Bill Kristol, at the Weekly Standard, questions whether a military strike on Iran’s alleged nuclear development program would be as dangerous as everyone seems to think. A limited, target strike against selected military and terrorist-training targets, he argues, would most likely result in a similarly limited Iranian response. The reason: the rational self-interest of Iran’s leadership.
“It’s unclear… that Iran would want to risk broadening the conflict and creating the prospect of regime decapitation. Iran’s rulers have shown that their preeminent concern is maintaining their grip on power. If U.S. military action is narrowly targeted, and declared to be such, why would Iran’s leaders… want to escalate the conflict, as even one missile attack on a U.S. facility or ally or a blockade of the Strait would obviously do?”
In other words, the Iranian leadership’s likely response is a rational assessment of the results of their own past actions: “This attack is punishment for our reckless policies. Clearly, we must adjust our course of action to avoid such punishment in the future.”
In the neocon view of the world, the United States is the only country in the world whose people and political leadership should be incapable of rational self-interest. For America, alone among the peoples of the world, rationally considering the consequences of the U.S. government’s foreign policy and adjusting that policy accordingly constitutes “defeatism.”
Apparently it’s never occurred to Kristol that, in the event of an American attack on Iran, the Iranian leadership would see itself as Chamberlain in the Munich scenario, and attempt to punish aggression as harshly as possible in order to deter further attacks — or that the Iranian people would rally around their flag in exactly the same mindlessly uncritical, gullible fashion as their Nascar-attending, Toby Keith-listening counterparts in the U.S.
To be a good American, you must be stupid. If you think, the terrorists have won.
