Victor David Hanson warns Iran that two can play the Crazy Game...

Quote :

"Ever since September 11, the subtext of this war could be summed up as something like, “Suburban Jason, with his iPod, godlessness, and earring, loves to live too much to die, while Ali, raised as the 11th son of an impoverished but devout street-sweeper in Damascus, loves death too much to live.” The Iranians, like bin Laden, promulgate this mythical antithesis, which, like all caricatures, has elements of truth in it. But what the Iranians, like the al Qaedists, do not fully fathom, is that Jason, upon concluding that he would lose not only his iPod and earring, but his entire family and suburb as well, is capable of conjuring up things far more frightening than anything in the 8th-century brain of Mr. Ahmadinejad. Unfortunately, the barbarity of the nightmares at Antietam, Verdun, Dresden, and Hiroshima prove that well enough. So far the Iranian president has posed as someone 90-percent crazy and 10-percent sane, hoping we would fear his overt madness and delicately appeal to his small reservoirs of reason. But he should understand that if his Western enemies appear 90-percent children of the Enlightenment, they are still effused with vestigial traces of the emotional and unpredictable. And military history shows that the irrational 10 percent of the Western mind is a lot scarier than anything Islamic fanaticism has to offer. So, please, Mr. Ahmadinejad, cool the rhetoric fast — before you needlessly push once reasonable people against the wall, and thus talk your way into a sky full of very angry and righteous jets."

http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson040706.html

4/7/2006 11:22:42 AM

hah, damn

4/7/2006 11:34:44 AM

that was a lot of words to say, "we're still crazy enough to bomb your shit"

4/7/2006 11:36:20 AM

well said

4/7/2006 11:37:03 AM

The simple fact of the matter is that the United States doesn't want to get into a conflict with Iran, period. It is not in our vested interest to do so, and going nuclear is not a viable option in modern warfare because of devastating repercussions. If we do engage Iran, it will be UN sanctioned air war where we take out military targets and tell them to shut the fuck up. Invading Iran is political suicide.

4/7/2006 11:41:49 AM

I don't forsee another iraq situation for a LONG FUCKING TIME due to the political fallout

4/7/2006 11:43:25 AM

Quote :

"And military history shows that the irrational 10 percent of the Western mind is a lot scarier than anything Islamic fanaticism has to offer."

see, I don't think that's true. I think we're all crazy, the west just has nukes and armies.

4/7/2006 12:05:19 PM

Quote :

"If we do engage Iran, it will be UN sanctioned air war where we take out military targets and tell them to shut the fuck up. Invading Iran is political suicide."

I dunno. I think that's what most people thought back in the late 1990s when Iraq was under sanctions.

Quote :

"I think we're all crazy, the west just has nukes and armies."

I completely agree. Iranians can probably come up with fantasies of death and destruction just as scary as the West, but the West actually has the resources to bring those horrors into reality.

4/7/2006 4:13:45 PM