Un-Christian Delusions
One of my commenters pointed me to this bizarre item* by Michael Novak at one of the blogs at First Things. Novak writes:
We again need such Christian realism. Such tough-mindedness. The most dreadful war of all time is just ahead of us, is already well begun. Many of us want to save the Christian Holy Places, and Israel, too–our best ally in the world, the creator of the most economically creative and democratic society in its region.
Fulfilling this desire will not be easy in the next twelve months, fateful months, clock-ticking months. If the nuclear capacity of Iran is not destroyed before functioning nuclear weapons are in their silos or other weapons platforms, the whole world will experience blackmail.
To make an object lesson, one nation in particular is on notice that it is listed as first for destruction.
How will we live with ourselves if Israel is annihilated with nuclear bombs? How will we survive? How will our understanding of the Word of God survive, if the fleshly, tangible heart of Jewish and Christian faith is obliterated?
He goes on to urge a war of aggression against Iran to “prevent” the absurd fantasy of the Iranian destruction of the Holy Places. It is bad enough that Novak invokes Niebuhr (!) in support of this mad call for unprovoked, unnecessary war, but when he says that the “most dreadful war of all time is just ahead of us, is already well begun” we can safely say that he has lost all touch with reality. WWII remains the most dreadful war of all time, and nothing on the horizon even remotely compares to the loss of life and destruction that occurred in that war. So there is nothing realistic at all about Novak’s “Christian realism,” and neither is there anything Christian about it if that word is to have any connection to the teachings of Our Lord.
Even under very broad interpretations of just war theory, there cannot be a just war when the other party has inflicted no grave, lasting injury on us. By definition, preventive war cannot be just, and yet it is most certainly preventive war that Novak and other advocates of attacking Iran demand. War is sometimes necessary and permitted for the restoration of peace. There is no justification for destroying what peace exists to satisfy our irrational fears of a deterrable and containable threat. There is no conceivable justification for initiating hostilities to attempt to stop the potential future acquisition of a weapon that the other state is very unlikely to use against us or our allies. To start a war for such a reason would be a crime against God and man.
What would make such a war even more unjustifiable is the improbability of success: a war against Iran might delay an Iranian bomb, but it would not eliminate Iran’s nuclear program and it would almost certainly make the acquisition of such weapons an even higher priority to deter future attacks. Meanwhile, the consequences of such a war could be very bad for U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gulf states, as well as for Israel and our Gulf state allies, to say nothing of the potential damage it would do to the global economy and the hardship and suffering it would inflict on the Iranian people. Thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of people would die, many more would be injured and displaced, and our government and the governments of any states that helped us would obviously be implicated in yet another illegal war. Beyond the loss of life and resources, the damage to our national reputation would be staggering.
Novak warns against the “blackmail” that will follow if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, but the only one engaged in a sort of blackmail here is Novak. He would exploit the emotional and religious attachment Christians naturally have for the Holy Places to inspire support for massive, unnecessary bloodshed. The message is quite clear: if you treasure the sacred places where God revealed Himself, you will endorse my monstrous proposal, and otherwise you probably don’t really care about these places or the revelation itself. The proposal is horrible, and the manipulation being employed to advance the proposal is simply despicable.
As for the Iranian threat, Novak is simply wrong. The “whole world” will not experence blackmail from Iran. Most likely, no other state will experience anything of the kind. It is possible that Iranian nuclear weapons could push other states towards nuclearization, in which case the danger would be an arms race and not Iranian “blackmail.” That would be undesirable, but it would not be worse than the regional conflagration that an attack on Iran would cause. Israel’s nuclear arsenal will ensure that Iran would never attempt a nuclear first-strike against Israel.
For that matter, Jerusalem is also considered holy in the eyes of Muslims. I have no idea how Westerners can claim to “know” that the Iranian government would be so moved by religious apocalyptic fervor that it would engage in suicidal nuclear warfare, but they also seem remarkably certain that the holy status of Jerusalem in the eyes of Muslims somehow doesn’t really “count” and will be tossed aside at a moment’s notice. We often see this selective reliance on the beliefs and statements of people in other states. When Ahmadinejad or some other figure of authority in Iran makes demagogic, bellicose statements against Israel, these statements are regarded as essential for understanding the thinking of the Iranian government. On the other hand, when their politico-religious authorities say repeatedly that they regard the use of nuclear weapons as abhorrent, we are supposed to dismiss these statements automatically.
* That is, it is genuinely bizarre, but it’s actually sadly predictable and normal for many of the people at First Things.
Daniel,
I really appreciate you taking time out to comment on this. In my previous ‘hyper-interventionist foreign policy’ life, I respected some/much of what Novak wrote, but now I read this piece with a mix of dread, confusion, and sadness. As a Catholic, I have to wonder if Novak and I are reading from the same catechism. Is he really using Christianity as the basis for an attack on Iran?! And not merely in the ‘protect Israel’ mode, but almost as though Iran has the ability to destroy Christianity itself? Does he have any thoughts on the fate of Christian sects in Iraq that we effectively destroyed by toppling Saddam? Does he understand that the crippling sanctions he is urging will only hurt the innocent people of Iran, and not the true object of his ire.
It is so painfully ironic that he is abdicating the higher calling of Christ, and instead demanding that we act like the Islamic terrorists we so demonize. Sorry, but not in my country’s name, and surely not in my Lord’s name.
Peace be with you.
I am intrigued by Mr. Novak’s notion of our being “blackmailed” by a nuclear-armed Iran. Have the Iranians gotten their hands on copies of nude photos of us, from when we were a young nation just starting out in show business?
How will we live with ourselves if Nagasaki and Hiroshima are annihilated with atomic bombs? How will we survive? How will our understanding of the Word of God survive…?
Ooops. Sorry.
Hi Jim,
I apologize, but I’m not entirely sure what point you are making. Are you saying that those attacks on Japan also justify us attacking Iran, or they justify Iran having the bomb as well, or that all Christians in America are hypocrites, or…?
Niebuhr wrote that “our idealists are divided between those who would renounce the responsibilities of power for the sake of preserving the purity of our soul and those who are ready to cover every ambiguity of good and evil in our actions by the frantic insistence that any measure taken in a good cause must be unequivocally virtuous.” Mr. Novak, along with many of his fellows at First Things, seem to remember only the first half of this sentence.
Herbert Butterfield, a much more compelling Christian international relations scholar than either Niebuhr or Novak, noted during the Cold War that “the policy of ridding the world of aggression by the method of total war—of the war for righteousness—is like using the devil to cast out the devil: it does not even have the merit of being practical politics.”
cfountain72..
My point was very poorly made for which I apologize. The nations which present the greatest nuclear threat are the nations that actually possess nuclear weapons. There has been only one to date that has actually used an atomic weapon, sadly us. We have shrouded what in justice should be guilt in the myth that their use was necessary to end the war. It was not as was recognized by Eisenhower among others. I don’t believe Americans are sufficiently well informed to say that they are hypocrites but Michael Novak should be. It is certainly hypocrisy for our policy practitioners and the attending media to indulge in the kind of hysterical war mongering represented in Novak’s call to arms; Iran does not have a nuclear weapon and may never have a nuclear weapon. Israel on the other hand has plenty of them as do we, undoubtedly reasons Iran might consider developing one. If I read the expression “crippling sanctions” one more time, I believe I may throw up.
Sorry again about the confusion. I meant to say that Americans would do well to trouble more over our prime role in the inauguration of atomic warfare and 65 years of nuclear terror.
On any threat to the Holy Places, I for one am happy to seek and take the word of their Francisan Custos.
Why does Zionism play so well among many (not all) Evangelicals? It is not usually because they subscribe to Dispensationalism. Even in America, most of them do not use the Scofield Reference Bible or take it at all seriously. Anywhere else, such as here in Britain, it is hard to obtain. The Left Behind series has no British distributor, since it has no conceivable British audience.
No, it is because they either do not know, or do not want to know, about Levantine Christianity, much as they either do not know, or do not want to know, about the Sub-Apostolic Fathers. They do not wish to be confronted with entirely matter-of-fact descriptions of all things “Romish” existing during the lifetimes of the Apostles and providing the context that the New Testament text presupposes. Nor do they wish to be confronted with the entirely matter-of-fact existence of communities of that kind which have been present continuously for two thousand years, right there in the Bible Lands.
Christian communities that go all the way back to the Day of Pentecost are problematic enough in themselves for them, without those communities’ having become, at best, Anglican or Lutheran rather than, say, Baptist, and far more commonly Latin Catholic or Maronite, Greek Orthodox or Melkite, Syrian Orthodox or Syrian Catholic, Armenian Orthodox or Armenian Catholic.
As part of Evangelicalism’s general upward trend in educational terms, perhaps even leading to a United States Supreme Court nominee this year, Evangelical theology is increasingly looking beyond the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to its earlier and more cerebral roots, and thus to a place within the older, broader and deeper Tradition. Approaches to the Middle East are starting to reflect this shift.
But most churchgoers, and indeed most clergy, are not academic theologians. So, for the most part, the attitude continues to be essentially the same as that which has since the nineteenth century maintained the completely made-up Garden Tomb because those who invented it did not like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and did not want people to know about it.
For all their lionization of Pope John Paul II, the First Things crowd often forgets his first words as pontiff: “Be Not Afraid.”
I hear that advice comes from a far more authoritative source, too.
Self-hypocrisy, consistency, and irony tend to be foreign concepts to fanatics – they literally just don’t think about it, or dismiss the comparison without even pondering it. That’s the only way that Novak can say something like this:
Without noticing that it is exactly the type of rhetoric that Al-Qaeda and its ilk are using to try and draw in recruits and followers. “Muslim lands are under attack! Return to God and expel the Zionist-Crusaders!” And so forth.
To be bluntly honest in responding to the above, I think Christians, Jews, and Muslims would probably do fine in the long-run, and possibly better than if they had the holy sites. I’ve always loathed those particular holy sites – they’ve been soaked in blood over centuries – and if their destruction helped those faiths get over their obsession with particular bits of geography, so much the better.
To add-
I’m not saying it would be a good thing for, say, Jerusalem to get nuked. I’m just saying that if I had some way to destroy the holy sites without hurting people in the process, I’d seriously consider doing it.
MEMO to Miss Novak: Your old essay on the gay man’s alleged “rage against nature” was very telling when I first read it. I reminded me of your 1976 book The Joy of Sports (which evokes The Joy of Sex, perhaps alluding to your angry arousal watching football).
It doesn’t take a sayan’s cheap polaroid of your guilty man-sex indulgences to out your sorry, bought posterior. Your mincing speech does that quite nicely!
“Meanwhile, the consequences of such a war could be very bad for U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gulf states, as well as for Israel and our Gulf state allies, to say nothing of the potential damage it would do to the global economy and the hardship and suffering it would inflict on the Iranian people. Thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of people would die, many more would be injured and displaced, and our government and the governments of any states that helped us would obviously be implicated in yet another illegal war.”
Interesting that I rarely, if ever, see a US commentator list the consequences of America’s wars of aggression in any other order than: US military losses (volunteer, professional soldiers, by the way!), followed by other costs to the US, followed finally by the deaths, injuries and devastation to the innocent victims of said war.
Says a lot about the self-absorbed nature of American politics, imo.
The thing about Jerusalem is a red herring. Muslims wouldn’t bomb Jerusalem and they wouldn’t need to. You could basically destroy the State of Israel by nuking Tel Aviv, and maybe throwing in Haifa too for icing on the cake.
I still don’t see an answer to the fear that someone with authority in the Iranian government will act “irrationally” by nuking Israel. Any Muslim who did that would go down in history as the greatest hero since Saladin, even if his own state got destroyed in response. I don’t know anything about Iran, but some people say that the government situation has changed a lot in the last few years and Ahmedinejad and other “extremists” have a lot more control over military decisions now than they used to. Obviously the probability of Iran nuking Israel is very small, but the cost (to Israel at least) is obviously enormous. I assume there’s some literature in international relations on very low-probability, high-cost events. How do you analyze them?
I agree with Larison that it’s wrong to automatically dismiss more “moderate” statements by Iranian officials, but they’ve got more incentive to tell “moderate” lies, for instance that their nuclear program is for peaceful energy purposes only. In evaluating moderate statements, I’d ask how much influence the speaker has to prevent a so-called irrational decision to launch a nuclear strike, and how much incentive he has to lie.
I don’t know which “just war theory” you’re talking about – Catholic? Orthodox? – but whichever just war theory you choose, you’re excluding the part of your potential audience which doesn’t subscribe to your favorite theory. As a non-Christian, I view Catholic just war theory as non-binding, not to mention ridiculous on its face. Same with secularized-Christian just war theories like that of Michael Walzer.
Nothing wrong with appealing to whatever theory you want. I’m just pointing out that it limits the scope of your rhetoric.
@Aaron–Novak was invoking Christian interests in his bizarre little piece, so aside from the fact that Daniel is Orthodox, it’s logical to invoke Christian thought on the matter.
Even if your theory comes from Thrasymachus or Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee, though, an aggressive war against Iran is a very stupid idea. In the end, is anyone seriously for it other than Dick Cheney and the Likudniks of Potomac, Maryland?
I’m always bemused by this insistence (for which no argument is ever offered) that Israel is our “best ally.” It seems like an insult to all those countries that, unlike Israel, send soldiers to fight and die alongside Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Aaron: “I still don’t see an answer to the fear that someone with authority in the Iranian government will act “irrationally” by nuking Israel”
Probably because there is no rational answer to paranoia. Just as there is no point trying to reassure a paranoid that it’s really very, very unlikely that the immigrants who live down the road are going to get him unless he gets them first. All you can do is have a structure in place that restrains him from “preventive” violence as far as its possible to do so.
This is one case where the domestic analogy is pretty appropriate. Much as the paranoid individual is not entitled to act violently on the basis solely of his own exaggerated fears, so the western elite are not entitled to act violently based upon their own fantasies about the mere possibility of an Iranian “state-suicide bomber” strike on Israel.
You doubtless think that because so many of the people you talk to and so many of the people you read comments from in your newspapers and hear on your tv screens take the anti-Iran propaganda seriously, that it must be worthy of being taken seriously. It isn’t – it is self-serving groupthink fostered by propaganda.
“I meant to say that Americans would do well to trouble more over our prime role in the inauguration of atomic warfare and 65 years of nuclear terror.”
Oh, for pete’s sake.
1. Japan lost about 2.7 million lives in WW2. At most, 10 to 15% of that was due to the nuclear attacks. Why are a few hundred thousand deaths caused by one sort of military strike morally worse than over 2 million deaths cause by other sorts of military action.
2. Any reference to nuclear terror that centers on the United States and not the USSR and the global communist movement which actually wanted to take over the world, as silly as that now sounds, is contemptible.
3. I’m not even going to get into the whole alternate history thing of how we can’t know what the effect of NOT using nukes on Japan would have been.
Mike
“I still don’t see an answer to the fear that someone with authority in the Iranian government will act “irrationally” by nuking Israel.”
It’s the same answer to the fear that someone in the Israeli government will act irrationally by nuking Iran.
Mike
Aaron: you are looking for guarantees where there are none. There is however a 40+ year history of foreign policy related to very low-probability, high-cost events: it’s called the Cold War (a true existential threat, if ever there was one.) And while there were claims that leaders of the ex-USSR were irrational, none but the most ardent suicidal hawks suggested starting a ‘preventive’ war against the Soviet menace. An even more acute version of this related to Indian/Pakistani relations. Both have nuclear weapons, have an abiding dislike of each other, yet neither we nor India have staged a ‘preventive’ war against Pakistan (a Muslim state, with a fairly unstable government already in possession of nuclear weapons.)
It is very easy to dismiss a regime’s point of view by calling them ‘irrational.’ Yet, Aaron, if I were to go to your neighborhood, burn down the houses to the left and right of you, camp out with a flame thrower in a van across the street from you, and claim that you were part of some ‘Axis of Evil’, would it be irrational for you to try to find the most cost effective way to defend yourself and your family? But if we look at a map, that is what Iran is faced with. We have invaded and are occupying (with 200k+ troops) nations to the east and west of them, we have naval bases and fleets throughout the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, we supported their adversary in a very bloody conflict during the 1980’s (Iran/Iraq War), overthrew their democratically elected leader in the 1950’s, and have very influential Americans constantly saying how we should attack Iran yesterday. They are also presented with the dichotomy of how we treated Iraq (w/o nukes) vs. North Korea (w/nukes.) Irrational? There is no definitive proof that they are actually developing nuclear weapons, but I would argue that it would be irrational for Iran to NOT want them.
Finally, with respect to Just War Theory, what is it that you find ridiculous about it? Even as non-Christian, I assume you have some conscious rules and/or limitations that determine at what point you would strike another person and/or their property. Maybe it requires a physical attack on yourself…maybe on your family…or maybe you feel physical action is justified following only a verbal attack? These are moral decisions on your part, a morality that tempers what you may be physically and emotionally capable of, versus what your response should be. The moral decision of a nation to go to war is an extrapoloation of this microcosm. As religions typically provide a moral framework, it would seem wholly appropriate for a religion to provide a similar framework for what should be the most difficult decision a leader can make: going to war.
Peace be with you.
Note Novak’s appeal to Reinhold Niebuhr, a rare insight into the influence on neoconservatism of neo-orthodoxy, a mid-twentieth century movement to salvage the traditional vocabulary of Protestant theology even while surrendering to every liberal, secularising assault. As among Lutherans and Calvinists on the Continent, and as in the Anglican, Scottish Presbyterian and historic Nonconformist bodies in Britain, so also in the related “mainline” churches in the United States, neo-orthodoxy successfully sold itself as a vindication of popular orthodoxy. But it is actually ruinous of such faith, as is evident from, among much else, “mainline” churchgoers’ support for neoconservatives.
Of course Iran is not going to bomb Jerusalem. Or anywhere else, for that matter. If anything, with his reserved seats for Assyrians and Armenians, with his opposition to the foreign forces of genocide against the indigenous Christians of Iraq, with his support for General Aoun’s allies against the threat to the most Christian country in the Middle East, with his ties to Syria, and indeed with his comfortable Jewish community which would be forbidden to live in Saudi Arabia but enjoys guaranteed parliamentary representation in Iran, Ahmadinejad has more than a little of Cyrus the Great about him.
“I’m always bemused by this insistence (for which no argument is ever offered) that Israel is our “best ally.” ”
Israel is an “ally” that has never fought alongside us, is not a major trading partner or investor in the U.S., is not a major source of natural resources, is not a source of immigration to the U.S, and aside from church groups, is not a major tourist destination for Americans.
As I’ve remarked to friends, “Israel has very good marketing in the U.S., but not much else.” Even their vaunted military expertise is a bit of hype. The U.S. had to save them in the Yom Kippur War, they performed miserably in Lebanon, but did manage to destroy a lot of stuff and get Israeli soldiers killed in a needless war. And fighting stone-throwing Arab teenagers is probably not the best training for a fighting force. Israel’s control of the skies looks impressive, but air power alone has never won a war.
@KXB–Actually there are quite a lot of Israeli émigrés in the US, voting with their feet. At least 1/2 million Israeli Jews live outside the country.
Otherwise, I agree with you. Not much in the “special relationship” for us.
“Otherwise, I agree with you. Not much in the “special relationship” for us.”
Well, we do get newspaper headlines warning Americans that Iran is just 2 years away from a nuclear weapon. They have been just 2 years away for almost 15 years now.
“Otherwise, I agree with you. Not much in the “special relationship” for us.”
But don’t they honor us by deigning to accept $3+ billion a year from us (as they have been doing for 30+ years? They even agree to fly U.S. military aircraft that we pay for. Sounds very special to me.
“Why does Zionism play so well among many (not all) Evangelicals? It is not usually because they subscribe to Dispensationalism.”
David, I beg to differ. Among evangelicals in America dispensational pre-millennialism is basically taken for granted. They may not understand all the theological intricacies of it or even recognize it, as they don’t understand the theological intricacies of virtually any doctrine except maybe soteriology, but their basic understanding of the coming end times is totally informed by pre-mil suppositions.
This may be changing. There is a growing movement among conservative evangelicals that is skeptical of dispy pre-millennialism, but it is a minority at present.
Not all reflexive support for Israel by American Christians can be explained by dispensationalism. Conservative Catholics and Reformed types reject dispensationalism but generally support Israel, but evangelical dispensationalism provides the milieu that allows reflexive pro-Israel sentiments to prosper.
“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms–he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse. ….
“As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated–if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration.” ….
“The paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon. Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering–a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies… systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.””
I’m not entirely sure what is going on among religious American paleocons at present- it’s not just Novak who is running off the rails lately. The extent to which it conforms to Hofstadter’s ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, though, is some mix of amusing and horrifying.
“I’m not entirely sure what is going on among religious American paleocons at present- it’s not just Novak who is running off the rails lately.”
What? Novak is certainly no paleocon if that is what you are suggesting?
@ MBunge, on April 21st, 2010 at 7:42 am
1. What’s 10 to 15% of 2.7 million, mostly non combatants, give or take, at the end of war that has already been won..
2. Stupid me. I forgot all about the USSR and its hegemonic designs for the world. Good thing you reminded me.
3. I agree that it wouldn’t be useful to go into history that didn’t happen in order to justify the extermination of that 10 to 15% of 2.7 million.
Jim
To Grumpy Old Man: Good point on just war theory. Larison was responding to a Catholic so his appeal to Catholic just war theory was entirely appropriate.
I agree with you that an American attack on Iran is probably stupid even if it’s just – or as I’d put it, if it’s unjust then that’s only because it’s stupid. When addressing a general audience (rather than Michael Novak specifically) it’s probably better to talk about prudence than justice.
To Randal: If, as you say, any fear that Iranian nuclear weapons would be used against Israel is a sign of a mental illness – paranoia – rather than of faulty reasoning, then you’re right that there’s no way to assuage that fear rationally. But if there are some who fear such an attack and are not mentally ill, then there should be a rational way to address their rational argument. As I said, I see that event as having very low probability but very high cost (my family and I would be dead), so there ought to be a rational way to persuade people like me that the probability is so low that it’s not worth worrying about. I haven’t seen any such persuasive argument. Note that this is a separate question from whether preventative military action should be carried out.
Aaron:
The main point is the basic irrationality of weighting the lives of yourselves and your family and nation too highly relative to the lives of other innocents. It’s natural to do so, but when it’s taken to an extreme – where extremely low risks based upon concocted and convoluted hypotheticals are used to justify immediate violence – then we tend to call it mental illness and have societal mechanisms to try to suppress it.
Your subjective assessment is that there is a “very low” risk that Iran might be seeking nuclear weapons (which would require an Iranian regime cynically uncaring about the repeated declarations of its primary religious authorities), might acquire such a weapon in a useable form, and then might have some kind of leadership come to power or to authority over the nuclear “crown jewels” which is so fanatical that it would use said nuclear weapons against Israel uncaring about the certain destruction of the Iranian nation, the leaders concerned and probably some very holy islamic sites, not to mention the very Palestinian people who are at the heart of the dispute, and that any deterrence or (hypothetically justifiable) pre-emptive defensive measures might fail.
Against that hypothetical and distant risk, which less subjective or biased analysts would, I submit, have to assess as being rather less likely than “very low risk”, you are prepared to countenance the certain deaths today of the many thousands of innocents who would die as a consequence of preventive war.
That is, imo, the equivalent in the international sphere of the kind of “better safe than sorry” violent paranoia in the domestic sphere, I raised previously. We have laws against it in the domestic sphere and we should regard it as unacceptable in international relations.
Aaron:
The other point to bear in mind is that beyond doubt many of the people who wield power and influence in the west and who claim to believe in the “Iranian threat” do have a very rational reason for making that claim (without, imo, seriously believing it – except perhaps for a few of the more hysterical cases).
The primary and immediate effects of Iran acquiring useable nuclear weapons would be an increase in Iran’s regional prestige, and much greater constraints on the freedom of action of the Israeli and US regimes in the region. While an Iranian nuclear attack can be deterred, interactions with nuclear weapons states are necessarily more cautiously carried out than with others, because the potential costs even to the victors of going to war are orders of magnitude greater.
I would regard this as a good thing, in the context of the present unhealthy predominance of the US and Israel in the region. You would presumably regard it as a bad thing, being happy for “your side” to have full freedom to pursue maximalist objectives.
But what it undoubtedly is not, is any justification for waging an elective war, with its inevitable mass killing of innocents and huge material costs.