Of "Tantrums", "Clashes of Civilizations" — and Simple Bullpucky. The Radical Right is trying to foment war hysteria about Iran, all the while downplaying and trivializing the danger we face from North Korea.
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Yesterday, the New York Post published a major opinion piece by Amir Taheri (see yesterday's blog entry, below) that tried to worry us about Iran's nuclear ambitions, as yet unrealized, by claiming that Iran anticipates rallying all of Islam (a billion people) under its banner to unite the planet under its "only True Faith" — that is, that Iran hopes to conquer the world, including the United States, and subject everyone to radical Islam, this despite the fact that Iran has neither so much as a single nuclear device nor a single rocket capable of reaching the U.S., and has a military that is only a fraction the size of ours, with nothing like the technological sophistication of ours.
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Today, by contrast, an opinion piece by Jim Hoagland in the same rightwing newspaper, the New York Post, trivializes the danger we face from North Korea, a country that has both working nuclear weapons and long-range missiles:

[Condoleezza Rice's State Department] has breathed new life into international efforts to manage North Korea's nuclear-weapons tantrum.

Think about this.
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On successive days, the Post tried first to worry us about Iran and then make us discount even the possibility that North Korea could be a danger to us.
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On Wednesday, Amir Taheri warned us that feckless, backward Iran — whose main language is spoken by no other country and whose minor languages are spoken only by countries even more backward than it is; which is not part of the Arab world and has no other kind of automatic "in" with any other country on Earth — will lead a worldwide "clash of civilizations" in which its nuclear program would contribute mightily to bringing the U.S. low within 20 years. Two and a half years ago, worries about a nonexistent nuclear-weapons program by Saddam Hussein were used to justify a massive, murderous invasion of a country 7,000 miles from our shores that had never attacked us and, as it turns out, had neither plans to attack nor the slightest ability to reach us, since it had no intercontinental ballistic missiles, no long-range aircraft, no missile-launching submarines, no aircraft carriers, no vehicle of any kind with which to carry out an attack.
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On Thursday, Jim Hoagland tells us not to worry about North Korea, even tho North Korea is said by our own experts actually to have (a) nuclear weapons and (b) missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads at least as far as Hawaii and possibly also the U.S. West Coast, to insignificant little places like the Nation's second-largest metropolis, Los Angeles (17 million people), and high-tech centers in Silicon Valley and Seattle. But that doesn't worry the Post. North Korea is only having a "tantrum". It is not an "imminent threat", as Iraq was said to be 2½ years ago and Iran is now being set up to seem.
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North Korea's bizarre and unpredictable dictator, Kim Jong Il, recently proclaimed that he might launch a pre-emptive first strike against the United States if he felt his regime was in danger. That sounds like an imminent threat to me. Why doesn't the Radical Right see North Korea as an "imminent threat"? And why does all the war talk we now hear concern Iran, not North Korea?
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The answer, dear reader, is all too simple: Iran is near Israel. North Korea is very far from Israel. North Korea can kill only Americans. It can't kill Israelis. That is the be-all and end-all of why the Radical Right is trying to drum up war fever against Iran but couldn't care less about North Korea: because the Radical Right is actively disloyal to the United States. They are major, furiously busy agents of a foreign power, not faithful Americans at all.
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Oh, they'll use patriotic rhetoric to mislead us, but they don't care a thing about the United States, only about Israel. So a country that actually has nuclear weapons and the means to carry them to our shores is only having a "nuclear-weapons tantrum", but countries in the Middle East that do not have either a single nuclear weapon nor any means to rain them down upon the United States are 'threats' that 'must be dealt with'.
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Every time you hear anyone describe Iran, Iraq, or any other Middle Eastern country as a 'threat', ask yourself, "A threat to whom?" If the answer comes back "Israel", know that you are being asked to kill for Zionism, not for the United States, by people whose first loyalty — nay, only loyalty — is to Israel. And if you think the war in Iraq has produced more problems than it has fixed, multiply that by at least 5 to get a sense of how costly a war against Iran would be. Multiply by 30 or 50, however, to get an idea of how costly to this country, not Israel, refusing to deal with North Korea could prove.
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Given a choice, I would much rather see Jerusalem incinerated than Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, or Seattle. Wouldn't you? It's not even remotely a close call for me. I don't give a damn about Israel. I'm an American.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,873.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:44 AM