We have serious issues with Iran. The Iranians have emerged as the main beneficiary of the Iraq war. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been saying disgusting things about Israel. He and other Iranian leaders seem determined to acquire nuclear weapons. It’s not clear that we can or will stop them. Many people are very nervous about all this. I count myself in that number. Speaking to this constituency among others, Hillary Clinton made the following comments in a television interview:
I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran,” she said when she was asked what she would do if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons. “In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them,” she added.
Senator Clinton is basically a good person. As a woman locked in a tough presidential race, she has an obvious need to look strong and decisive. It’s important to deter Iran. Still, this is a terrible statement to make about any nation, perhaps especially one with which we might someday be at war. After all, how would Americans react if a prominent Iranian said the same thing.
It is telling that Senator Clinton speaks with greater menace than do our own military leaders. To state the obvious, a massive attack of the sort described by Senator Clinton would be monstrous and crazy. As Omid Memarian notes,such an act would also be a crime, violating the Geneva Convention, international treaties against genocide, and our own uniform code of military justice. Senator Clinton’s comments are especially dismaying when we are already equipped to respond to any attack the Iranians could mount.
To our military’s enduring credit, it has spent billions of dollars developing smart weapons whose accuracy allows smaller warheads and less collateral damage. West Point cadets read and debate works such as Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars to ponder the wrenching dilemmas of counterinsurgency and preemptive war. One does not have to support the Iraq war or every military policy to realize that we have built very different armed forces from the one that firebombed German and Japanese cities and sometimes behaved shamefully in Vietnam.
Whatever difficulties we’ve encountered in Iraq, our forces needed only a few short weeks to maul Saddam Hussein’s war machine that had fought Iran’s military to a standstill in a long and devastating war. If Iran were foolish enough to attack Israel, Israel is quite capable of launching a devastating response. If for some reason Israel could not, our forces are equipped to severely punish the Iranian military and the political establishment that launched the strike without exacting massive collective retribution against the Iranian people. Iran is a sophisticated society. Everyone, from the president down to the lowliest cabdriver knows it would be crazy to strike the United States or our key allies.
Senator Clinton also speaks quite differently from the scientists who developed nuclear weapons, and who were often chastened by what these weapons had wrought. Four blocks from my office, a Henry Moore sculpture marks the spot where Enrico Fermi supervised the world’s first nuclear reactor.
Fermi was a central figure in the Manhattan Project. He was equally famous among scientists for other achievements. He was perhaps the last great physicist who made fundamental discoveries as both a theoretician and a gifted experimentalist in the lab.
In 1949, Fermi and other Manhattan Project scientists tried in vein to prevent the development of the hydrogen . In a famous (then-secret) statement, Fermi and another great scientist, I.I. Rabi, concluded
Posted by Mohamad Reza on 9:52 AM | 1 comments
