It’s true that we live in an age of alarmists. Listen to the Republicans and the country is being destroyed by the Democrats. Listen to the Democrats and the country is being corrupted by selfish people who care only for themselves, namely, the Republicans. Listen to Greece and other failing states in Europe and the rest of the world is merely out to make them suffer. Listen to Germany and the rest of Europe is merely fleecing it to death.
As President Kennedy once wrly remarked some six months into his term, “You know, things really are as bad as we said they were during the campaign.” Fifty years later, it is not being alarmist to be alarmed about Iran. This is a country that imprisoned more of its journalists last year than any other country. This is a country that hates transparency. This is a country that, with respect to its nuclear ambitions, has perfected the art of stalling via negotiations.
More to the point — frighteningly closer to the point — Iran is a country that is not deterred by any level of slaughter and destruction even among its own people, as L. Gordon Crovitz recently put it. More succinctly, Iran is not a rational actor.
This is a country whose putative opponent, the USA, is actually letting it off the hook of sanctions. Twenty of Iran’s major trading partners are exempt from them. One reason to consider the military option against Iran’s nuclear facilities is indirect: Sanctions will never work because those who push sanctions do not do so consistently and comprehensively. Sanctions basically say to business: You suffer. Sanctions say: It’s a greater good to stop Iran than to keep your profits up. That’s a tough sell. It’s a sell ripe for lobbying against the consistent and comprehensive implementation of sanctions — that is, if the sanctions were even comprehensive to begin with. In Iran’s case, they were not.
People who do not take religion seriously do not understand people who do take religion seriously. Iran takes religion seriously. Its leadership is willing to die, and to kill its people, in order to realize its messianic vision. Alarmist? They pooh-poohed Hitler, too, in the 1930s.
Copyright © 2012 by the Intermountain Jewish News
