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"Politics is the art of the possible" - Otto von Bismarck
Glenn Greenwald: An Interview with The Art of the Possible
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I’d probably be taking a more critical tone in responding to this Marty Peretz post talking up a Saudi Arabian columnist agitating for war with Iran, except that somewhere amid the prose I completely lost my foothold on whatever point he was trying to make. Still, this jumped out: (more…)
One last thing before I leave for the Holy Land: Anyone who hasn’t yet seen this needs to drop everything and watch.
Doing research for an article about US-Iranian relations coming (relatively) soon to a newsstand near you, I encountered some eye-grabbing verses from the Shahnameh (”book of great kings”), the national epic not only of Persia/Iran, but the whole expanse of the Airyanem Vaejah (modern Persian: Iran-vez, whence the name “Iran”), the “Aryan lands” divinely consecrated by Ahura Mazda and civilized by Cyrus the Great (Old Persian: Kurush Xsyathiya Vazraka) and his descendants. The epic poem was composed by Ferdowsi c. 1000 years after the birth of Jesus and somewhere between 1100 and 7000 years after the birth of Zoroaster (Avestan: Zarathushtra, modern Persian: Zartosht). It includes these lines: (more…)
Daniel Larison has a lot more to say about the Robert Kaplan “Current” piece in the Atlantic that I linked to the other day — the one in which Kaplan proclaims that we ought to “worship” Israel. Ostensibly, Kaplan’s subject is the prospect of an Israeli strike against Iran, and how that might affect the US presidential election. But Kaplan’s real subject is his own hyperbolic exaggerations of the Iranian threat. E.g., Kaplan writes, “A nuclear arsenal will allow Iran to become a Middle East hegemon like the Great Persia of antiquity, yet it will also encourage countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey to develop their own bombs.” To which Larison responds:
Those who engage in fearmongering about Iran usually save contradicting themselves for separate sentences, but not Robert Kaplan…Pretty clearly, if an Iranian nuclear arsenal inspired other regional states to acquire their own bombs, Iran would not become a Middle East hegemon of any kind, much less a hegemon like “the Great Persia of antiquity.”…If several of those states acquire nuclear weapons in response to an Iranian bomb, and two already have them, what are the odds of Iranian regional hegemony beyond what it currently enjoys? You can legitimately raise the concern that an Iranian bomb would trigger a regional arms race, but you can’t also say that Iran would also dominate the region as in the days of Cyrus and Xerxes at the same time.
Quite so. (By the way, apart from the problems Larison notes with comparing the Islamic Republic of Iran to the Achaemenian Empire, Achaemenian Persia was fairly philo-Semitic and Cyrus is a hero in Jewish tradition. So it’s not the best analogy for those agitating for air strikes.) (more…)