The suggestion is offensive to start with, but it is all the more so coming from someone who proclaims their faith as a "Christian" at every possible turn. Of course, Mr. Coren is cut from the typical thin, brittle cloth that makes up most of the Neo/Theo Con-iverse these days, so we shouldn't be surprised that his response to Iranian posturing is so thuggish.
He attempts to "moderate" his position as follows:
Not, of course, the unleashing of full-scale thermo-nuclear war on the Persian people, but a limited and tactical use of nuclear weapons to destroy Iran's military facilities and its potential nuclear arsenal.
What Mr. Coren fails to appreciate is that there is no such thing as a "tactical use" of nuclear weapons - especially not in the long-distance approach to warfare that the US uses. As both Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated, nukes are "area of effect" weapons that don't differentiate between civilian and military victims.
Further, Coren has missed a fundamental point about the Iranian government - especially in its current incarnation - namely that they are posturing for a reason. They perceive that with the United States tied up in wars on two fronts already (Iraq and Afghanistan), and North Korea rattling its sabre regularly, they stand to gain status in the region by being seen as the "defenders of Islam" by many people. (Why the heck else do you think they might be supporting Hezbollah?)
Its motives are beyond question, its capability equally so. It is spending billions of dollars on a whole range of anti-ship, anti-aircraft and anti-personnel missiles, rockets and ballistic weapons:
Using that logic, the world can - and perhaps should - have moved a long time ago to disarm the United States. The only nation that has ever used nuclear weapons in war, and keepers of the largest stockpile of so-called "WMD"s in the world - everything from nuclear weapons to biological and chemical agents.
I'm not saying I like what I hear coming out of Iran, but I am not fool enough to take it as literally as both Mr. Coren and other Neo/Theo-Con politicians seems to be doing.
I do know enough to recognize that bombing any country "back into the stone age" with conventional or nuclear weapons will not serve the collective interests of "western powers".
1 comment:
The thing is that your average theo-con thinks in terms of black and white, if they think at all of course. In their black and white world it's ok to bomb people they don't like into the stone age since they were "askin' for it". It's easier for them if the people they're bombing aren't Real True Christians (TM Pat. Pend) of course, but anyone they see as a threat to their rather narrow world view is a target.
For the rest of us who see shades of grey, the theo-cons just look wakky.
JN
www.evilscientist.ca
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