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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (194978)	8/4/2006 3:34:55 PM
From: wonk	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

“….Iran intends to use those nukes against Israel - they say so. Once Iran has nukes, Hizbullah will have nukes too, if Iran wishes it….” Lets examine the worst-case scenario. Iran gets nukes. Iran either directly or through proxies nukes Israel. Israel responds and destroys every major and minor population center and cultural icon in Iran. Who loses? I would submit to you that the Iranians lose worse. 1. The Holy Land, sacred to Muslims as well as Christians and Jews is a wasteland; 2. A whole lot of Arabs and Palestinians are dead in addition to Jews (kinda shows the arguments about supporting their Muslim brothers to be specious…); 3. A whole lot of Persians are dead and Iran – Persia – a culture with 6,000 years of history will disappear from the face of the earth. Like Carthage; 4. While Israel is destroyed and millions of Jews have been killed, Judaism survives because though its spiritual center is Jerusalem, its culture and its people are spread throughout the world. Again, the Jewish people could survive the loss of Israel far easier than the Persian could survive the loss of Iran. (Or for that matter Islam losing Mecca). Delving deeper into the scenario one recognizes – as with the arguments during the cold war on strategic arms limitations - that launchers, not warheads, are key. Given that, it almost makes sense to build the Israelis and Iranians silos around Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Tehran for a flock of Pershings. As we found out with the Soviets, Mutually Assured Destruction works. Mass Death has a way of sobering people up. One cannot put the nuclear genie back in the bottle. The knowledge is out there. The big risk is that the Iranians, or the NKs give the bomb to a proxy. The way to prevent that is inspection and sampling of fuel. Every processing plant has a distinctive signature, a fingerprint shall we say. Assume a terrorist sets off a bomb. If it turns out the fuel comes from the Iranian’s processing plant, they get the retaliation – massively so. What you see in Iran is young men being persuaded to die to perpetuate old men’s power, or people who aspire to the old men’s power. (That certainly hasn’t changed for thousands of years). Convince the leaders that they too will die and rationality breaks out. What the world has to watch out for is the truly crazy. Hitler was crazy. Stalin and Mao – while paranoid – were not crazy. They balanced cruelty to a nicety in the scales of their malice and protection of their power. Ahmadinejad may be crazy, but he doesn’t have the power. You don’t actually believe that the mullahs, or the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah or even Al Qaeda believe that martyrdom cr*p? eom eod ww