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Hawkish Madness on Iran

Bolton’s presentation concluded the way the chant usually concludes, which is that because “diplomacy has failed,” the only “realistic alternative” is to use military force preemptively [against Iran]. And also as usual, he said absolutely nothing about all the ways in which diplomacy has not yet been tried. ~Paul Pillar While I was in Florida, […]

Bolton’s presentation concluded the way the chant usually concludes, which is that because “diplomacy has failed,” the only “realistic alternative” is to use military force preemptively [against Iran]. And also as usual, he said absolutely nothing about all the ways in which diplomacy has not yet been tried. ~Paul Pillar

While I was in Florida, I happened to find a copy of George Kennan’s The Fateful Alliance in a used bookstore. Kennan addresses exactly this problem of leaders and officials who treat the next war as both inevitable and ultimately more desirable than the alternatives. Kennan was investigating the history of the creation of the Franco-Russian alliance, which later contributed greatly to the start of the general European war in 1914, but his observations apply very well to the habitual American saber-rattling directed at Iran. Kennan wrote:

In the history of the negotiation of the Franco-Russian Alliance one can witness the growth of a whole series of those aberrations, misunderstandings, and bewilderments that have played so tragic and fateful a part in the development of Western civilization over the subsequent decades. One sees how the unjustified assumption of war’s likelihood could become the cause of its final inevitability. One sees the growth of military-technological capabilities to levels that exceed man’s capacity for making any rational or intelligent use of them. One sees how the myopia induced by indulgence in the mass emotional compulsions of modern nationalism destroys the power to form any coherent, realistic view of true national interest. (p.257)

As Pillar explains very well, the idea of launching a war with Iran is madness, which is what makes the conviction of Bolton and other Iran hawks that there must someday be a war launched against Iran so disturbing. It is this conviction, which seems to be widely shared among many officials and politicians of both parties, that may lead some future administration to follow through on the statement that an Iranian nuclear arsenal is “unacceptable.” When Iran hawks say often enough that “the only thing worse than a war with Iran is an Iranian nuclear weapon,” they have preemptively rejected every other policy option except for war in the event that Iran acquires such a weapon, and they are guaranteeing that any crisis resulting from an Iranian nuclear test (should one ever take place) would lead inexorably to war. Presumably, no diplomatic resolution will be acceptable during such a crisis, because it will have become conventional wisdom that diplomacy has already failed, despite having hardly been attempted.

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