From the City Journal
Edition of Spring 2006
Facing down Iran
By Mark Steyn
Most Westerners read the map of the world like a Broadway marquee: north is top of the bill—America, Britain, Europe, Russia—and the rest dribbles away into a mass of supporting players punctuated by occasional Star Guests: India, China, Australia. Everyone else gets rounded up into groups: “Africa,” “Asia,” “Latin America.”
But if you’re one of the down-page crowd, the center of the world is wherever you happen to be. Take Iran: it doesn’t fit into any of the groups. Indeed, it’s a buffer zone between most of the important ones: to the west, it borders the Arab world; to the northwest, it borders NATO (and, if Turkey ever passes its endless audition, the European Union); to the north, the former Soviet Union and the Russian Federation’s turbulent Caucasus; to the northeast, the Stans—the newly independent states of central Asia; to the east, the old British India, now bifurcated into a Muslim-Hindu nuclear standoff. And its southern shore sits on the central artery that feeds the global economy.
If you divide the world into geographical regions, then, Iran’s neither here nor there. But if you divide it ideologically, the mullahs are ideally positioned at the center of the various provinces of Islam—the Arabs, the Turks, the Stans, and the south Asians. Who better to unite the Muslim world under one inspiring, courageous leadership? If there’s going to be an Islamic superpower, Tehran would seem to be the obvious candidate.
My apologies for posting this Coulteresque nonsense. It was posted by a Bushbot posting in a discussion on The Nation
's website. My reply from there:
The Mark Steyn piece is a piece of garbage Who better to unite the Muslim world under one inspiring, courageous leadership? If there's going to be an Islamic superpower, Tehran would seem to be the obvious candidate.My, my. All Muslims are Islamic fundamentalists and all Islamic fundamentalists are terrorists. Mark Steyn and Osama bin Laden may believe that nonsense, but most of us get out more and know better.
Mr. Steyn's statement is informed by rank Islamophobia. It assumes that Muslims can be united. I would like to impress on Mr. Steyn, and anybody who thinks we're at war with Islam rather than some terrorists who happen to be Muslim, that: like Christianity, Islam is one of the great faiths of history and open to many different interpretations of its meaning; it has a billion adherents, which by itself precludes it from being monolithic; and it somehow should strike reasonable people as absurd the Prophet Mohammed walked the Earth 1400 years ago just to undermine the security of the United States of America.
While this is reason not to take Mr. Steyn entirely seriously, it is no reason not be concerned about Iran. Amahdinejad is a hothead who openly talks of wiping Israel off the map; I, for one, don't care to find out how serious he about that. So let's just bypass Mr. Steyn's Islamophobic rhetoric and get down to his solution:
Once again, we face a choice between bad and worse options. There can be no "surgical" strike in any meaningful sense: Iran's clients on the ground will retaliate in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and Europe. Nor should we put much stock in the country's allegedly "pro-American" youth. This shouldn't be a touchy-feely nation-building exercise: rehabilitation may be a bonus, but the primary objective should be punishment--and incarceration. It's up to the Iranian people how nutty a government they want to live with, but extraterritorial nuttiness has to be shown not to pay. That means swift, massive, devastating force that decapitates the regime--but no occupation.That sounds like nuclear annihilation that he is proposing. At least, nuclear annihilation is the only way I can think of to devastate a nation that requires no occupation afterward.
Annihilating Iran in order not to have to occupy it must sound attractive to Bush, the neoconservatives, or anybody else who thinks they're playing a video game or still has the mentality of frat boys playing Risk. The occupation of Iraq has been terribly bothersome to the neoconservatives and continues to take military resources that could be used to occupy Iran. Moreover, Iran is two and a half times as large and has about that many more people than Iraq. In addition, while the Islamic Republic is hardly a democracy, it resembles one much more than did Saddam's Iraq; consequently, there is even less reason to suppose foreign troops will be welcomed as liberators.
Of course, after Iran is annihilated, her nearly 70 million people dead and her soil radioactive (perhaps Mr. Steyn would also propose plowing salt into the earth to keep future crops from growing), there will still be the problem of Iran's "clients" elsewhere. It's not like we've taken out any of them by striking Iran. And, of course, they will strike back. Just as star wars technology would be totally ineffective against hijackers with box cutters, so a nuclear strike against Iran would be ineffective against terrorism. It would do about as much good as invading a state that had no ties to international terrorism, but the neoconservatives have already done that and still, in spite of massive evidence to the contrary, claim it to be a great success.
No matter how much people like Steyn love to hate Muslims, and even no matter how much a danger a nuclear Iran will in fact be, the fact remains that a nuclear Iran is years away, leaving us time to deal with this problem and find a way that does not present us with the choice of annihilating one nation in order to prevent it from annihilating another.
It would be best to leave the solution to the threat of a nuclear Iran to a future administration. Mr. Steyn may be contemptuous of those with a "Clinto-Powellite bent", but they are certainly wiser and more rational men than the US version of Ahmadinejad and the mullahs who misrule America now.
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