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Starting Unnecessary Wars Isn’t “Creative Destruction”

It’s not very surprising, but Niall Ferguson’s column on Israel and Iran is awful. There are many things wrong with it, but let’s start with the idea that U.S. aircraft carriers in the Gulf will be able to limit Iranian retaliation via Hizbullah, Syria, and militias in Iraq: The Iranians will very likely be facing […]

It’s not very surprising, but Niall Ferguson’s column on Israel and Iran is awful. There are many things wrong with it, but let’s start with the idea that U.S. aircraft carriers in the Gulf will be able to limit Iranian retaliation via Hizbullah, Syria, and militias in Iraq:

The Iranians will very likely be facing not one, not two, but three U.S. aircraft carriers. Two are already in the Persian Gulf: CVN 72 Abraham Lincoln and CVN 70 Carl Vinson. A third, CVN 77 George H.W. Bush, is said to be on its way from Norfolk, Va.

Ferguson seems to think that if U.S. forces join in the attack on Iran, this will somehow stop or limit Iranian retaliation in all of these other places, but there’s no reason to believe this. If the U.S. joined the attack, that would expose U.S. forces in the Gulf and Afghanistan to retaliation as well, and it would hardly stop rocket attacks from Lebanon or militia attacks on the embassy in Baghdad. Presumably a joint U.S.-Israeli attack would do more damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities, but that makes retaliation against both Israeli and U.S. targets more likely rather than less. The blithe reference to a “new six-day war” also underestimates the duration of the conflict that Ferguson is so eager to start. The closing remark about being on the “eve of some creative destruction” is warped: starting wars has nothing to do with “creative destruction.” It’s just destruction. Ferguson’s column takes the prize for showing the greatest indifference to adverse consequences of an Iranian war so far.

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