You, Sir, are an Idiot
By Josh Muravchik is a real prize, but at least he helps me hold out hope that, if I fail to get tenure, I could drop 40 or so IQ points in the ensuing binge and still get a job at the American Enterprise Institute. Josh:
In short, Tehran can build influence on a mix of ethnicity and ideology, underwritten by the region’s largest economy. Nuclear weapons would bring regional hegemony within its reach by intimidating neighbors and rivals and stirring the admiration of many other Muslims.
[…]
The only way to forestall these frightening developments is by the use of force. Not by invading Iran as we did Iraq, but by an air campaign against Tehran’s nuclear facilities.
Right, and since Muravchik allows in this very column that an attack will give Tehran MORE influence, GREATER capacity to build on ethnicity and ideology, and win the admiration of many other Muslims WITHOUT the need for a nuclear program, it’s quite likely to exacerbate the very problems that Muravchik poses. To make things worse, Muravchik cuts and pastes from half a dozen or so Weekly Standard articles in an effort to compare modern Iran with Germany in 1933 or the Soviet Union in 1917. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, Josh, but isn’t it true that only a genuine moron would believe that the rise of either Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia could have been forestalled by a few airstrikes. Indeed, as Yglesias points out, the Western Allies (and Japan) DID intervene in Russia in a failed effort to strangle the revolution in its crib. There’s nothing worse than a neocon without the courage of his own convictions.
The LA Times typically refrains, Jonah Goldberg aside, from publishing the incoherent scrawlings of stoned 8th graders. Hopefully there will come a time when nonsense like this receives the same treatment. It barely rises to the level of the New Federalist.