I am here in Princeton preparing for the panel, but I had noticed a couple items that I wanted to discuss briefly. Bill Frezza takes that ludicrous Bret Stephens’ op-ed from the other day, which I remarked on here, and he uses it as his starting point for an argument that is, if this is possible, even more bizarre. Frezza writes:

It was shocking. Only after reading it [Stephens’ op-ed] twice did I realize it was just a forecast and not reality. Yet as Nobel Peace Prize winner Barak Obama pursues his strategy of global multilateralism, the inexorable logic of reciprocal disarmament smacks one in the face.

If the US refuses to acknowledge the existence of evil, rejects unilateralism, and insists on an even-handed approach to international relations, what else can we expect the UN to deliver but an insistence that all sides in the Middle East give up their weapons of mass destruction, including Israel? If this harrowing forecast becomes reality, what might happen next?

War.

The small problem with this “inexorable logic” is that Obama has already ruled out any sort of Israeli disarmament. Having ignored this and all that it implies, Frezza goes on to explain why the Iranian government would welcome an Israeli attack and uses this in support of the attack:

The Iranian mullahs may be crazy but they’re not stupid. The biggest threat to clerical rule comes not from Israel or the US but from Iran’s own restive people. The surest way to crush domestic opposition is to unify the country around hatred for the infidel invader. A price would have to be paid, but Ahmadinejad might find a little death and destruction acceptable compared to the loss of power. Bloodying Israel’s nose by putting up a good fight wouldn’t hurt his standing either. If Ahmadinejad’s handlers believe that Israel will execute a careful surgical strike, which is likely given Israel’s interest in minimizing collateral damage, the mullahs may roll the dice.

So Frezza wants us to believe that a course of action that makes Ahmadinejad and Khamenei more secure in their positions of power and which will at most delay, not prevent, Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is in the interests of Israel’s government. To listen to advocates of attacking Iran, one might have thought that it is the character of the current regime that makes an Iranian nuke so threatening. By Frezza’s own admission, an Israeli attack would strengthen the current regime and open Israel to retaliatory strikes, which would in all likelihood be seen by much of the world as justified self-defense against an unprovoked attack, and this is going to help Israel’s government? It is fair to say that Frezza’s article has an abundance of “[t]ortured logic rife with miscalculation.”