Bombing Iran is Good for the Iranian Soul. Apparently.

Tuesday, 31st March 2009

Elliot Abrams, veteran warmonger and neoconservative, reminds us that while there are always those who find themselves fighting the last war there are also those who forget that the last war even happened. Concerned about bombing Iran? You shouldn't be. Why? Well, the Iranians will, probably, like it. Or, as he puts it:

We are not talking about the Americans killing civilians, bombing cities, destroying mosques, hospitals, schools. No, no, no – weʹre talking about nuclear facilities which most Iranians know very little about, have not seen, will not see, some quite well hidden.
So they wake up in the morning and find out that the United States if attacking those facilities and, presumably with some good messaging about why weʹre doing it and why we are not against the people of Iran.
Itʹs not clear to me that the reaction [would be] letʹs go to war with the Americans, but rather, perhaps, how did we get into this mess? Why did those guys, the very unpopular ayatollahs in a country 70 percent of whose population is under the age of 30, why did those old guys get us into this mess.

Alas, as Matt Yglesias says, pretty much the entire history of air power contradicts this so-called analysis (since one presumes neither America nor Israel is actually going to lob a first strike nuke onto Tehran). The problem with Abrams and co is not simply that they treat every problem as though it were the same, but that they seem to have no imagination. That is, Abrams clearly cannot imagine how an Iranian might be both opposed to the regime and proud that Iran had a nuclear capability. Yet it is not difficult to imagine how such feelings might exist. Equally, Abrams' lack of empathy makes it impossible for him to imagine how an Iranian might hear the "good messaging" about "why we ae not against the people of Iran" and see these messengers dropping bombs on Iranian territory and conclude that perhaps the Americans do indeed have something against the Iranian people. This is elementary.

But no, let's attack anyway. And, of course, if the attack is unsuccessful then we'll have to bomb again. And again. Pretty soon you'll have a nice little war there and what could possibly go wrong with that?

Filed under: Iran (144 more articles) , Lunacy (138 more articles)

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Dimitrijevic

March 31st, 2009 2:45pm Report this comment

The Americans have an illustrious history of deluding themselves into believing that every person on the planet dreams of being an American or of living an American lifestyle, which is of course absurd. They pay little respect to foreign civilisations that have existed for hundreds if not thousands of years longer than the United States has existed. This explains why the Americans are so cavalier in their military aggressiveness and in their foreign political meddling then they are so consistently surprised by the hostile reception they receive around the world. They refuse to understand that a Persian, or an Iraqi or a Venezuelan or a German etc is every bit as patriotic to his mother country as an American may be to his. An attack on any nation reflexively solidifies the population against the attacker regardless of whatever domestic problems the citizens may grumble about when they're left to themselves. The Americans are keen to believe that the peoples of the world secretly desire to be "liberated" by the Americans, or they're keen to see their own political leadership "punished" by the Americans which is a ludicrous, self-serving fantasy. Most people of the world primarily want to be left alone and they'll gladly decline American monetary assistance in exchange for assurances that the Americans will stay out of their affairs.

Richard, Dublin.

March 31st, 2009 5:35pm Report this comment

I'll say one thing about Mark Steyn...... At least he can come up with a good title for a piece.......

Shygetz

March 31st, 2009 8:48pm Report this comment

Abrams has an excellent point. I mean, when Japan bombed the Pearl Harbor military facilities, the American people collectively thought "Why did these old guys get us into this mess?" They CERTAINLY didn't immediately clamor for war against Japan and her allies.

Oh, wait...

Michael Chaffee

March 31st, 2009 9:02pm Report this comment

Abrams demonstrates a peculiarly American failure of introspection. The most meaningful parallel to an American attack on Iranian facilities would have to be the 9/11/2001 attacks. It wasn't really socially acceptable in America for a long time after that to even speak frankly about why Al Qaeda would have attacked, to say nothing of asking whether perhaps they SHOULD have.

Why does Elliot Abrams think that the Iranian public would react to an American attack in the exact opposite fashion to how the Americans reacted to 9/11?

campbell

April 1st, 2009 2:00pm Report this comment

And were we not told that the Iraqis would line the roads of Baghdad cheering and throwing flowers? Which is not, as I recall, exactly what took place.
The attitude Abrams evidences is the kind of thing that leads one to seriously regard other nations,cultures, whatever as 'lesser breeds under the law'. We resist heroically, they can be cowed into submission. We are wedded to our independence, they are too supine to rise up and so are grateful for our help. It is crap history and it is crap psychology

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