The Times They Are A Changing

A DW Debate between Leonard Carrier (DW’s In-house Historian and Philosopher)

And Dusty Schoch (DW Foreign-Policy Editor) on Whether Iran should become

A Nuclear Power.

LEN’S OPENING:  (PRO)

            Everybody has dire predictions about what will happen if Iran gets nuclear capability.  Hillary Clinton and all the other presidential candidates in both parties cross themselves and say that this would be anathema to them.  No way can Iran get the bomb.  These politicians would be willing to do what?  Bomb Iran, invade their country, sow destruction far and wide?  Kill little children with cluster bombs, dismember people with bunker busters, but above all else don’t let these Persians have a nuclear weapon?

            What’s the big deal here?  Iran has said that it wants to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.  So maybe we don’t believe them.  Suppose we’re right.  Suppose that they really want to be able to fashion a nuclear weapon.  The nuclear club consists of the United States, China, Great Britain, Israel, Russia, France, India, and Pakistan.  Why don’t they want to let Iran in?  That would mean that Iran would have the same status as the other bomb-capable nations.  That would mean that those other nations couldn’t just bomb Iran with impunity.  That would mean that Iran would be able to fight back and inflict considerable damage on any possible invader.  Well, we can’t have that.  That would mean that we couldn’t use our muscle to make the Iranians do what we want them to do, which is to get them to give us their oil without the costly invasion we inflicted on Iraq.

            If Iran got the bomb, then we wouldn’t be able to threaten them without getting a counter-threat.  That would mean that Israel wouldn’t be the only nuclear nation in the Middle East.  That would mean that Israel might have to sit down and talk to Palestinians and forge a lasting peace.  Oh, that would be calamitous, wouldn’t it?  Let’s face it, if Iran got the bomb they wouldn’t use it, just as the Soviet Union didn’t use it, and just as we didn’t use it against them.  It would be back to Mutually Assured Destruction.  Looking back on those days, they didn’t seem that bad at all.

(As an aesthetic addendum, Len shares with us a prosaic

Portrait of Iran and its peoples…

Authorship: Surprise!—Len Carrier himself)

Pictures from Tehran

Tall, sunlit buildings posed before majestic mountains,

Autumn streets dappled with their colored leaves,

Fountains shooting forth their spray,

Skies smiling down on crowded streets,

On music makers, on children with their painted faces,

On wide, green soccer fields with fans in rapt attendance,

On women in their long dresses and bright scarves,

Glamorous in their understated beauty.

Oh, shining city beneath the snowy hills!

This is what you are now.

What you will be tomorrow is left to chance

And the whims of godless men.

L.C.

DUSTY’S COUNTERPOINTS:

Len, this is (most likely) the most important issue you and I will ever debate. An initial   listing of my  counterpoints to your proposal that we should favor Iran’s building a nuclear arsenal would include: (1) I think it was a suicidal mistake to let Pakistan have the bomb because they’re perennially an easy-coup away from landing the bomb in the hands of people who despise us (America/Israel) and believe that in a nuclear holocaust they will all go to heaven which a sizable percentage of them prefer to breathing air on earth. (2) Iran is worse in every respect than Pakistan. (3) If nukes had been in the hands of the Japanese and the Americans in 1945, there would have probably not been a 1946, as we knew it, or a 2007 for that matter as we know it. (4) You’re heading us in the wrong direction – We need to reduce, not expand, the number of nations with doomsday discretion. (5) You’re naively equating the leadership of Iran with rational humanity. They are led by fundamentalist lunatics. You’re arguing for investing preemptive holocaust power on people who are theocratically led  and who despise us with the fervor of fundamentalist idiocy. (6) You’re philosophically-oriented to the impaired point of thinking there “must be an answer” to every problem.

Quite frankly I view this problem as a dilemma—a  truly classic conundrum from both the logical and moral perspective. We have no “right” from either position—legal or ethical– to prevent Iran from arming themselves. We are asserting it because it is logical and because we can. In this situation I’m prone to  say “to hell with our humanly-civilized concept and construct of justice”; we’re talking global survival. If it takes tyrannical power to produce plutonium peace, I’m in favor of it. These are different days, my historically-sage friend. “Justice” was a meaningful phrase when the world knew only  conventional means of destroying one another. Since E=MC2, all notions of justice and “fairness” are less than archaic. They are irrelevant. Humans in the process of destroying one another now have it within their collectively aberrant power to take the whole world with them. E=MC2 gave us god-like power; power in fact sufficiently potent to effectively end incalculable life forms and ecosystems on earth.

Somehow, every intuitive bone in my body screams we must keep these Islamic creeps from having the ability to make us and fellow species (millions) on earth extinct. They are a theocracy. They unfortunately KNOW they are good and we are evil, and the more unfortunately KNOW they will not be permanently dead if or when we nuke them.  We certainly cannot view these Islamic nuts as we viewed the Russians and the other nuclear nations which, with the possible  exception of Pakistan, are inhabited and commanded by people sane enough to know that when they die, they will remain dead a very long time.

You are flirting with the idea of permitting the placement of doomsday (ours) weaponery in the hands of a national personality more insidiously disposed and insane than Charlie Manson.

Here’s the meat of what I suggest you consider most as you compose  your rejoinder:  Until we know what will work to best turn this conundrum into a plan to prevent the birth of a new nuclear (especially theocratic, especially Islamic) power, we should consider ourselves the physicians of a very sick world, and we should follow scrupulously the Hippocratic Oath:  First do no harm. Endorsing the development of the doomsday bomb by Iran…with these crazy Islamics living next to Zionist-crazy (and nuclear-armed) Israel…. is NOT THE ANSWER. Crazy, fundamentalist Iran whose majority of jihad-ready Moham-mad-men are presently itching to sacrifice themselves in the pan-Islamic* quest to make Israel disappear into the sea (or better vaporize it into the atmosphere),

And by *pan-Islamic, I mean, even with our allied Shieks of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, the peoples of those countries would love to see Israel disappear in a cloud of nuclear dust. Our alliance with those OPEC nations is a matter of oily détente, and the oil taps are tightening every second as the reserves get shorter and the world gets hotter.

My bottom line at this stage of contending is that not having presently the RIGHT answer is no call or justification for yielding to the intellectuals’ compulsion to HAVE an answer.  Sometimes doing NOTHING IS THE RIGHT THING.

Just one scenario to pose for an example: If we do what we should do—and immediately withdraw all U.S. troops from the Middle East, there will certainly follow considerable chaos. Out of chaos, order routinely arises. Letting the Sunnis, Shites, the infidel Israeli’s and the rest of the warring sons of Abraham have at each other and enjoy all the conventional war they want…now and before there are two of them with doomsday machines, might very well establish an order where the fittest (rationally and strategically) in fact survives.

While the Middle East is involved in a roaring and contagious conventional war, no nation among them will have the leisure or capacity to develop nuclear weapons.  I can’t prescribe the precise progression of events or see the future. No one can. But give Iran and Israel the bomb and I cannot envision a future with any peace, either of mind or of military machinations. Leave them alone and I can envision Israel unilaterally eliminating anything close to a bomb-factory in Iran. You saw how they aborted Iraq’s ambitions in that regard. I think America should stay the hell out of it and let the Middle East Hatfields and McCoys pursue their perennial convenings of conventional war.

The prosaic words you sent describing Iran are beautiful, as are its people. But their beauty does not render their leadership benign. The world is full of beautiful and deadly creatures. Truth is, the Middle East as a crude third-world whole, lives today in the dark ages, culturally and religiously. The horrible conundrum with which we’re faced is the result of a world technologically compressed and culturally constant. We’ve got medieval fundamentalist Hebrews and Arabs warring over the same old promised sand and  Zionist bones of contention their forbears fought over 2000 years ago with daggers and slings. But they’re sporting AK 47’s under arm and plutonium cataclysm under covert construction. We, as technical innovators and suppliers, are their enablers. “We” being our amoral, invisible, intractable military corporate cyborgs. The ones whose old, surplus and discarded Stinger missiles are in alien hands plucking our Black Hawks out of alien skies as we write each other here on the safe side of mayhem.

The centered, circumspect thinkers (which would include you and me and our ilk) have got to maintain the big-picture intelligence to deal with new problems with new stratagem.  Your “let Iran arm itself” philosophy is in distinctly  past principle and practicality perfect.  Wouldn’t argue against it if we were talking planes, tanks, guns and conventional explosives. These things, Dresden included, kill only arguably-responsible humans and environmentally they’re fairly benign.  Fission and fusion weapons are ….. u n t h i n k a b l e.   I can’t think of another word.  We need to be planning and scheming with Manhattan-project desperation ways to shrink the existing arsenals to extinction before one of our loose nuclear cannons fires a first volley the nuclear responses to which shrink unitary earthly life to extinction.

I have no answers to the lingering connundrum at this point. Only non-answers. I look at your proposition as the zen sculptor looks at the block of granite he must ultimately evolve into a product which is “finished” and “right”. As he chips away he determines only what the shape taking form is “not”. Allowing Iran access to the nuclear button to me is clearly only something I can say with certainty is “not” the way to pursue nuclear peace, much less universally-desirable disarmament. We have no nuclear “peace” at present- only an armed and dangerous doomsday standoff.

I am not particularly worried about the “peace” which cyclically reigns between perennial-conventional wars on earth.  I am dreadfully worried about global warming and other things which might create such massive  annihilations that the effects on our unitary ecology are either irreversible  and/or end-time cataclysmic. The fact that America (along with other competing or allied nations) is possessed of sufficient toxic power to destroy life on earth is itself unthinkable. Especially in view of the fact America’s systems of guidance and governance have been proved sufficiently flawed to have evolved the world’s preeminent nuclear power into the world’s most dangerous (and loathed) imperialistic predator.

Men of reason, circumspection, memory and compassion must recapture the attention and reform the conscience and conduct of America.  It may be a highly “improbable mission”, but that doesn’t mean we should cease trying.

Len, you must continue your devil’s advocacy on this issue. Don’t pull in your talons because of my preview. Argue this with me as passionately and persuasively as you can manage, and with every cerebral sinew you can muster. I need you to challenge me and fight me so we can help each other see not only more clearly the defect in your thesis and reason, but also hopefully—prayerfully—catch even an evanescent glimpse of the shape that amorphous piece of granite must assume to afford the future of life on earth a viable foundation…a formula….a form of peace, in the old, conventional sense of that seemingly disintegrating concept.

This is not just about Iran, but about all nations who’ll ultimately figure they can follow what ever precedent Iran and N.Korea establish in their on-going efforts to challenge America’s right-or-wrong plan to be the baddest ballistic bully on the block.   So, get on with your chipping, Professor.  I suggest not going too far afield in terms of pre-nuclear history.  Caesar’s Gallic Wars aren’t going to give us much steerage into the age of H-Bomb hell on earth.  Like it or not, we’re talking about the weird and very-here and now world of Dr. Strangelove and On the Beach. Russia and Iran are allies. Russia and China are allies. I’m not afraid for the few years I have left.  I’m afraid for the few years my children and planet earth may have left. I’m pondering, for sakes other than mine, the unthinkable.  So help me, Len. Give me your best shot.

LEN’S REJOINDER

Here’s  my best shot on why I think that a nuclear-armed Iran is a lesser of evils.  We both agree that were no country to have the bomb we’d all be better off.  That, unfortunately, is one genie we can’t put back in the bottle.

So now that we have many nations possessing nuclear capability, what do we do about the nuclear have-nots?  Our present tack has been to threaten those who want nuclear capability with sanctions, or even worse.  Why do you suppose that is? The ostensible reason is that we don’t want so-called “crazies” like Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il to use them on peace-loving nations like us.  One has to remember, however, that the only nation ever to use nuclear weapons was the good old, peace-loving USA.  We not only used them on Japan, but our generals are presently contemplating using tactical nuclear weapons, not only in any battles we might have to fight in the Middle East, but also from manned space stations, as well.

Our long stare-down with the Soviet Union did not produce one single nuclear incident.  This was because both parties knew that any first strike would produce a counterstrike.  There was a stalemate that finally resulted in arms reduction on the part of both nations.  Heraclitus recognized this more than two thousand years ago, when he claimed that only where you have conflicting and equal opposites do you have peace and stability.

Our invasion of Iraq was an object lesson for countries like North Korea and Iran.  If you only bluff about having weapons of mass destruction, woe betide you.  We’ll blast you with cluster bombs and bunker busters, and we’ll contaminate your water supply with depleted uranium, killing more than 600,000 people who otherwise would have lived.  So the message is clear to any rational-thinking leader of a country like Iran, a country possessed of enormous supplies of energy which they know we desperately need:  either get armed with a proper deterrent, or else let those who have a better-supplied arsenal roll right over you and steal your natural resources.

Right now Israel has nuclear capability. Will it be tempted to use it if it feels that Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Lebanon are exerting too much pressure on them to make peace with the Palestinians?  Unless we rein them in, I think they would.  The Israelis have no compunctions about bombing what they believe are nuclear facilities in Iran.  They’ve done it before, and they are poised to do it again.  If Iran had nuclear capability, Israel wouldn’t be the bully of the Middle East anymore.  They would be more likely to come to terms with, not only the Palestinians, but their other Arab neighbors, as well.  Out of discord, said Heraclitus, comes the fairest harmony.

Both India and Pakistan have the bomb.  Now those nations are not at each other’s throats as they were when they were fighting with conventional weapons.  My prediction is that the longer their nuclear stalement continues, the better the prospects for a lasting peace between India and Pakistan; and then they can begin mutual disarmament the way we did with the Soviet Union.

I also do not view Iran’s leaders as “crazies.”  Ahmadinejad might have some weird views about the holocaust (if he really does have those views and isn’t being misquoted), but he is not someone who would set the world on fire with a nuclear war.  It’s a good thing Bush demurred in debating Ahmadinejad, because the clever Persian would have tied our tongue-tied president into logical knots.

What those nations seeking nuclear capability want is justice.  We’ve been calling the shots for them for too long.  We removed the democratically elected leader of Iran and replaced him with the Shah.  What business of ours was that?  We wanted the oil, and we wanted a client state to make it easier for us to take it. We’re now attempting to do the same thing in Iraq.  When the Iranians kicked out the Shah, the mullahs took over.  But the mullahs aren’t about to start a war. They know that their country would be annihilated if they did.  So far, only we and the Israelis have started wars in the Middle East. I count the war between Iraq and Iran as a war we instigated, since in those days Saddam was our client and we supplied him with weapons–even those chemical and biological weapons whose remnants were resurrected under the phrase “weapons of mass destruction.”

Mao might have got many things wrong–cultural revolutions and iron rice bowl economics among them–but there was one thing he got right.  Justice comes from the barrel of a gun.  In today’s military climate that gun is a nuclear one.  Without it a nation has to accept some one else’s justice. Is there a danger that this gun will be used?  Of course there is, but this is a dangerous world.  I believe that there is more danger of its being used when there is no threat of a counter-use.  This, of course, is open to dispute; but I remember the motto of the Strategic Air Command, in which I was proud to serve during the Cold War: ”Peace is Our Profession.”  We meant it, even though our B-52s were carrying nuclear warheads meant for the Soviet Union should they attack us.  Of course, that attack never came, and I believe that it was because our nuclear capabilities balanced out.

The question remains:  should we go to war with Iran to prevent them from gaining nuclear capability?  If what I have said above carries any weight, then the answer is “no.”  Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. — L.C.

DUSTY’S REBUTTAL OF  LEN’S REJOINDER

As is par for your philosophical course, Len, you  responded to my counterpoints with a beautifully-composed argument.  But, as with beauty in women, beauty in polemics can be seductive.  Only difference, the charm of what you have just written is, thank-heavens, resistible.

Not a single one of your reasons holds any water. They are merely chips off the block of some truth which will hopefully take better shape hereafter. I’ll take them one at a time:  Remember our topic and the bone of contention – It is NOT whether the U.S. should militarily attack or otherwise prevent Iran from having the bomb—Rather, it is simply whether it is best for the international community, the world, if you will, that Iran have the bomb. You have contended that their having bomb is a situation to be preferred over their not having it.   I will now contend with your argument’s premises one at a time:

First you suggest that America has no right to prevent Iran as a nuclear “have not” from becoming a nuclear “have” nation like America because America used nuclear weapons against Japan…and threatens to use them (tactical grade) in the Middle East.  Len, this is an argument against permitting any nation nuclear arms. America in 1945 was at its peak both in terms of international integrity and nonaggression.  If WE chose to drop the bomb in the course of wanting an accelerated and clean resolution to the war in the Pacific, we can expect Iran’s trigger fingers to be a hundred-fold “itchier”.  What’s good for the Goose is in fact good for the Gander, but what was bad for America (not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki) remains worse for Iran.

Second you contend the Soviet Union’s nuclear armament has proved innocuous since the cold war standoff, and implicitly you are contending that what was “safe” in the case of Soviet Russia will prove safe when Iran is armed with nukes.  The scary thing is, you’re not kidding. I’ll mention only a few trump cards that independently sweep your cards off the table. (1) We came, with the Cuban Missile crisis so close to becoming cosmic gas. (2) Russia’s stockpile (enough to extinguish all American life 5 times) resulted in Japan’s nuclear assailants (America) building its stockpiles to a point sufficient to snuff out essentially all life on earth; not sure how many times, but once would seem enough.  Heraclitus’ theory of peaceful standoff between “equal opposites” has no application where the weapons held by the combatants are doomsday weapons.  Didn’t you see the movie “War Games”, Len?  Didn’t you hear that wonderfully-inspired war-game programmed computer spout the Oracle’s truth at the end of the flick by saying, that “In the game of thermonuclear war, the only way to win is not to play.”  The corollary to this rule, Len, would be—The only way to prevent the game’s being played (as we did in Japan) is to ELIMINATE EITHER THE PLAYERS OR THE WEAPONS THEY PLAY WITH.  I submit, since we (U.S.) is already armed, the elimination of thermonuclear weapons is the preferred alternative; and there are only 2 alternatives imaginable.

THIRD you suggest that we attacked Iraq because they DIDN’T (truly) have the bomb (or any other WMD’s), and that if they had had them, we’d have been more reluctant to … attack, conquer and occupy them.  Len, this is not an argument that makes it more rational to permit Iran to build a nuclear arsenal it presently does not have. If Iran had the bomb, given their relative size and non-ICBM capacity to deliver it, we could make them disappear preemptively at will.  We’re much more powerful than Goliath was over David.  It would take Iran decades to get as insanely armed with nuclear over-kill as we.  Iran’s nuking up is dangerous to us because they will have the power to equip terrorists with suitcase bombs that could easily be containerd-through our ports or open borders.  We need to prevent Iran from producing nukes they can distribute under their robes and tents to anti-western Jihadists.

FORTH you reprise your argument of nuclear-deterring détente between Russia and America in suggesting Israel would be less likely to nuke its enemies if its enemies (e.g., Iran) could nuke them back.  At the same time you argue that Israel is likely to nuke its enemies at any time they think they might be losing a conventional war over the Palestinian problem.  I think, Len, you are contending that two nuclear idiots are better than one.  These Biblically-bellicose enemies have historically used against each other every weapon at their avail (most of which either we or Russia has manufactured and shipped to them).  I’ll say it again— Nukes in the hands of America is wrong. The “nicest” and most respected nation on earth used the unthinkable weapons in WWII. There is a thousand-times greater likelihood for nuclear war when the players are Zionist and Islamic fundamentalists motivated by the intellects and animus of pre-medieval religious fanatics. These nations should be deprived of all forms of explosives. Giving them plutonium bombs is…again (but I promise—not for the last time)….unthinkable.

FIFTH -  I’m really surprised you played the “justice” card in this Armageddon doomsday game.  I told you up front I had no “solution”, but this is clearly one of the most patent  “non-solutions”.  Sure it’s “unjust” in every sense for the biggest nuclear bully to say to the lesser nations “Thou shalt not have nuclear weapons”. And in endorsing America’s such declaration, I do not endorse either the ethicality or rationality of Aristotle’s “Golden Men”  (i.e., his philosophy that there will always be people whose superior intelligence and powers make them better equipped to make decisions affecting their …inferiors.)  I simply stick by my guns at this point. There are (very unjustly for every species of life on earth) already too many nuclear powers. The un-represented (in Congress or English Parliament) fish in the sea and fowl in the air quite un-justly have no voice in the matter which will certainly affect their being among the “quick or dead” in their future contexts.  Forget “little picture” justice. Considering the macrocosmic globe and the “justice” affecting all integrated and interdependent life on earth, no nation on earth is justly in possession of doomsday Armageddon power. End of sermon. End of argument.

I’m glad (and thank you for your part in the restraint) that our SAC boys didn’t nuke Russia and light the fuse to the Armageddon war.  But, beyond that gratitude, I feel like being in the planes carrying those bombs, was aiding and abetting a  sin against nature if there ever was one.

SIXTH, you state that a question remains—that being: Should we go to war with  Iran to prevent them from gaining nuclear capability.  I think I might join your “no” in that debate but it is quite unrelated to the debate here under way. That’s another fight for another day.   Let’s wind this one up.  I’ll give you the closing argument on why, if you still do, Iran should have nuclear bombs.

IN CONCLUDING…

CONSIDER THIS… “BULL”

I commenced my counter-pointing of your pro-nuke argument for Iran by referring to the problem as “conundrum” and “dilemma”.  My first faulting of your proposition was in mentioning that the most glaring defect in your logic was that you apparently think that it’s logically incumbent on us to in fact DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE PROBLEM.

Robert Pirsig (like you, Len, a professor of philosophy) wrote a book some time ago entitled “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, which was a challenging and provocative examination of the areas of ethicality and aesthetics wherein the term “quality” is viewed variously as either illustrative or axiomatic.  In short, his book, viewed as philosophic thesis stands for the proposition that the term “quality” is incapable of logical limitation or utilitarian definition. That’s because it is imbued with both relativistic and subjective …qualities (opps…I should have said “aspects”).

In the course of unraveling his fascinatingly-creative only quasi-fictional book, Pirsig discusses a way he has devised of thinking outside all boxes.   In the course of delivering his discourse on quality and the pursuit of excellence, Pirsig poses and rejects our concepts of conundrums and “dilemmas”.

Even before Pirsig and his book, Albert Einstein taught us in his ending the debate between the particular and wave physicists on the nature of light (where the former were contending it was a particle, and the latter a wave) that the question that seemed dilemmatic was in fact not, because, as he eventually proclaimed, light was neither a wave nor a particle, but rather “both. “

Pirsig was heading us in a similarly expansive and liberating direction when he argued to us through  his protagonist’s wrestlings with the mind-numbing denotations of “quality” that there are more than two things to do when facing what we perceive to be a dilemma. He poses the philosophical or logical “dilemma” in metaphorical fashion as the proverbial two-horned bull. He postures us as matador in the ring with the bull and it’s dual-pointed menacing  array heading our way and asks us to re-think the essential nature of the dilemma.

Long story short – he suggests we quit looking from horn to pointed  horn in order to decide which we’ll choose for purposes of impalement.  He instructs us to get the image of conundrum and dilemma altogether out of our minds and think outside that box  as he had learned to do in order to save his sanity and perhaps even his own life.

When the bull is headed your way, with those terrible pointed horns, don’t think you have only two alternatives. Think outside the sandy box of the bull ring and do as he did. At the last moment with the bull’s approach, he finds himself no longer willing or able to look the bull in the face. There is no answer to his “dilemma” there, and so long as he is staring at the bull no other “options” will appear. So he looks down…into the sand of the bull ring in fact.  Then and there the solution appears.  It is the sand itself. He reaches down and scoops it up in his hands and instinctively hurls it in the eyes of the impending bull. Bullfight over. Matador walks away, to fight (or maybe not) another day…

Len, it presently appears to me clearly that we have with the situation of Iran’s becoming armed with nuclear weaponery what  appears to be a classic or even paradigmatic dilemma.  A nuclear-armed Iran is…unthinkable.  On the other hand, a war waged against Iran by either the U.S. or  another “Allied Coalition” to prevent Iran from becoming nuclear armed is also…unthinkable.

Somewhere out there, there is a pail of sand for the eyes of this Arabian Bull, this Islamic ICBM wannabee.  We just need to keep thinking with Einsteinian stealth outside all the old boxes.  If we could bomb or invade Iran and accomplish the mission of keeping it forever nuclear disarmed, I might be disposed to join the hawks in such a mission. History and intelligence counsel me that such force begets only reprisals worse than the originally-perceived enemy.

But simply because we don’t presently know what the answer is today does not mean there is none, either right on the sand within our frightened view or…out there inchoate in someone’s Einsteinian noggin.  Simply doing nothing (from America’s standpoint) as said before, may be the best answer, at least for the time being.   Iran may find its eyes filled with Israeli (and/or Pakistani and/or Indian) sand long before its nuclear horns come within poking distance of the U.S.

When all presently-perceived options are unthinkable, we must wait. We must wait until one of us has a better idea.  If we keep our heads and hearts in the right places, the idea will come. That’s my “field of peaceful dreams” position at least.  And I’d certainly love it if you—any of you has a better idea.

Best,

Dusty

War is still our only enemy.

4/11/07

LEN’S CLOSING

Final Words

            I find myself not so much in disagreement with Dusty on the main thrust of his argument, but rather on the details.  But, as always, that’s where the devil resides.  Let me then briefly respond to the points Dusty raises.

First:  Dusty contends that since we bombed Japan when no other nation had nuclear weapons, Iran would be more likely to use them in a first-strike capacity.  I disagree.  We might not have used atomic weaponry if we knew Japan had a second-strike capacity.

Second:  Dusty claims that in a “game of chicken” with nuclear weapons, Heraclitus’ notion of a balance is inapplicable.  I disagree.  We have many nuclear nations now, and no nation has used these weapons against another. That’s empirical evidence that a standoff does work.  Our use of them occurred when no one else had them.

Third:  I simply reiterate that in the face of a bellicose nation that wants to steal your oil, it’s better to be more prepared rather than less.  We have long been bellicose toward Iran.  We still list Iran as a member of an “axis of evil.”  We listed Iraq that way, and look what we did to them.

Fourth:  I give more credit than Dusty does to the intelligence of Israelis, Arabs, and Persians.  A main reason why there is so much turmoil in the Middle East is that we have declared that region in our “national interest” ever since the Carter Doctrine. Our own meddling in that area has created more friction than there would be otherwise.

Fifth:  I can agree that no nation on earth is justly in possession of nuclear weapons.  So why isn’t justice followed?  Why don’t we start by dismantling our nuclear arsenal?  The only justification is that we want them for self-defense.  But if that’s a justification for us, then it has to be a justification for any other nation.  This is an application of Kant’s principle of universality.

Sixth:  Dusty agrees with me that it would not be worth going to war with Iran to prevent their gaining nuclear weapons, but he says it is unrelated to our dialogue.  I disagree.  We are not arguing in a vacuum.  My premise concerned what we would be willing to do to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I assumed that there was no way our present Administration would allow it—and that means war if all else fails.  But here a cost-benefit analysis is helpful.  There was also no way we were going to let Saddam stay in power in Iraq.  After 3,500 American dead and perhaps 30,000 wounded, along with hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, we got an escalating civil war with no conceivable exit.  A conflict with Iran would be even deadlier.  So, given the present state of mind of our leaders, my claim is that it’s the lesser of evils for Iran to have the bomb than it is for us to forcibly prevent them from getting it.

Finally—the bull:  I heartily concur that we should always try to “think outside the box.”  My argument that it’s a lesser evil for Iran to have the bomb assumes that the Bush Administration doesn’t know how to think outside the box.  “My way or the highway” is the mantra of these policy-makers.  Either Iran knuckles under—or else.  What I have outlined is a worst-case scenario.  It is one in which Iran really wants to fashion a bomb and not use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.  It is on that assumption that I have proceeded.  But what if Ahmadinejad is telling the truth? What if he really wants a peaceful use of nuclear energy? We could certainly find out by sitting down and talking to the Iranians. We could get other nations to help us, in the way that China is helping to defuse North Korea’s nuclear aspirations.  We could defuse the situation in Iran with diplomacy, but we choose not to do so.  We would rather try to sell the American people a story about an “axis of evil,” so we can more easily get them in a frame of mind for more war.  My earlier lyrics on the beauty of Tehran are meant to provide another framework.  So Dusty and I agree on the most important proposition:  war is the enemy. – L.C.

4 12 07