via The American Conservative » Netanyahu Calls the Shots.
We are seeing something awful unfolding before our very eyes – an essentially phony case for going to war being driven by a foreign country and its domestic lobby with the political class too terrified to say no and a complicit media beating the drum.
Philip
You’ve well argued the standard criticism. However, the practical reality is that the risk to Israel is simply too high that after an election that Obama may win, the next four year window is too tempting for Iran, and too threatening to israel. It’s a practical decision for them. There is nothing irrational about their actions.
That the intelligence agencies argue that no decision has been made is an argument that I have trouble comprehending as rational. That they have conducted a multi-decade program of enablement is evidence enough. That the elimination of israel is a stated objective, and the laurels that will christen Islam’s leading state is enough of an objective for any political leadership.
Iran has long desired to become the core state of post-ottoman islam, and has the population, military and economy to do it. A syrian, iraqi, irania, afghani, pakistani islamic block cum-civilization with two nuclear armed states given their internal fragility is strategically irrational for the USA to tolerate without total energy independence, and some evidence of a developing middle class that will engage in and have an interest in, the international system of specialization and trade.
Moral arguments are nonsense in the face of strategic threats.