Shadi Hamid's 'America is evil' strawman

Hamid, at The Atlantic:

The United States has done terrible things in the Middle East. To even casual observers of the region, this should be clear enough. That, however, doesn’t mean there is a moral equivalence between Iran and the United States. Elevating America as a somehow unique source of evil takes necessary self-criticism and turns it into narcissism. It insists on making us the exceptional ones, glorifying ourselves by glorifying our sins. To suggest that American officials are at the rarefied level of the deliberate, systematic mass murder and sectarian cleansing that Soleimani helped orchestrate isn’t just wrong; it’s silly.

It's also ... not what is happening.

American criticism of the Soleimani assassination generally hasn't suggested that America's bad guys are as bad as Iran's bad guys. (I'm not sure how to do that moral balancing, anyway, but that's not what the criticism has been.) Instead, the criticism has been that Trump's decision didn't make Americans safer, and that it might have been a dangerous and unnecessary escalation of the low-level conflict that could lead to a shooting war the United States seems ill-equipped to win.

 That's a different critique. But it's the one most critics of the president are making. Hamid's piece doesn't really make sense.

Are Iran and Al Qaeda allies? Prove it.

This story sounds very familiar:

Administration officials are briefing Congress on what they say are ties between Iran and Al Qaeda, prompting skeptical reactions and concern on Capitol Hill that the White House could invoke the war authorization passed in 2001 as legal cover for military action against Tehran.

Why skeptical? Well, remember...

  Iran is a majority Shiite Muslim nation while Al Qaeda is a hard-line Sunni group whose members generally consider Shiites to be apostates. The two have often fought on opposing sides of regional conflicts, including the Syrian war.

If you're of a certain age, you'll remember how the Bush Administration tried so very hard to connect Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It was completely false. Some Republicans, naturally, choose to believe it anyway. But asserting that connection helped the administration make the case for the unnecessary and disastrous invasion of Iraq. Given that history, there's every reason to make the U.S. government prove this latest allegation beyond a reasonable doubt.

 For the moment: I sure as hell don't believe it.

Those dead Iranian scientists

I've been struggling with what to think—and how to express my thoughts—about the wave of assassinations directed at Iranian nuclear scientists. I think that war is bad and killing is bad, but I'm not the complete pacifist I was in my Mennonite days—back, that is, when I thought God would make everything OK in the end, making it easier to accept certain evils and injustices on Earth. Perhaps it's the Mennonite poking through, but the assassinations strike me as ... unsavory. Yet, unlike Glenn Greenwald, I'm not prepared to quite condemn it either. This troubles me. I like my moral conundrums easily resolved.

I suspect we could live with a nuclear-armed Iranian state. I don't think the mullahs are suicidal. I think they—like the U.S. and the old Soviet Union—would use the threat of nuclear arms use to throw their weight around the region and the world. But: The more nuclear weapons there are in the world, the more countries that get their hands on them, the more opportunities there are for something to go disastrously, genocidally wrong.

So what's the death of a few scientists compared to an averted genocide?

Yet, something doesn't feel quite right about that to me either. I found myself rubbed wrong by Jonathan Tobin's praise of the assassinations yesterday. He wrote: "Anyone who believes Iran should be allowed to proceed toward the building of a nuclear bomb has either lost their moral compass or is so steeped in the belief that American and Israeli interests are inherently unjustified they have reversed the moral equation in this case. Rather than the alleged U.S. and Israeli covert operators being called terrorists, it is the Iranian scientists who are the criminals. They must be stopped before they kill."

Wait. The scientists are criminals? That doesn't strike me quite right, either. It's entirely possible they're patriots, with all the good and bad that implies. (And I've heard a few experts suggest that the end of theocracy in Iran wouldn't necessarily mean the end of the pursuit of nuclear weapons; it's kind of rational for a country to want to have the ultimate weapon to use in its defense.) Or it's entirely possible, authoritarianism being what it is, that the assassinated scientists simply didn't have much choice about their participation: Show a talent for math or physics, and voila! You're working on a planet-killer. Do we have evidence that these scientists are, well, mad scientists, bent on the world's destruction? I'm not sure we do. Ascribing criminality to those individuals—instead of the regime they serve—seems a way of making us feel better about the awful thing that has happened.

But as awful as that hypothetical genocide?

I don't have a good answer to this. There's the certainty of the awfulness now, weighed against the (again) hypothetical danger avoided. It's a guessing game, but one in which a few lives or many might be sacrificed.

Rod Dreher gets at it better than I can here:

To be sure, I’m against war with Iran, and the main reason I would never vote for Santorum is that he relishes the thought of war with Iran. However, I am by no means certain that it was wrong for the Israelis to have killed this scientist, given that they are in a state of de facto war with Iran, and that the Iranian leadership has publicly and repeatedly vowed to exterminate the Israelis. My point here is that even if the killing of the Iranian scientist is justified as self-defense, it is nothing to be called “wonderful.” A grim, tragic necessity? Perhaps. But “wonderful”? We must not allow ourselves to bless these things, much less glory in them, as Santorum has done.

That sounds close to right to me. One reason I'm pretty sure I'll never become a certain variety of conservative is because I have enough Mennonite left in me to disdain glorying in such things. But I've also got enough distance from that faith to suspect that sometimes bad things must be done. I feel remorse about the death of the scientists. And I hope that their deaths served the (apparent) intended purpose. I suspect they'll just be another trigger in an endless cycle of recrimination that might one day end up immersing us in the awful violence we seek to avoid. I'm not sure we'll ever know the right answer.

Is It Time To Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb-Bomb Iran?

That's the question raised in The Atlantic's September cover story, and is also the topic of my Scripps Howard column with Ben Boychuk this week. My take:

An attack on Iran, whether by Israel or the United States, would have devastating consequences for the rest of us: Iran would almost certainly respond by unleashing its terrorist proxy groups to make war on Western targets, and it could easily make life miserable for shipping in the Straits of Hormuz -- a critical passage for oil exports from the Middle East to the rest of the world. Many people would die, and a shaky world economy might be plunged into depression.

And that's what would happen if the attack worked.

Iran learned the lessons of Israel's attacks on nuclear facilities in Iraq and Syria during the last three decades. The country has spread out and buried its key nuclear facilities. Western intelligence probably doesn't know where all those facilities are located. Even proponents of an attack admit that bombing Iran might not keep that country from obtaining a nuclear bomb -- it just might slow the process a little bit.

Whether you believe an attack is justified, then, depends on your answer to this question: Are Iran's leaders so crazy they would actually use a nuclear bomb once they obtained it?

Certainly, there's little reason to love President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or the mullahs who back him. They are Holocaust-denying totalitarian theocrats. But there's little evidence they're ready to commit national suicide. If Israel didn't destroy Tehran with a retaliatory nuclear attack, the United States almost certainly would.

A nuclear-armed Iran is undesirable. It may also be inevitable. The suffering unleashed by an attack on the country, though, would be guaranteed -- while the consequences of a nuclear Iran remain, at this point, hypothetical. If the debacle in Iraq has taught us anything, it is that we should wait for a true threat to reveal itself, instead of squandering blood and treasure trying to ward off a chimera.

Ben's solution? "Let's kill the mullahs."

Dear Citizens United: What does "Stop Iran Now" mean?

I bet you can't guess which 20th century historical analogy is used in this Citizens United ad urging President Obama to "Stop Iran Now."

Oh wait. I bet you can.



Put aside the self-parodying hilarity of the right's ability to see every single foreign policy challenge as 1938 revisited. Here's a question for Citizens United:

What the heck does "Stop Iran Now" mean?

I've got a guess. It probably doesn't -- judging from the D-Day footage used in the ad above -- involve sanctions and diplomacy. It probably involves bombs and destruction and, well, war.

But try as I might, I can't find any statement on the Citizens United site -- or on any of the StopIranNow.com feeds -- that suggests explicitly calls for a precise course of action. There's nothing at the StopIranNow.com site, as of this writing, except this video.

Why so coy?

Such vague apparent but plausibly denied warmongering leaves me believe one of two possibilities: The "Stop Iran Now" folks don't have the courage of their convictions, which is why they remain somewhat murky. Or the ad isn't really about Iran at all -- it's purely about trying to make the president look weak and, well, Neville Chamberlainish. It's aggressive passive aggression, but despite being promoted by outlets like The Weekly Standard -- or maybe because of that -- it shouldn't be taken seriously as anything ther than politics.