According to a new CNN poll, a significant majority of Americans — 68 percent — support ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran.
That would be the very same nuclear negotiations that 47 Republican senators tried their best to sabotage last week with an extraordinary letter to Iran’s leadership, in which they warned that the United States would not honor any agreement reached by President Obama.
Think about that: A letter written by American senators warned that their own country could not be trusted to keep its word in the international arena. More amazing still, by trying to wreck any hope of a deal, those senators were also attempting to ensure that the only option we have left would be war.
They don’t admit that insistence on war — not yet. But the logic of their position allows no other conclusion. They believe that Iran can never be allowed to have nuclear weapons, and that Iran will never give up its nuclear ambitions voluntarily. From those two principles, only one outcome is possible.
Writing in the Washington Post on Friday, Joshua Muravchik of the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute made that argument explicit. He wrote that the only way to be certain that we have halted Iran’s nuclear program is to bomb that country, repeatedly and extensively. And if that in turn leads to a larger Mideast war, so be it.
It’s important to remember that Muravchik has been advocating that position at least since 2006, and that he and his colleagues also championed our ill-fated invasion of Iraq through the very same reasoning process. Their view of how the world works can be expressed in three simple words: Force produces submission. And on those real-life occasions when that theory seems to fail, when force does not produce submission? Then by definition, sufficient force wasn’t used. Because force produces submission. That is the axis on which the neoconservative planet spins. As physicist Stephen Hawking would put it, that is their theory of everything, the elegant equation that ties it all together.
And because force always produces submission in the neoconservative universe, the opponent is always denied a vote in the outcome. He never gets credited with responding to force as we ourselves would respond, with emotions such as anger, resentment, humiliation, patriotism, defiance and a thirst for revenge. In the invasion of Iraq, you may recall, the overwhelming application of U.S. military power was supposed to so “shock and awe” the Iraqis that it would turn them into a quivering, malleable clump of humanity that we could then mold to serve U.S. interests.
Force would produce submission. It wouldn’t give us ISIS and a fractured Iraq and a greatly strengthened Iran. It wouldn’t give us what we’ve gotten instead, which is chaos.
That’s because chaos and the irrationality of human nature are not conditions that the neoconservatives are prepared to acknowledge. Such factors sully the intellectual tidiness of the closed universe in which they operate, a universe in which every attempted negotiation is another Munich, every skeptic of their world view is another Neville Chamberlain, every day the sun rises is another Sept. 29, 1938, and they are always Winston Churchill.
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