Today on Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough said, “Iran [is] a country that has promised to get a nuclear weapon, and then has promised to use that nuclear weapon to annihilate Israel.” Shortly after that he said that Iran has said it wants to “wipe Israel off the face of the earth.” Needless to say, this is not the first time I have heard this sort of thing. It all goes back to a speech given by Ahmadinejad in 2005, in which he said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.”
Of course, this is a translation of what he said, which lends itself to disputes about interpretation right there. But even if we accept the translation, it seems to me that there is a difference between saying that Israel should be wiped off the map and saying, as Scarborough and many others have modified it over the years, that Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth. To my mind, wiping Israel off the face of the earth would entail a genocidal slaughter. Wiping Israel off the map, on the other hand, sounds to me like an assertion that the State of Israel is illegitimate and should not exist. In other words, if things were as they should be (in Ahmadinejad’s view), a map of the world would show not the State of Israel, but the State of Palestine, a place where the Jews could continue to live if they wanted to, but where they would hold no special political privileges, especially since they would soon be swamped by Muslims.
Furthermore, I have seen no speech in which Iran has said that it wants to get a nuclear weapon so that it can use it on Israel. If anyone reading this has seen such a speech, please be so kind as to provide a link directing me to that remark. Of course, referencing Michelle Bachmann as an authoritative source is not exactly what I have in mind. In any event, I haven’t even seen a statement from Iran saying they want to build a nuclear weapon, let alone use it on Israel. From what I have seen, they deny wanting to get a nuke. They may be lying, of course, but the point is that they have not “promised,” to use Joe Scarborough’s word, to get such a weapon.
As a matter of fact, it is my assumption that Iran would like to have a nuclear arsenal. I mean, I’m sure glad I live in a country that has nuclear weapons. A lot of our presidents have blathered about the complete elimination of nuclear weapons, notably Reagan and Obama, but we don’t believe them. And even if they did mean what they say, it just ain’t happening. First, we would never be able to trust other countries, such as Russia, to not actually have a few nukes squirreled away for contingencies. And second, who wants to give up the advantages that come with having a nuclear arsenal?
Our use of two atom bombs at the end of World War II aside, no country possessing a nuclear weapon has ever used it. But neither has such a country ever had an army cross its border after acquiring that weapon. Using a nuclear weapon offensively may be madness, owing to the likelihood of retaliation. But using an army to cross the border of a country that has such weapons would be equally mad. And that is just the way I like it. Who wants to go back to the good old days of conventional warfare, where you had to worry about invading armies pillaging, raping, and slaughtering? In the nuclear age, those countries lucky enough to have nuclear weapons can fight all their wars in someone else’s country, while the citizens back home can rest easy knowing that the fighting will never affect them.
That was one of the reasons for the pell-mell rush to go to war with Iraq, for it was feared that once that country got itself a few nukes, our options would be limited. With such a weapon, the shock and awe would have been the other way around, when Saddam Hussein incinerated an entire army on its way to Baghdad. True, we would then have retaliated with a nuke of our own. And this would have been a little embarrassing, since that would have meant the destruction of all those nice Iraqi citizens who were going to strew flowers in our path, but we would have gotten over it. More to the point, however, think of what difference this would have meant to Saddam Hussein. Instead of hiding in a hole, and then being ignominiously dragged out and hanged, he would have gone out in a blaze of nuclear glory, providing material for historians to marvel at and poets to praise for centuries to come.
Given all the bad blood between Iran and the United States going back sixty years, from the CIA orchestrated coup in 1953 to George W. Bush’s axis of evil speech in 2002, Iran has every reason to fear us. I mean, I don’t even trust us not to invade Iran. How do you think they feel? They don’t want a nuclear weapon to destroy Israel. They want one to keep from being destroyed by America.
Now, I know what you are thinking, that I want every country to have nuclear weapons so that there will never be another war again. Not at all. Much better would be for us to have the only nuclear weapons. Much better for us, that is, not so good for everybody else. But since there are already a bunch of other countries with nuclear weapons, we unfortunately have to share. But it would be best to keep things to a minimum. The more we can keep other countries from getting nuclear weapons, the better, because then we can still push them around. But let’s not get hysterical about it every time we get a new member in the nuclear club. Countries like Iran just want to be like us, safe from invading armies. Like us.