Archimedes, Bush and Rice, and Ahmadinejad
We know where Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stands on the coming war. We really don’t know where President Bush and Condoleeza Rice stand. That appears to be shrouded in mystery. But while we freely interpret Ahmadinejad’s peaceful statments as clever nonsense, we don’t seem to cut Bush and Rice the same slack.
Archimedes of Syracuse, who lived in the third century BC, was not only the world’s first mathematical physicist, but also the designer of some pretty nifty war machines. We had occasion to think of Archimedes and war today, in particular this saying of his: “Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.” As you know, the idea was that with a long enough lever, and an appropriate fulcrum, Archimedes could have stood somewhere in outer space, and from that distant perspective, could move the earth. Today we know where Mahmoud Afmadinejad stands — he intends to move the earth to Shiite dominance, using his nuclear weapons to give him the leverage to do so.
We thought of that saying of Archimedes when we read Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s column, A Path To Lasting Peace, this morning in the Washington Post. The piece is full of spin, pious palaver, and the kind of wishful thinking that should make a sixth grade civics student blush — leading one to the question, “where does the administration really stand”:
Syria no longer occupies Lebanon, and the international community is helping the Lebanese government create the conditions of lasting peace — full independence, complete sovereignty, effective democracy and a weakened Hezbollah with fewer opportunities to rearm and regroup. Once implemented, this will be a strategic setback for the Syrian and Iranian regimes.
Some have characterized the Lebanon ceasefire that Rice praised as an agreement worse than Munich. Perhaps it is. Perhaps President Bush and his Secretary of State are so feckless, and the administration so bogged down and blinkered, that they have all forgotten what happened seven decades ago. Perhaps it is even worse than that. Perhaps the United States is simply powerless to stop history from repeating itself, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reprising the role of the German Fuhrer, only successfully this time.
But pause to consider something. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is given a pass whenever he mouths pieties. He issues a dawa to the united States, couched in often flowery and religious language, and the MSM characterize it as just a letter. He says that Iran intends its nuclear program to be for peaceful purposes, and no one says that he is naive, blinkered, bogged down, or beset. That is because we know where he stands. He means war and Shiite conquest and the elimination of Israel. Peaceful talk, to the extent Ahmadinejad engages in it, is just a ruse.
But where do Bush and Rice stand? Is Benjamin Netanyahu correct in his belief that (as Paul Mirengoff characterized it) Bush is “totally committed” to preventing a nuclear Iran? Is the happy talk of Condi Rice’s piece (a) defeatism, (b) a belief in fairy tales, or (c) strategic misrepresentation? Where do they stand? With what lever will they move the world?
We happen to believe (but only on a good day, and those seem fewer all the time) that this is all strategic misrepresentation, that the administration knows ultimately what it will do to prevent a nuclear Iran, and that the poker playing President and his Secretary of State see no benefit in revealing their cards to the world. Whether foreign and military policies can be conducted like that in democracy with elections every two years is another matter entirely.
August 16th, 2006 at 12:31 pm
Munich, 2006
“Historians will look back at this weekend’s cease-fire agreement in Lebanon as a pivotal moment in the war on terror. It is pivotal in the same sense that the Munich agreement between Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain was pivotal in an earlier ba…
August 16th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
I do not share your hope that Bush and Rice are engaged in “strategic misrepresentation” in our dealings with Iran, Syria, Islamic terrorism, et al.
Rather, I think Bush and Rice have run into a wall constructed of (1) western liberal pieties (esp., multiculturalism and the belief that reason trumps violence), (2) western anti-militarism (which flows from the admixture of decadent cowardice — which inhibits a resort to violence — and the liberal pieties just cited — which justify nonviolence as moral superiority), and (3) the lack of success (real or imagined) in defeating the insurgency in Iraq.
Together, these three factors have steadily undermined the philosophical and emotional foundations of the original Bush Doctrine, so much so that now Bush will not take forceful military action to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons — the raison d’tre of the original Bush Doctrine. The preparations for such military action could not be kept secret. If Bush were planning to strike Iran, we’d know about, and they would know about it because Bush would issue an ultimatum before launching the attack. Just like with Saddam in 1991 and 2003.
So, no, I think what we’re seeing is what we’re getting. Any meaningful “war on terror” is over at this point in time. Perhaps our next president will reinvigorate our efforts, without first waiting for another devastating attack on the country.