A Brazen Evil

Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com
July 21, 2008

Evil usually hides its face, because the sight of it repulses all but the
depraved. However, in the case of Benny Morris, writing in Friday’s New
York Times, we see something new: a proud evil, glorying in pure
malevolence. His piece is a cold, calculated attempt to simultaneously shock
and intimidate, one that succeeds at the former but fails miserably at the
latter.

Here’s the shocker, really a double jolt: “Israel,” he avers, “will almost surely
attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months.” Either that,
he writes, or else Israel will eventually have to launch “a preemptive nuclear
strike.” His message to the West: take out Iran, or we’ll nuke ’em!

The Israelis have been threatening to strike for the past six months, so
nothing new there, except for the tone of certainty. Morris is no fringe nut-job
flailing away on his obscure blog; he’s a prominent Israeli historian writing
on the most noted opinion page of them all, a veritable bulletin board
for governing elites worldwide. As such, he is almost certainly speaking with
some insight into Israeli government plans. It is, in any case, almost
inconceivable that he wrote his piece without the foreknowledge and consent
of Israeli government officials.

As to whether he – and they – are bluffing, well, I wouldn’t count on it.
With all this talk of Iran’s alleged attempt to build nuclear weapons – which
our own intelligence services say was abandoned years ago – Israel is
the one country in the region we know is armed to the gills with nukes.
Given their history, the increasing extremism of their leadership and polity,
and their fanatical devotion to the doctrine of preemption – indeed,
they invented it, while George W. Bush merely adopted it – the Israelis are
far more likely than any other member of the nuclear club to actually use
nukes, as Morris makes all too clear.

In what has to be the most widely circulated blackmail note ever written,
Morris announces, “It is in the interest of neither Iran nor the United States
(nor, for that matter, the rest of the world) that Iran be savaged by a
nuclear strike” – so take out the Iranians, or we will. To be fair, he also says it
won’t be a good thing if “both Israel and Iran suffer such a fate,” but
since Iran has no nuclear weapons and has given up all attempts to make
them, this is just window-dressing for a genocidal agenda.

Morris’s rationale for mass murder is oddly hollow and formulaic: Well, you
see, “Every intelligence agency in the world believes the Iranian program is
geared toward making weapons, not to the peaceful applications of nuclear
power.” To begin with, this has got to be a misprint. Surely what Morris
meant to say was that every Israeli intelligence agency thinks Iran is on the
verge of acquiring nukes. Why else are the Israelis slated to make a series
of trips to the U.S. to convince their American counterparts that they are
right, and the Americans’ National Intelligence Estimate on Iran is wrong?

Aside from that, there is a dispute as to where to draw the “red line,” the
point-of-no-return, the passage of which acts as a tripwire provoking military
intervention. The Israelis have a far tighter timeline, as you might imagine,
and their forecast – “one to four years” – is wildly improbable. It is based on
the development of the ability to weaponize nuclear processes in a purely
theoretical sense, quite aside from the problems posed by construction,
possible detection, and delivery.

Reading the Morris screed, one wonders how he came to write such an
unimaginative apologia for what would rank among the worst crimes
in human history: “everybody knows” the Iranians are trying to build nukes
(where have we heard that before?), the sanctions aren’t working, the
Russians and the Chinese won’t cooperate, oh, and “the American public has
little enthusiasm for wars in the Islamic lands.”

As anyone with the least amount of historical or common sense could easily
figure out, even if Iran did develop a nuclear weapons arsenal, it would
create a nuclear stalemate analogous to the Cold War standoff between the
U.S. and the Soviet Union. Morris claims this example doesn’t apply, due to
“the fundamentalist, self-sacrificial mindset of the mullahs who run Iran.”
Aside from the ruling by Iranian Shi’ite religious authority Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei – the real leader of Iran – that forbids the development,
stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons, what about his own genocidal
mindset, which glories in the prospect of ethnic cleansing? No Iranian
personage of any prominence has called for the nuclear extermination of
Israel in quite the same terms as Morris, not even Iranian President
Ahmadinejad, whose vague remark about Israel “disappearing from the
page of history” has been interpreted as a threat to use nukes.

Morris neither knows nor cares about Iran’s alleged nukes. Lurking behind
his mundane laundry list of complaints is, I fear, a darker motive: sheer
bloodlust. Morris simply wants to kill as many Muslims as possible, so why
doesn’t he just come out and say it? After all, it isn’t like he hasn’t said
it before:

We must forget our national interests and go to war for Israel’s sake, or
else the Israelis will unleash their illegal and unaccounted-for nukes, killing
tens of thousands, poisoning the atmosphere, and forever scarring human
history with the mark of their heinous crime. This is like one of those hostage
dramas in which a mad gunman grabs someone and uses them as a human
shield, braying his demands to horrified onlookers.

Americans must reject this attempt at moral blackmail with the contempt
it deserves – and perhaps begin to reexamine the “special relationship” that
enables Israel to even contemplate such crimes against humanity. As for
Morris, he should be shunned by every decent human being, although
perhaps that description doesn’t apply to the editors of the New York Times.