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Jewish World Review
May 12, 2005
/ 3 Iyar, 5765
The Fuzzy Logic in the nonproliferation debate
By
James Lileks
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
North Korea is planning a nuke test. Iran has admitted to converting 37 tons of uranium into UF-4 gas, a key step toward making weapons. Or electricity. It's possible they want to load up their missiles with giant, nuclear-fueled batteries and distribute electricity to Israel, free of charge. But probably not. So who's to blame should the bad guys get the big bombs?
The United States, naturally. We maintain such declasse notions as "the bad guys," and hence set such a dreadful example. Ask those arbiters of universal moral precepts, Dutch protesters. From Reuters:
"Dutch police arrested six activists on Sunday who said they wanted to enter President Bush's Netherlands hotel and look for the suitcase which allows him to activate nuclear weapons. ... The activists, carrying binoculars and wearing signs that identified them as `citizen's inspectors,' mimicking the International Atomic Energy Agency's weapons inspectors, were caught by Dutch soldiers as they approached Bush's hotel."
In the good old days, one could count on the progressive elements to side with a pluralistic, tolerant, secular democracy against a theocratic regime made up of glowering, Jew-hating misogynists. But that was before the permanent adolescents of the '60s hijacked the left with their fragrant blend of anti-Americanism and loathing of the very culture that guarantees their freedoms. To them, Iran is a problem only inasmuch as it provides the Zionist Oil-Cabal Neocons with an "enemy." And if the mullahs respond to a successful revolution by nuking Israel on the way out? Well, how many Jews does the world really need, anyway? Europe's been asking that question for centuries. An answer might be nice.
When suicide bombers start going after something the European left truly cares about, the "activists" might wake up, but it's hard to tell what they think is worthy of defending.
The churches are empty vestiges of an abandoned past; the art museums are bourgeois temples for the dead hand of the artistic patriarchy. The European left prizes naught but thin, windy bromides about justice and tolerance, ideas the enemies of the West (how quaint a phrase!) use to enable their own agenda. One day the hash houses will be closed down because they offend religious sensibilities; then the naughty districts will be shuttered.
As the saying goes: They came for the pot-smoking hookers, and I said nothing, because I was not a pot-smoking hooker. (Recently.) In this way, in the name of multiculturalism, Europe will lose the culture that made such an idea possible.
Or not. That's a lot to draw from six protesters, granted. But there's a related mind-set that's equally peculiar, and it's held by members of our own Congress. Writing in the new Huffington Post group blog, Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said:
"Today, I will join Hans Blix at the United Nations for a discussion on the need to balance disarmament and nonproliferation. The real `nuclear option' that threatens our national security is not the one being debated in the Senate — this nuclear option will end in a devastating plume of smoke over our cities. ... 134 congressmen (Democrats and Republicans) share my concern about the direction of our nuclear policy. Today these members signed letters ... calling for the immediate cancellation of the Bush administration's proposed nuclear bunker warhead. We are concerned at the adverse impact of the nuclear bunker buster on America's credibility to lead on nuclear nonproliferation with North Korea and around the world."
In other words: To dissuade countries from developing weapons in places we can reach only with bunker-busting nukes, we should give up bunker-busting nukes. Noted. And if the United States had dismantled the gas chambers in the federal penitentiaries, Hitler wouldn't have gassed the Jews. Why, he would been drenched with shame-sweat just thinking about it.
Apparently it is better for North Korea and Iran to sell nukes to America's enemies than for us to use nukes to destroy these weapons before they're built. We nuke their bomb factories, they nuke our cities — in the end they're both the same, no?
No. They're not. And even if they were, what would you rather lose — credibility or New York?
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor James Lileks is a columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Comment by clicking here.
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© 2005, James Lileks
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