Insofar as Nuclear Proliferation is a Bad Thing, Iran's Acquisition of Nukes is Bad

Andrew Sullivan considers retired General Abizaid's contention that we can live with a nuclear Iran:

He can live with it. Matt wonders if this approach doesn't actually help us forestall a nuclear Iran. Not so sure here. I'm obviously a skeptic of the last military resort against the Tehran regime - largely because I've yet to be convinced that it wouldn't actually hurt our long-term interests in the war against Islamism. But that a nuclear Iran would be a terrible blow--not least to Iranians forced to live under a theocracy newly empowered by the Doomsday weapon-- is indisputable.

This is a stupid reason to consider a nuclear Iran a "terrible blow." Having awesome destructive capabilities of this sort doesn't empower the Iranian regime with respect to its own citizenry; are they going to threaten to destroy Qom if the populace becomes restive? To the extent that it bolsters the clerics' hand it's just a side-effect of the fact that the strategy of obtaining nuclear weapons is very popular among ordinary Iranian citizens. A democratic Iran would, in all likelihood, also pursue nuclear weapons. Iranians would be dumb not to have noticed that a nuclear-armed North Korea, although a member of the "Axis of Evil" has remained...totally unmolested. The US would also have much more credibility on this issue if we weren't supporting India's nuke-up policy (and *cough*Israel), and generally giving a convincing impression of not giving a shit about proliferation unless we think it advances our interests, in which case we suddenly start hopping up and down about UN mandates, etc. It's hard to construct a compelling rationale for why it's OK for some Great Powers to have nukes (US, France etc.), and OK for India and Pakistan to inject nuclear weapons into their regional conflict, and OK for Israel to have nuclear weapons, but obviously a horrible nightmare for Iran to have nukes--indeed, such a bad result that we might, on balance, do better by starting a war with Iran! really, that's just a bat-shit crazy thing to think.

Finally, I object to Sullivan's playing the "I just care about the Iranian people" card. I have learned, from the bitter experience of advocating for one of the worst foreign policy blunders in America's history, that arguments of the following form are extraordinarily bad: "If you really cared about the suffering Xians, you'd support an extensive, indiscriminate bombing campaign, followed by a land-invasion of Country X!" Try our new patent falsehoods--delicious morsels of bloody-mindedness dipped in a couverture of moral preening!

Comments

[lemuel pitkin]

This is a good post, but I have to take issue with the construction "... a democratic Iran would..." By the standards of the region -- by the standards of most of the world -- Iran is democratic.

[The Modesto Kid]

Reckon we all know whose standards are the only ones that count when determining whether some other country is democratic.