Sept. 11, 2006 issue - It's 1938, says the liberal columnist Richard Cohen, evoking images of Hitler's armies massing in the face of an appeasing West. No, no, says Newt Gingrich, the Third World War has already begun. Neoconservatives, who can be counted on to escalate, argue that we're actually in the thick of the Fourth World War. The historian Bernard Lewis warned a few weeks ago that Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, could be planning to annihilate Israel (and perhaps even the United States) on Aug. 22 because it was a significant day for Muslims.
Can everyone please take a deep breath?
To review a bit of history: in 1938, Adolf Hitler launched what became a world war not merely because he was evil but because he was in complete control of the strongest country on the planet. At the time, Germany had the world's second largest industrial base and its mightiest army. (The American economy was bigger, but in 1938 its army was smaller than that of Finland.) This is not remotely comparable with the situation today.
Iran does not even rank among the top 20 economies in the world. The Pentagon's budget this year is more than double Iran's total gross domestic product ($181 billion, in official exchange-rate terms). America's annual defense outlay is more than 100 times Iran's. Tehran's nuclear ambitions are real and dangerous, but its program is not nearly as advanced as is often implied. Most serious estimates suggest that Iran would need between five and 10 years to achieve even a modest, North Korea-type, nuclear capacity.
Washington has a long habit of painting its enemies 10 feet tall—and crazy. During the cold war, many hawks argued that the Soviet Union could not be deterred because the Kremlin was evil and irrational. The great debate in the 1970s was between the CIA's wimpy estimate of Soviet military power and the neoconservatives' more nightmarish scenario. The reality turned out to be that even the CIA's lowest estimates of Soviet power were a gross exaggeration. During the 1990s, influential commentators and politicians—most prominently the Cox Commission—doubled the estimates of China's military spending, using largely bogus calculations. And then there was the case of Saddam Hussein's capabilities. Saddam, we were assured in 2003, had nuclear weapons—and because he was a madman, he would use them.
Meanwhile, Kofi Annan reports that the Iranians still want to talk, despite being publicly rebuffed by the Bush administration. The Iranian government refuses to halt its nuclear enrichment programs in advance of those discussions but the EU's foreign policy chief is willing to meet with Iran's senior nuclear negotiator, regardless.
Senior negotiators of the five permanent Security Council members plus Germany are expected to convene in Berlin on Thursday to discuss the results of the Solana-Larijani meeting.
[...]
The U.S. and its allies are increasing pressure for punishing a defiant Iran. But they agreed last week to give the Solana-Larijani talks a chance in an attempt to mollify Russia and China, which are reluctant to endorse harsh and swift U.N. punishment for Iran, a major trade partner.
So, while Bush is busy pounding his chest publicly to make it appear that he's totally opposed to negotiating with evil Iran, his government has been supporting secret talks behind the scenes. Can we now accuse him of appeasing those who support terrorists since he's been reminding anyone who would listen since the Israel/Lebanon war that Iran was behind Hezbollah's success?
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