In other words, war is not inevitable. Key people can still say no, with U.S. President Barack Obama being the most important among them. For now, the Obama administration seems to believe that pro-war rhetoric is manageable, and that it can tack between the demands of the Israeli government, the sanctions coalition and the presidential candidates of the Republican Party. This process involves pushing back against the idea that an immediate attack is necessary, while reaffirming the general idea that Iran represents a major threat to the United States.

However, it could become more difficult to avoid war in the future:

As a political strategy, this may be viable. It runs the risk, however, of creating a rhetorical trap for the Obama administration. At some point, it may be hard for Obama to step down from the idea that an Iranian nuclear weapon is unacceptable and worth a war to prevent. In that case, saying no may become too politically difficult for the president. The task for hawks, whether in the United States or Israel, will be to draw this box as tightly and narrowly as possible. It behooves the president, and opponents of conflict with Iran, to remember that nothing about war removes the threat of uncertainty. Rather, most of the problems that exist before a strike against Iran will remain afterward, just in a much less predictable environment [bold mine-DL].

This appears to be a case where military action has little or no prospect of success while also being unnecessary and therefore likely to make the situation worse than it is now. If an Iranian war can’t eliminate the perceived threat (and it can’t), there is no reason to expose Israel or the U.S. to the risks it would involve.

Machiavelli, who knew him well, pointed out that he was an ‘unarmed prophet’, and his last words had the serene dignity of a martyr. He left many admirers: throughout Europe, pious humanists valued the deep spirituality of his writings and overlooked the nightmare years of his republic–far away in the kingdom of that would-be Henry VIII, Savonarola’s meditations continued to be much read, and two of his meditations were incorporated in an officially approved English primer in 1534. Ignatius Loyola felt constrained to ban members of the Society of Jesus from reading his writings, despite seeing a lot of good in them, simply because his fate still stimulated unseemly disagreement between his supporters and his detractors. (p.95)

Dominicans have advocated his canonization, and Erasmus reportedly cited Savonarola’s example as a major reason why he remained in the Catholic Church rather than going over to one of the Reformation churches. Savonarola is probably one of the more misunderstood figures from early modern history.

They [the authors of the story] found a December 1995 interview with Philadelphia Magazine where Santorum admitted he had been basically pro-choice until he got into politics.

Elsewhere in the original 1995 article, it describes Santorum’s evolving politics:

He has forgone a past that was unexaminedly moderate for a platform that is unexaminedly conservative, including reversing, rather quietly, his pro-choice stance on abortion.

Another anecdote about Santorum’s earlier involvement in Republican politics confirms this picture:

It was the dawn of the 1980s, and the Reagan Revolution was stirring. But Santorum was not yet politically impassioned, and what political orientation he did have was quite moderate. “There was a Youth for Reagan group on campus, but Rick shunned them,” remembers a friend who was active with him in the Pennsylvania College Republican organization. “He always described them as right-wing fringe. But I don’t think he gave it much thought. Through three years in the College Republicans with Rick, I never heard him actually discuss issues.”

It makes it a little easier to understand why Santorum wouldn’t have had too much difficulty endorsing Arlen Specter’s presidential bid in the same year.

“It’s kind of silly,” he said afterward. “We expect an Israeli company that makes flat bread to influence their government’s policies?”

More to the point, the organizers intend to boycott firms solely because of where they are based, and not because of any contribution these firms make to the occupation they are protesting. It’s a self-satisfying protest move that isn’t going to change anything, and it is one that is likely to punish Israelis who share the organizers’ political objections to government policies. Michael Desch discussed the futility of the BDS movement for TAC back in 2010. Part of what I said at the time bears repeating:

To the extent that boycotts, divestment and sanctions successfully cut off the people imposing them from the country they are targeting, all that this does is open the field to other investors and competitors. It deprives the boycott and divestment participants of whatever influence they might have had, and it will tend to make the target government even less responsive to the demands of the supporters of the boycott. BDS movements might work if the country being targeted were entirely dependent on one or a few other countries, but every remotely modern economy is diversified enough and connected to so many other so others that any company or institution’s decision to divest from a targeted state simply becomes a buying opportunity for its competitors overseas. Even if a large number of American and European firms could be pressured into supporting such a movement, which I very much doubt they could, there would be Indian, Chinese and other firms lining up to take advantage of Western withdrawals from the Israeli market. The same would hold true at the state level. As unlikely as U.S. and EU sanctions are, other major and rising powers would readily take advantage of them if they ever happened. If Western governments are going to be able to change Israeli policies in the territories, which seems less likely all the time, it would have to be through using what leverage they have rather than depriving themselves of influence through imposing morally-satisfying, useless sanctions.

On Wednesday they hold the first presidential debate in three weeks. As in previous ones, commercial breaks are likely to air a spot calling on Mr Obama to remove the MEK – the Mujahideen e-Khalq, the armed Iranian opposition group – from the US list of foreign terrorist organisations.

The MEK is believed to have carried out the recent assassinations of Iranian scientists on Israel’s behalf. Its US front organisations have paid hefty speaking fees to dozens of prominent figures, from Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, to Howard Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Many of the Republican candidates also support lifting the ban.

Michael Auslin overreacts:

Yet even more incomprehensibly, Luce then notes that at the upcoming Republican presidential debate, there likely will be televised commercials calling for the delisting of Iran’s armed opposition group from lists of terrorist groups. Not only does this have nothing to do with the issue at hand, does Mr. Luce think the commercials are being paid for by the GOP? If not, then what’s his beef with the free market — whoever can afford a commerical can buy it. Just ask SEIU, which kept up a constant barrage in favor of Obamacare last year.

As the quote from Luce shows, the MEK issue is perfectly relevant to a discussion of Israel and the Iranian nuclear program because Israel has allegedly used MEK operatives to kill Iranian nuclear scientists. I assume Luce’s point is to draw attention to the fact that there is televised advocacy for de-listing a terrorist group that has recently been implicated in acts of terrorism against Iran, and these attacks form one part of the covert war being waged against Iran because of its nuclear program. Some of Romney’s advisers have publicly supported de-listing the MEK, and Gingrich and Santorum are on record endorsing the assassinations the MEK has reportedly carried out. One problem is that the MEK’s American advocates are often paid for their advocacy, and the other is that three of the Republican presidential candidates apparently have no objection to acts of terrorism so long as they are committed against the right people.

If this were any other terrorist group, it would be unthinkable that its advocates could run television commercials calling for the group’s removal from the FTO list during presidential debates or at any other time, but because it is a group dedicated to overthrowing the Iranian government it is somehow considered acceptable and unobjectionable. I am guessing Luce’s inclusion of the MEK material in his column was intended to highlight how biased in favor of confrontation the Iran debate in the United States is. That Auslin thinks it is plausible or appropriate to compare advertisements on behalf of a recognized foreign terrorist group with legislative advocacy by an American union confirms it.

In a single sound bite, General Dempsey managed to tell the Iranians they can breathe easier because Israel’s main ally is opposed to an attack on Iran, such attack isn’t likely to work in any case, and the U.S. fears Iran’s retaliation. It’s as if General Dempsey wanted to ratify Iran’s rhetoric that the regime is a fearsome global military threat.

Viewed more soberly, Gen. Dempsey’s statement was an attempt to reduce worsening tensions and to state the merely obvious. A “successful” Israeli strike will delay Iran’s nuclear program by just a few years, and the U.S. has good reason to be concerned about retaliation against our forces in response to an action that would be widely perceived as U.S.-supported and approved, so there is no reason to incur dangerous risks by launching an attack that isn’t going to achieve its objective. Reinforcing the impression that an Israeli attack is inevitable gives Iran the incentive to concede nothing and to assume that the diplomatic track is nothing more than a distraction. If the U.S. were not openly discouraging Israel from attacking, Iranian hard-liners would conclude that nothing can be done to satisfy Israel and the U.S. in any case, so they may as well brace for what is coming.

The WSJ makes the same slippery use of the word rational that I was discussing yesterday:

This would be the same rational Iran that refuses to compromise on its nuclear plans despite increasingly damaging global sanctions, and the same prudent actor that has sent agents around the world to bomb Israeli and Saudi targets, allegedly including in a Washington, D.C. restaurant.

Is it actually irrational for a government that perceives enrichment as a national right to continue to insist on that right despite intense pressure from other governments to give it up? Not really. If the Iranian government perceives the nuclear program as important for Iranian national interests, why is it going to sacrifice those interests to satisfy avowedly hostile states? Let’s understand that Iran is not just being called on to compromise, but to capitulate completely on enrichment. It is possible to be rationally self-interested and nationalistic at the same time. Even rational actors have non-negotiable positions that they are unwilling to abandon.

How can it be, less than a decade after the U.S. invaded Iraq, that the Iran debate is breaking down along largely the same lines, and the people who were manifestly, painfully wrong about that war are driving the debate this time as well?

Beinart must know the answer to his question. The simple answer is that there has been zero accountability for any public figure or politician that agitated in favor of the invasion of Iraq, so all of the unrepentant advocates of the Iraq war know that there is no professional or personal cost attached to advocating for equally or more irresponsible foreign policy decisions. Inside the GOP, the opposite continues to be true. Even after Iraq, refusal to endorse irresponsible and reckless foreign policy views is still the bigger liability among Republicans. Democratic supporters of the Iraq war may have mostly repudiated their support for that war, as Beinart has done, but many of them have failed to learn from the mistake of Iraq. Just look at the list of co-sponsors for S. Res. 380. There are fourteen Democrats in the Senate already on board with the absurd demand to reject containment of Iran as an alternative. Irrationality on Iran is a truly bipartisan affliction.

Advocates of preventive war drive these debates because they are the ones most interested in the issue, their arguments appeal to the desire to take action and “do something,” and they are usually successful in framing the debate in terms of doing what they recommend or doing nothing. Another reason that advocates of preventive war retain the advantage in the debate is that even many skeptics of military action accept that Iran’s nuclear program poses a threat that needs to be countered in one way or another. Preventive war supporters offer the illusion of “quick” and “decisive” action, even though a preventive war would be neither quick nor decisive, while those promoting containment and deterrence necessarily cannot pretend that their alternative will “solve” the problem, because their alternative is an attempt to manage Iran’s nuclear program rather than holding out the unreasonable hope of ending it. Arguments for containment have the advantage that they are far more realistic, but that is because they do not minimize the costs and risks involved. Advocates for preventive war minimize costs and risks of their preferred course of action as a matter of course, and they always grossly exaggerate the dangers of inaction, so their horribly skewed presentation of costs and benefits makes an irrational policy appear much more appealing to those who aren’t paying very close attention.

But if a head of state can feign insanity, or, better yet, convincingly announce a wish for the apocalypse, then he can, in theory, circumvent some traditional rules of deterrence.

One of the many flaws in this argument is that the only people who seem to be convinced that Iranian leaders wish to bring about the apocalypse are the ones most vocally agitating for an attack on Iran. Another small problem with the theory is that the so-called evidence to support the “wish for the apocalypse” interpretation of how Iranian leaders think doesn’t come from the head of state, but instead comes from the comparatively powerless president, and even then the interpretation is misleading. Circumventing rules of deterrence doesn’t really work to the advantage of the Iranian government, since Iran is badly outmatched militarily. It wants to deter the U.S. and Israel (and anyone other threat in the region). Probably the most significant flaw in the myth is that Khamenei issued a fatwa against the use of nuclear weapons. Even if a head of state fits Hanson’s description, there are many other people involved in any modern state apparatus that would never permit a head of state to launch a disastrous first-strike. To believe the martyr-state myth about Iran, one has to believe that the top echelons of the Iranian government are all committed to starting a self-destructive nuclear war. No one actually believes that.

The new resolution—despite ostensibly aiming for an agreement with Iran—would damage the prospects for negotiating any such agreement. The resolution calls for terms that are understandably non-starters for Iran. In referring to “the full and sustained suspension of all uranium enrichment-related and reprocessing activities,” the resolution appears to rule out an Iranian enrichment program under international supervision and inspection, which almost certainly would have to be part of any formula that could gain the agreement of both Iran and the western powers. Incredibly, the resolution also calls for “the verified end of Iran’s ballistic missile programs.” This goes beyond any United Nations resolutions on Iran, which talk about nuclear capability of missiles, and even beyond anything ever demanded of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, for which range limits were imposed. It would be understandable if Tehran reads such language as further evidence that the United States is interested not in any negotiated agreement but instead only in regime change.

The goal of any provocative ultimatum is to make such excessive demands that there is no way that the other government could ever agree to all of them without suffering complete humiliation. Undermining a possible negotiated settlement is the purpose of the resolution as far as many of the resolution’s co-sponsors are concerned. By declaring containment to be intolerable as an alternative, the co-sponsors are doing their best to make war with Iran unavoidable.

But remember, the Greatest Generation, for a year and a half, sat on the sidelines while Europe was under darkness, where our closest ally, Britain, was being bombed and leveled, while Japan was spreading its cancer all throughout Southeast Asia. America sat from 1940, when France fell, to December of ’41, and did almost nothing.

“Why? Because we’re a hopeful people. We think, ‘Well, you know, he’ll get better. You know, he’s a nice guy. I mean, it won’t be near as bad as what we think. This’ll be okay.’ Oh yeah, maybe he’s not the best guy, and after a while, you found out things about this guy over in Europe, and he’s not so good of a guy after all. But you know what? Why do we need to be involved? We’ll just take care of our own problems. Just get our families off to work and our kids off to school, and we’ll be okay.

All of the controversy over these remarks has completely missed that Santorum was saying that Americans prior to Pearl Harbor were all naive, overly-optimistic people who thought Hitler was a “nice guy.” That’s just not true. Obviously, there was a majority of Americans opposed to entering WWII prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and there was never quite as much popular enthusiasm for the European war as there was for the war in the Pacific, but opponents of U.S. entry had no illusions that Hitler was a “nice guy” who will “get better.” What they did believe was that it was a mistake for America to become embroiled in another European war. This was informed by the realistic (or some might say pessimistic) assessment that U.S. entry into WWI had all been for nothing, and that staying out of a major war was better for America than joining it.

We’re not here to serve the Earth. The Earth is not the objective. Man is the objective.

Santorum has defended his statement in terms of affirming a Biblical understanding of man’s role as a steward of creation, but if we took this later remark at face value we would have to say that Santorum doesn’t understand the concept of stewardship very well. After all, the purpose of Christian stewardship isn’t simply to serve human needs (much less desires), but to preside over the natural world as God’s viceregents and to rule it in a manner pleasing to God, all of which is directed towards giving God glory and thanksgiving for the blessings He has bestowed upon us. We are to see creation as something entrusted to us by God, and as something that we are responsible for preserving and keeping as part of our obedience to Him. That necessarily involves limiting and restraining our desires so as not to exhaust or waste what has been entrusted to us. Viewed that way, we are here to care for the earth and for one another, and in so doing serve the Creator Who made both.

On a related point, a passage from Roger Scruton’s Green Philosophy seems appropriate here:

If society is a contract, it is not a contract between the living only, but a contract that includes the dead, the living and the unborn–in short, not a contract at all, but a relation of trusteeship, in which the living have charge of the assets inherited from the dead which they in turn must pass on to those unborn. Simply to waste in the lifetime of a nation’s temporary tenants, the capital accumulated over centuries, is to breach the trust on which future generations depend. (p. 174-175)

Even to the extent that Santorum is partly right that “man is the objective,” that still includes the part of humanity not yet born that will inherit the world we bequeath them.

P.S. Santorum’s spokesman isn’t doing him any favors when he demonstrates that he has no idea what the differences between theology and ideology are:

Theology’s a worldview. And Obama sees the world differently. I mean, someone who apologizes for America’s greatness, and someone who thinks the government knows best on health care, I mean those are different theologies.

I know that some people treat the “apology tour” lie as an article of religious faith, but that’s no reason to confuse it with the effort to understand God.

In other words, according to the heads of the IC [Intelligence Community] and DIA: 1) against all odds, the supposedly “mad Mullahs” of Tehran are endowed with the capacity for rational human thought, and thus there might be diplomatic or economic inducements that could compel an agreement on outstanding questions regarding the nuclear program; 2) the United States has at least a year; 3) Iran is not looking to start a war with the United States; and 4) Israel has not yet decided to undertake a preemptive war with Iran.

Debating the rationality of Iran’s government with people convinced of its self-destructive irrationality sometimes seems futile. For one thing, those who insist on portraying Iran’s regime as insane and suicidal are very slippery in the way they use the word rational. According to them, a rational regime would never be antagonistic or threaten other states as Iran has been, and from there they leap to the conclusion that a state that is antagonistic is therefore willing to invite its own destruction. They make this leap even when all the evidence points to a regime intent on preserving itself. Somehow we’re supposed to believe that the Iranian government is the only one on the planet that is unwilling to preserve itself and incapable of knowing what its self-interest is.

U.S. and Israeli media regularly discuss how and when to start an unprovoked war against Iran to punish it for its “crime” of enriching uranium. The American and Israeli governments leave the door open to starting that war. Despite the significant costs such a war would impose on the U.S., Israel, the region, and world, it is not the governments contemplating how to start this war that are considered to be acting irrationally. Instead, it is still the Iranian leadership that is viewed as unhinged and dangerous.

This combination of humility, curiosity, and empathy was the ethical corollary of James’s rejection of absolutism, the core of his conviction that we inhabit a pluralistic universe.

Pluralism, in turn, provided the foundation for James’s anti-imperial thought. As Robert Richardson writes, James’s opposition to empire “grew naturally from his advocacy of pluralism and individual self-determination and from his conviction that we are mostly blind to the vital centers of the lives of others–to the lives, for example, of Filipinos.” Imperialism was nothing if not an expression of blindness to others’ aspirations–a failure to consider the possibility of multiple perspectives on the world. Arguments for empire discounted the Filipino desire for independence and instead celebrated the uplifting mission of the American invaders. A pluralistic foreign policy, in contrasy, would sanction multiple vital centers, granting legitimacy to local desires even among “backward” peoples–as James and his anti-imperial contemporaries granted legitimacy to the Filipino yearning for independence. Imperial foreign policy denied those aspirations in the name of progress, a teleological creed that demanded the replacement of idiosyncratic traditions with universal modernity.

Contemporary hegemonism is characterized by many of the same flaws, and instead of a “failure to consider the possibility of multiple perspectives on the world” there is an acknowledgment of these perspectives combined with contempt for them. Hegemonists may be aware these perspectives exist, but they regard these other perspectives as inferior or illegitimate to the extent that they conflict with their own, and the aspirations of certain other nations are viewed simply as hostile ambitions.

But this is not a typical “any friend of right-wing Israel is a friend of mine” argument. Boteach has a more complex case to make, parts of which we’ve heard plenty of times before, most notably from Hyam Macoby (the scholar to whom Boteach acknowledges his biggest debt). Jesus was a patriotic Zealot, “calling his men to arms. An armed insurrection against Rome was his battle cry.” “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword,” was his true motto.

When I read this, I found it hard to believe someone would make such a ridiculous claim. If there’s one thing Christ never did, it was fomenting insurrection against Rome. Evidently, Boteach missed the part where the Lord said, “My Kingdom is not of this world.” I checked the book, and sure enough Chernus’ quotes from the text are accurate. Elsewhere on the same page, Boteach writes, “But he wanted to show his followers they must be prepared to resist evil with force.” This is a preposterous interpretation, not least since Christ specifically taught the opposite of this in the Sermon on the Mount: “But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” (Matt. 5:39) The passage on bringing a sword has nothing to do with armed resistance, but concerns the division from others that following Christ requires.

Apparently, Boteach’s entire argument hinges on arguing that the “real” Jesus was a political rebel whose anti-Roman agenda was carefully purged from Scripture:

The editing done to purge the crimes of the Romans and to delete references to Jesus’ rebellion against them was an intricate and difficult job. Part of it was left incomplete. Remember, thousands of manuscripts were circulating around. Not all could be completely purged. Flashes of accuracy remain….This statement in Luke indicates that corrupt priests delivered Jesus to his oppressors, the Roman administration, because he was a rebel against Roman rule pure and simple. Because it is so different from the rest of the statements in the Gospels, which take great pains to make Jesus non-political, it is an obvious piece of real history that has slipped through, contrary to the intent of editors pushing Paul’s concept of a strictly spiritual Jesus. (p. 51)

Never mind that the accusation of rebellion was a false one. The “real history” seems to be whatever Boteach can twist to suit his argument. So Boteach’s argument relies on completely ignoring what the Gospels say whenever it contradicts his nonsensical thesis, and to account for the lack of supporting evidence he posits a conspiracy theory so extensive and implausible that it makes Dan Brown’s novels seem realistic.