the Princeton scholar, Bernard Lewis, a close adviser to Bush and
Vice President Dick Cheney, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal
predicting that on Aug. 22, 2006, President Ahmadinejad was going to
end the world. The date, he explained, "is the night when many Muslims
commemorate the night flight of the Prophet Muhammad on the winged
horse Buraq, first to ‘the farthest mosque,’ usually identified with
Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This might well be deemed an
appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world" (my emphasis). This would all be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.