K Marx The Spot

Thanks for Not All That Much

Dear Newsweek:

I was pleased that you asked Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu about the Iranian nuclear threat in your interview with him. But did you ask him about Israel's own nuclear arsenal? Surely one has a better appreciation of Iranian motives if one considers what Iranians consider to be Iran's external threats.

Labels: Iran, Israel, nuclear proliferation, Stupid reporting tricks, the nuclear arsenal that dares not have its name be spoken

Clockwork

How do you know when your local newspaper columnist is a third-rate hack? One way to tell is how quickly the right-wing memes of the moment make it into print. Case in point, Jeff Jacoby of the nominally liberal Boston Globe, with this gem from today. Last week, Bush tried to argue that the Democrats were appeasers, and like clockwork, the little bird emerges from the hole in the clock.

Speaking in Jerusalem on Thursday, President Bush criticized the appeasement-flavored mindset of those who imagine that the world's worst tyrants can be placated with face-to-face chats. "Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals," said Bush, "as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along."

Though Bush didn't mention anyone by name, Democrats decided that his target was Barack Obama. The Obama campaign blasted the president for launching an "unprecedented political attack on foreign soil"—and insisted that if Obama is elected, "we're not going to sit down and engage Iran, unless or until they give up their nuclear weapons program."

Really? Obama's own website describes him as "the only major candidate who supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions." When Obama was asked during a televised debate last year whether he would agree "to meet separately, without precondition . . . with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea," he promptly answered: "I would."

If Obama has had a change of heart, he should say so. Complaining of an "unprecedented political attack" when he hasn't even been named, let alone misrepresented, is peevish and pathetic, not presidential.

The idea that negotiations, even with people we really do not like, are somehow some sort of appeasement is both stupid and dishonest. When Neville Chamberlain agreed in September 1938 to allow Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia, critics decried the appeasement of German imperial ambitions. And there was much to worry about: Germany was an industrial and military superpower, run by men with ambitions to run the world. And there was no reason to think that Germany was going to start abiding by international niceties.

Iran, on the other hand, is a superpower in no sense of the word. Its military capabilities are severely limited—it is no threat to any of its immediate neighbors. The idea that Iran is going to try to annex any territory, let alone claim it needs lebensraum is absurd—it is Israel that has, bizarrely, decided that German claims on the Sudetenland and some sort of model for statecraft.

And Iran's nuclear weapons program is years behind those of countries that the United States has managed to abide. Why Iran's nascent program is somehow anathema while Israel's is not is a worthy queation. Why Iran's program makes it a potential enemy while Pakistan's program does not keep it from being an ally of the United States makes the United States look like global schmucks. (The fact that Pakistan's nuclear designers were running a global nuclear technology swap meet makes the worry about Iran even more ludicrous.)

Hacks like Jacoby would have us believe that any negotiations with countries like Iran makes us appeasers. History has shown that countries with many reasons to distrist one another have had ample reason to negotiate about those reasons. The SALT talks between the United States and Soviet Union were important steps in limiting how hot the Cold War got. The Camp David accords in 1978 came about because Israel and Egypt—longstanding enemies which had fought two wars in the past dozen years—knew that negotiating was neither appeasement nor suicide. And I will bet that even Jeff Jacoby took some flak from his friends when he negotiated his contract with the supposedly liberal Globe.

Labels: appeasement, Iran, Jeff Jacoby, stupid pundit tricks

Getting Nuclear on the Subject

Max is completely right that saying bold things about Iran's nuclear ambitions is way, way too popular among those in Washington who are supposedly liberal.

I never agreed with the argument of Kenneth Waltz that more nuclear weapons states are better than fewer, but it is an intriguing argument that relies on the actual uselessness of current nuclear arsenals. Still, having more nuclear weapons states means more chances to test the uneasy framework of nuclear deterrence. I think that it would be great if Iran followed in the steps of South Africa (which developed nuclear weapons then gave them up) and Sweden (which worked in the 1960s on nuclear weapons and halted its program before building any).

The abject truth is that the United States and its allies have almost no moral standing to be lecturing states like Iran about nuclear weaponry.

First, the United States is still the only country in the entire world to have used a nuclear weapon on another country. Twice.

Second, the United States, despite the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has made only feeble steps toward the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Third, despite the frequent and fervent discussion by George Bush of nuclear weapons as evil and of the possession of nuclear weapons by Iraq or Iran as dire, other nuclear weapons have meant less to us. The United States has over 10,000 nuclear weapons in its stockpile, yet has no enemy with nuclear weapons to deter. The Bush administration has strengthened military links with India, a country that first exploded a nuclear device in 1974 and then detonated a series of nuclear weapons in 1998, just before Pakistan did the same. Throughout the 1980s, the United States ignored Pakistan's desire to build nuclear weapons, because Pakistan was a useful ally against the Soviet Union and its adventures in Afghanistan. And the United States cozied up to Pakistan in the last several years, even though Pakistan was instrumental in jump-starting nuclear programs in both North Korea and Libya. And for all of the talk about not wanting nuclear weapons in the Middle East, the Bush administration, like its recent predecessors, has refused even to acknowledge that the Middle East already features dozens of nuclear weapons, in the hands of Israel.

Fourth, the United States has placed itself in the bizarre position of invading a country that claimed nuclear capability, but certainly lacked it (Iraq) but not invading a country that claimed nuclear capability, but probably had it (North Korea). The leaders of Iran are not irrational. What does recent American behavior suggest is the better deterrent to invasion: merely a claim of nuclear weapons, or having the weapons themselves?

Labels: Iran, nuclear weapons, US foreign policy