Pooh-Poohing Armageddon

Newsweek tries to help us avoid an inordinate fear of Iranian nukes:

A new round of Middle East hysteria has broken out in Washington. It goes like this: Iran is not really such a serious threat; but once again we are cooking intelligence, ignoring moderates, being needlessly provocative, acting unilaterally and preemptively, looking for a mere pretext to strike, and refusing to try diplomacy. Supposedly Mr. Bush, if just for political reasons alone, can’t wait to face the bad choice of removing the Iranians’ centrifuges and the worst choice of letting them be.

That we have been engaged with Iran on and off for 27 years is forgotten. We are also apparently to put aside for a moment Iran’s breakneck efforts to get the bomb and forget its serial threats to wipe out the Israeli democracy.

This fear of American cowboyism is now widespread in and out of government. Consult, for example, the latest Newsweek cover-story exposé by Michael Hirsh and Maziar Bahari (“Rumors of War”), in which we are lectured about George W. Bush’s blundering: “The secret history of the Bush administration’s dealings with Iran is one of arrogance, mistrust and failure.”

For Newsweek, there is a weird (or rather, warped) sort of moral equivalence, in which Bush has become the doppelganger of Ahmadinejad, as evidenced by the cover photo of the issue showing a composite face—Bush and Ahmadinejad each contributing half (Bush, of course, being the right side, while the right-wing fascistic Ahmadinejad is on the left). The suggestion is that without these two similar extremists, there would a sort of natural détente between our two not so dissimilar nations:
In a warped parallel to Bush, who found his voice after 9/11 rallying Americans to the struggle against a vast and unforgiving enemy, the Iranian president rose in stature throughout the Middle East as he railed against America.

Apparently after reading this Newsweek exclusive, one is supposed to snicker at the pedestrian Bush idea that Islamic terrorism is “vast,” “unforgiving,” or really an “enemy” at all.

Given that the Muslim bomb which detonated in New York, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvanion on 9/11/01 were decidedly non-nuclear yet killed 2,977 Americans, I'm inclined to think that Newsweek is as full of it as they always have been.