While the neocons days appear to be numbered, it hasn’t stopped them from forging ahead with their plans to wreak global chaos; nor have the realities on the ground in Iraq blunted the fanaticism.
These people are prepared to pay any price for the chance to witness the day when bombs are raining down on Tehran.
First we had Charles Krauthammer, who admits that the costs would be terrible, economically, militarily and diplomatically, but is convinced the price is justified to prevent Iran becoming a regional power.
He asks the question:
Against millenarian fanaticism glorying in a cult of death, deterrence is a mere wish. Is the West prepared to wager its cities with their millions of inhabitants on that feeble gamble?
While ironically overlooking the fact that and economically, militarily and diplomatically defeated US would be powerless to prevent another state from becoming such a threat.
More recently, the deranged Norman Podhoretz chimed in with his own take on this brand of nihilism.
Well, if we were to bomb the Iranians as I hope and pray we will, we’ll unleash a wave of anti-Americanism all over the world that will make the anti-Americanism we’ve experienced so far look like a lovefest. On the other hand — that’s a worst case scenario, and worst case scenarios don’t always materialize. It’s entirely possible that many countries, particularly in the Middle East — the Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, who are very worried about Iranian influence and power — would at least secretly applaud us.
And last but not least, a recent Heritage Foundation study of the economic effects of bombing Iran concluded that those effects would be bad (oil prices up, GDP down, employment down, recession in the offing, etc.). However, since Heritage is institutionally committed to insane hawkery, they re-ran their model with a few changes and discovered that the results weren’t so bad after all. In fact, bombing Iran might even be good for the economy!
Out of all the possible things they could spend their time doing, these wingnuts invested a substantial effort on torturing the data to come up with some plausible way of claiming that bombing Iran would be just peachy as far as the U.S. economy is concerned. Wow. That’s dedication to the cause.
The serious side to this, of course, is that Heritage now has this study sitting on their shelf just waiting for the next time Iran hawkery is again in the news. The next time someone argues that it would be economically devastating to attack Iran, they’ll be able to very soberly claim that a sophisticated economic model says we have nothing to worry about. And sane people almost certainly won’t have a comparable piece of claptrap to fight back with.