Joel Mathis

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

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

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 o

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

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: