Some ominous mailings turned up in my mailbox this week. I publish an obscure legal newsletter that has nothing to do with international politics. But yesterday I received two semi-glossy flyers—essentially 8 1/2 x 11 postcards—from The Israel Project.
They resembled the strident, fearmongering election literature you might see against abortion or gun control.
They hysterically accuse Iran of plotting to launch a nuclear war, and charge that tens of thousands of Iranian suicide bombers are ready to attack American cities. "The clock is ticking," the headline claimed. "Get the facts," the flyer urged—meaning, get terrified by the counterfactual.
Interestingly, if you go to The Israel Project website (theisraelproject.org), you won’t find much wild-eyed rhetoric like this—the multiple press releases on Iran are much more circumspect, even though in my view they are dangerously misguided. So this is a disinformation campaign—and it must be pretty wide-ranging—clearly targeted to a more gullible segment of the public.
In The Fog of War, you may remember McNamara retailing how Castro and Kennedy during the missile crisis were both poised to make a move that would inevitably lead to massive loss of life in their own countries—if not their countries’ complete destruction. Yet they were capable of believing, at the same time, that they were rational and that they were acting in their respective nations’ best interests.
Israel and the Bush administration are now demonstrating that Castro and Kennedy had no monopoly on this brand of thinking. Perhaps what is going through their minds is the fantasy of Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle on the eve of the invasion of Iraq: "If we just wage a total war...our children will sing great songs about us."
I feel the only hope is for us to demand that Congress shake the men claiming to be our leaders out of this palpable stupor of denial.