The Guardian.
In the Washington Post today, Richard Cohen expresses surprise
that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "starting to make some
sense" and "wax rationally". Cohen specifically cites this statement
from the Iranian president last week:
"Let's even imagine that we have an atomic weapon, a nuclear weapon. What would we do with it? What intelligent person would fight 5,000 American bombs with one bomb?"
Cohen's surprise notwithstanding,
numerous Iranian leaders, including Ahmadinejad, have long made the same
point. And it's a point so obvious it should not even need to be made.
No rational person takes seriously the claim that Iran,
even if it did obtain a nuclear weapon, would commit instant and
guaranteed national suicide by using it to attack a nation that has a
huge nuclear stockpile, which happens to include both the US and Israel.
One can locate nothing in the actions of Iran's regime that even
suggests irrationality on that level, let alone suicidal impulses.
That Iran will use its nuclear weapons
against the US and Israel is rather obviously the centerpiece of the
fear-mongering campaign against Tehran, to build popular support for
threats to launch an aggressive attack in order to prevent them from
acquiring that weapon. So what, then, is the real reason that so many
people in both the US and Israeli governments are so desperate to stop
Iranian proliferation?
Every now and then, they reveal the real reason: Iranian nuclear weapons would prevent the US from attacking Iran at will, and that
is what is intolerable. The latest person to unwittingly reveal the
real reason for viewing an Iranian nuclear capacity as unacceptable was
GOP Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the US's most reliable and bloodthirsty warmongers.
