New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman says that given the choice between a nuclear-armed Iran or a U.S. attack against Irans nuclear facilities, right now he would opt for a nuclear Iran. "As someone who believed and still believes in the importance of getting Iraq right, the level of incompetence that the Bush team has displayed in Iraq, and its refusal to acknowledge any mistakes or remove those who made them, make it impossible to support this administration in any offensive military action against Iran," Friedman writes.
The liberal pundit says a better course of action than an attack would be to keep a nuclear Iran at bay through "deterrence making it clear that if Iran uses a nuclear weapon or gives one to terrorists, the United States will destroy all of its nuclear sites with nuclear weapons. "The main reason [Donald] Rumsfeld should leave now," Friedman concludes, "is because we cant have a credible diplomatic or military option vis-à-vis Iran when so many people feel, as I do, that in a choice between another Rumsfeld-led confrontation or just letting Iran get nukes and living with it, we should opt for the latter."
Israel might question the use of the word "just," since the Iranian regime has said Israel should be "wiped off the map."
#2
...making it clear that if Iran uses a nuclear weapon or gives one to terrorists, the United States will destroy all of its nuclear sites with nuclear weapons.
So, Tom. Suppose they decide to use this nuclear weapon in, say, New York City while your sitting at your desk pounding out your latest screed.
Are you still okay with it?
#3
"deterrence making it clear that if Iran uses a nuclear weapon or gives one to terrorists, the United States will destroy all of its nuclear sites with nuclear weapons.
So the "deterence" logic trail proceeds, if Tel Aviv is incinerated Tom Friedman and the Dems will automatically assume Iran launched and we can nuke them?
#7
...making it clear that if Iran uses a nuclear weapon or gives one to terrorists, the United States will destroy all of its nuclear sites with nuclear weapons.
Sure Tom -- a Democrat will do that. Right.
Not the Democrats I'm reading at the left-wing blogs. Iran could nuke the Israelis and Kos, Atrios and Kevin Drum would -- at most -- politely 'tsk' them.
The correct response, if you honestly believed that Irann could be deterred, would be, 'use a nuke once, anywhere, and your country ceases to exist.' That's deterrence, but we're not likely to see that from the Dhimmicrats.
Posted by: Steve White ||
04/20/2006 16:11 Comments ||
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#8
1. I dont see where Friedman says whats in the headline. What hes saying is that a nuclear armed Iran is better than an attack on Iran done incompetently, and at this point, as long as Rummy is in charge that what he thinks we would get. Now you can argue with either of those points, but its really not fair to mischarecterize what hes saying.
2. Kos, Drum, etc are no better indications of what any Dem would do, than Rantburg and other conservative blogs are indications of what any Republican Prez would do.
BTW, if you want to see some more centrist Dem opinion, you can try Oxblog, The Moderate Voice, or Liberals against Terrorism. Oxblog is closest to my own views of all 3, but you'll find all of them different from Kos, etc.
#9
Oxblog is centrist. But how well does it reflect the thinking of the Democrat leadership? Not very well, especially as elections season approaches. It doesn't even reflect the thinking of that centrist Hillary Clinton.
#10
...in a choice between another Rumsfeld-led confrontation or just letting Iran get nukes and living with it, we should opt for the latter.
Let me translate for old Tom: "If it's a choice between urban liberals staying out of power and Israel being wiped from the map then... inshallah, the Zionist Entity is doomed!"
#11
when will American jews see the writing on the wall and realize the Donks won't do sh&t to cover Israel? Jimmuh, Hillary, and crew will hand wring while the nukes fall, saying, at least the NY jewish votes safe and alive....Even Schumer wouldn't do jack to help
Posted by: Frank G ||
04/20/2006 19:30 Comments ||
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#12
Good thing this dodo is hidden away in Times Select.
#14
LH, what happened to the Scoop Jackson and Sam Nunn part of the Democratic party?
The Carter (do-nothing) and Kos (rabid hate filled collectivists) types have completely chased them away from the Democrat (and me and many other former Democrats).
Good luck over there trying to get those rabid weasels back on a leash.
#15
IOw, better for Western democracies to lose Israel, Taiwan, Japan, the PacRim, .........@WEST and eventually 1/2-plus of CONUS + 200Milyuhn Americans, becuz fighting for your country, freedoms, and way-of-life; or running away to Canada-Mahico IS GEE WHIZ JUST TOO HARD, SWEATY, SMELLY, AND INCONVENIENT, espec without any Cradle-to-Grave Government subsidized Universal Welfare checks to take care of 'em.
Frontpage Interviews guest today is Thomas Joscelyn, an expert on the international terrorist network. Much of his research has focused on the role that nations such as Saddam's Iraq and the mullah's Iran have played in providing support, training and funding for terrorist entities such as al Qaeda, al Qaeda's affiliates, Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups. He has written extensively about these connections for the Weekly Standard and in several other publications. Currently, he is organizing a research project to review and translate the millions of documents captured from the fallen Iraqi regime and the Taliban.
In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That's the conviction that inspired Greenpeace's first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.
Cue the Roger Rabbit graphic. RTWT
There's been a few other greenies who've come to the same conclusion: it's almost like they've read Steven Den Beste.
#2
SDB's wrong on one count. Taxing gaseoline is the most effective of reducing consumptio. Kyoto is in effect a transnational tax where developing countries sell phuny carbon credit to developed countries.
BTW, I expect the US and other are seeing a clamour to reduce tax on gas and oil in reponse to rising oil prices as we are in Oz. Whereas, governments should do exactly the opposite and raise taxes, because this far and away the most effective of encouraging the development of alternatives.
Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the vacuity of the idea that dhimmi Westerners have a responsibility to rebuild Muslim countries:
Does the United States, and the West in general, have a responsibility to fix what is broken in Afghanistan? As a poster to this website put it recently: The only option I see is for the armed forces of the western nations fully occupy afghanistan, subdue them and colonize them for at least two generations and teach them civilized life."
Absolutely not. That would end, once and for all, any chance of sensible support, within the Western world, for dealing with the worldwide Jihad, and especially with the problems of Da'wa and demographic conquest within the Western world. What happens in Europe is far more important than whether primitive tribesmen, who will hardly be weaned away from Islam by Infidels, fight with each other or do not fight with each other.
The Pentagon should right now be arranging only to supply local warlords who may, in promoting themselves, do our bidding. Let Afghanistan collapse into warring fiefdoms, as long as those warlords keep Al Qaeda and the Taliban at bay. And they can do so, if they are supplied with weaponry, and if there are on the ground only Afghanis or others of interest (for example, soldiers from Tadjikistan). Others who are also worried about the Taliban can at the same time supply what they can (e.g. Kazakhstan might help with American bases for the odd bombing run, and with some of that oil money as well).
Resources must be husbanded, not squandered. The American public will lose all interest -- the very interest it has been so hard to sustain -- in fighting a war of self-defense against the Jihad if the American army is now deployed in large numbers to Afghanistan. In fact, the Infidel presence in Afghanistan should be reduced to the point of near-nothingness. As long as America is seen as the source of money, money, money (as it is seen in Iraq), plausible locals will insist on the Americans remaining, and doing much of the fighting, and all this ridiculous "rebuilding" which has nothing to do with limiting the power of the global Islamic jihad.
We can only lose, we can only become confused, when we begin to think that maybe this or that group is composed of people who hold to Western sensibilities. We, the Infidels, and especially the naive Americans, are permanently out of our depth when we are dealing with those for whom smiles and deception are a way of life.
Instead of working to rebuild Afghanistan or any other Muslim polity, we should work to divide and demoralize the forces of the global jihad. We can do this in many ways, among the chief being by pointing out the obvious. For example, we should be pointing out all the ways in which Islam is a vehicle for an Arab supremacist ideology, one which requires non-Arabs to exhibit a kind of historical amnesia about, or indifference to, or contempt for, all that is pre-Islamic about their past.
By refusing to help -- helping with the Jizyah of foreign aid, helping with all that rebuilding -- Infidels can do more to help themselves. In the end, this will also help the peaceful Muslims around the world. Let them discover, over the next many decades, what has been done to their societies by the inshallah-fatalism of Islam, and by the habit of mental submission that is encouraged by Islam, and by the willingness to endure despotism because in Islam political power cannot be located in the will of mere people, but only in the Will of Allah as codified in the Shari'a or Holy Law of Islam -- which mere mortals, men who count for nothing except to the extent that they submit to the revealed will of Allah, can only hope to approximate.
Let Muslims themselves begin slowly (as Kemal Ataturk did, and as others have) to understand that all of their political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures, of their states, of their societies, whether in Dar al-Islam or Dar al-Harb, are a direct result of various Islamic doctrines and assumptions.
That cannot be imposed by Infidel armies. That can best occur by the U.S. limiting its contacts with Muslim countries, and not helping them out. It can best be accomplished by forcing them to help each other out, or to dissolve into internecine warfare, Muslim against Muslim.
Meanwhile, as that spectacle of internecine warfare and endless cruelty is on display, even those in Western Europe who have lost all sense of themselves, and who have permitted themselves to allow their own worst mental pathologies -- anti-Americanism and antisemitism -- to be exploited cleverly by an army of mujahedin and their ideological collaborators (or simply venal Western hirelings of Muslim states and interests), to undo and reverse those intellectual and moral errors of their own.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman says that given the choice between a nuclear-armed Iran or a U.S. attack against Irans nuclear facilities, right now he would opt for a nuclear Iran. "As someone who believed and still believes in the importance of getting Iraq right, the level of incompetence that the Bush team has displayed in Iraq, and its refusal to acknowledge any mistakes or remove those who made them, make it impossible to support this administration in any offensive military action against Iran," Friedman writes.
By Patrick Moore
