Fareed Zakaria needs to be
read more frequently:
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....
And here,
Kevin Drum has close to the right caveat:
It is not quite right to say that "Washington" has a habit of doing this. Zakaria should instead say that "hysterical Republican hawks" have a habit of doing this.
Accuracy is important in these matters. For the record, then: "Team B" was a creation of George H.W. Bush and included such members as Richard Pipes, Paul Wolfowitz, and Edward Teller. The Cox Commission was the brainchild of congressman Christopher Cox (R–Calif.). And Saddam's nuclear bombs were the fantasy product of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, et. al.
The hysterical impulse is not solely a Republican trait - Milosevic was compared to the Nazis more than once by spokespeople for Clinton - but it's close enough to be an axiom.
2 comments:
Good post.
The right-wingers are always trying to give us a history lesson to explain this or that wrong-headed policy: Noriega is Hitler! Saddam is Hitler! Ahmadinejad is Hitler! Chavez is Hitler! Nasrallah is Hitler!
We need to remember instead their history of defending disastrous policies with bad historical analogies.
What you fail to realize is that rogue states are a real threat - so was Noriega, so is Chavez. They are acting in their own best interests - which are the opposite of ours. We need to neutralize them before they do get powerful enough to cause some real damage. A coallition of anti-American nations is not something we want... especiall the only strong countries we can count on our side are Israel and... Israel (I'm gonna try to refrain from mentioning the United States of Micronesia).
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