Deterrence worked during the Cold War because the U.S.S.R. had no interest in being destroyed in a nuclear exchange even if it meant that the U.S.A. would be destroyed too. Nations such as North Korea and Iran are a whole different story.
by Charles Krauthammer
There are few foreign-policy positions more silly than the assertion without context that “deterrence works.” It is like saying air power works. Well, it worked for Kosovo; it didn’t work over North Vietnam.
It’s like saying city-bombing works. It worked in Japan 1945 (Tokyo through Nagasaki). It didn’t in the London blitz.
The idea that some military technique “works” is meaningless. It depends on the time, the circumstances, the nature of the adversaries. The longbow worked for Henry V. At El Alamein, however, Montgomery chose tanks.
Yet a significant school of American “realists” remains absolutist on deterrence and is increasingly annoyed with those troublesome Israelis who are sowing fear, rattling world markets and risking regional war by threatening a preemptive strike to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Don’t they understand that their fears are grossly exaggerated? After all, didn’t deterrence work during 40 years of Cold War?
Indeed, a few months ago, columnist Fareed Zakaria made that case by citing me writing in defense of deterrence in the early 1980s at the time of the nuclear freeze movement. And yet now, writes Zakaria, Krauthammer (and others on the right) “has decided that deterrence is a lie.”
Nonsense. What I have decided is that deterring Iran is fundamentally different from deterring the Soviet Union. You could rely on the latter but not on the former.
The reasons are obvious and threefold:
(1) The nature of the regime.
Did the Soviet Union in its 70 years ever deploy a suicide bomber? For Iran, as for other jihadists, suicide bombingis routine. Hence the trail of self-immolation, from the 1983 Marine barracks attack in Beirut to the Bulgaria bombing of July 2012.
Iran’s clerical regime rules in the name of a fundamentalist religion for whom the hereafter offers the ultimate rewards. For Soviet communists — thoroughly, militantly atheistic — such thinking was an opiate-laced fairy tale.
For all its global aspirations, the Soviet Union was intensely nationalist. The Islamic Republic sees itself as an instrument of its own brand of Shiite millenarianism — the messianic return of the “hidden Imam.”
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The classic formulation comes from Tehran’s fellow (and rival Sunni) jihadist al-Qaeda: “You love life and we love death.” Try deterring that.
(2) The nature of the grievance.
The Soviet quarrel with America was ideological. Iran’s quarrel with Israel is existential. The Soviets never proclaimed a desire to annihilate the American people. For Iran, the very existence of a Jewish state on Muslim land is a crime, an abomination, a cancer with which no negotiation, no coexistence, no accommodation is possible.
(3) The nature of the target.
America is a nation of 300 million; Israel, 8 million. America is a continental nation; Israel, a speck on the map, at one point eight miles wide. Israel is a “one-bomb country.” Its territory is so tiny, its population so concentrated that, as Iran’s former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has famously said, “Application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.” A tiny nuclear arsenal would do the job.
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This doesn’t mean that the mullahs will necessarily risk terrible carnage to their country in order to destroy Israel irrevocably. But it does mean that the blithe assurance to the contrary — because the Soviets never struck first — is nonsense. The mullahs have a radically different worldview, a radically different grievance and a radically different calculation of the consequences of nuclear war.
The confident belief that they are like the Soviets is a fantasy. That’s why Israel is contemplating a preemptive strike. Israel refuses to trust its very existence to the convenient theories of comfortable analysts living 6,000 miles from its Ground Zero.
Read the rest – The ‘deterrence works’ fantasy
Tags: Charles Krauthammer
I saw that loon John Stossel use the argument “We lived with the USSR having nuclear weapons” argument.
We love life, they love death. You can’t deter that. You can and must destroy it if you want to live. The sooner we wake up to that, the fewer people have to die.
@ Speranza:
The Ayatollah don’t care about the Iranian people. They are willing to sacrifice their country for Islam. They believe getting nuked will bring back the 12th Iman.
@ Speranza:
@ Iron Fist:
Look at this. Morsi threw the gauntlet at Iran. Muslim Brotherhood vs. Ayatollahs is on!
@ Iron Fist:
Let us oblige them. ISLAM DELENDA EST!
Speranza wrote:
Stossel gives libertarianism a bad name.
@ MacDuff:
I agree. He’s more of an Anarcho-Libertarian as opposed to a Conservative-Libertarian.
Iron Fist wrote:
In that case, we oblige them. give them all the death they can handle. Delivered at sub-orbital speeds.
Do unto them before they do unto us.
The golden rule updated for islam.
There is a huge difference between the curreent situation
and the Cold War.
The power elite in the Soviet Union had no interest in
martyrdom. They were committed communists and as such
had no interest in dying, since there was nowhere to go.
Today our Islamist enemies think that dying for the cause
grants them Paradise and a virgin brothel.
Big difference.
@ MikeA:
War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let’s give them all they want.
William Tecumseh Sherman
I agree.
islam is evil.
Two Afghan children beheaded in separate incidents
Via ABC News:
Perfect. Obama has just announced that he’s going Monday.
The fanatical leaders in the Muslin world preach suicide and teach their youth to kill themselves and hate anyone not of their faith.
Buffalobob wrote:
Sounds a lot like the Democrats, aside from the suicide part.
Maybe that’ll be next.
You cannot negotiate with anyone whose idea of negotiation is to ask if you want to die in the morning or the afternoon.
@ MacDuff
bie denied FEMA aid to the fire victims on OK, apparently not enough MSM news coverage for him to miss his golf tee times.
The same conept works in any conflict. Both sides have to have mutual ground. If one side says.. “I want you dead and will not accept anything else”, there is no common ground. The only option is to remove the threat to your home.
I get the feeling that if Jesus Christ would have spoken
at the RNC , the Media would have bashed Him.
“Jesus really is a right wing religious zealot. That
carpentry business that he and his father ran, they really didn’t
build. They were helped by donkey carts.”
@ MacDuff:
That means that Romney is starting to control Obama.
This is reactive from somebody who never would have
gone on his own.
@ RIX:
You know very well Romney will meet with Jindal. And when Обама arrives, I hope Jindal blows him off!
@ RIX:
They’d bitch about the lack of diversity among the twelve disciples…
@ RIX:
@ Iron Fist:
*GIGGLES*
Iron Fist wrote:
Except for Judas Iscariot… Him they would feel a special kindred spirit for…
The Soviets were rational people, and they loved their children. muslims, not so much.
@ doriangrey:
Take a look at this!
China—Not Wall Street—Caused 2008 Crisis: Study
@ MikeA:
Nah, Judas wasn’t gay or an abortionist. Gays and abortion are the twin themes of the Democrat convention, after all…
Macker wrote:
And Jidal would be within his rights.
Obama has been very contentious with him.
Iron Fist wrote:
No doubt & they only got there on the backs of the poor.
Iron Fist wrote:
“Everybody Fuck!
Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
See how all-inclusive the Demo☭rats are? 8)
Iron Fist wrote:
Like PMSNBC has lots of “people of color” with their own shows.
Rodan wrote:
So how can we take advantage of the Chink in their Armor? There’s gotta be one ya know.
I’ve got it! Tariffs up China’s ying-yang!
Speranza wrote:
And they all have the same color: Communist Red!
Rodan wrote:
Who told you this first… wink wink nod nod say no more…
@ Speranza:
They have Al Sharpton. That’s all they need. You don’t get more token than Al Sharpton …
@ Iron Fist:
Resist we much!
Iron Fist wrote:
Sure you do, you get Barry “The Choom King” Soetoro…
Macker wrote:
RAAAAACIST!!!!
/////
@ doriangrey:
Yup!
You should do a guest post on things you have called.
@ Iron Fist:
I’ll take Arthur Davis over Al Sharpton.
Rodan wrote:
Gadzooks no, people might start paying attention to what I say. Besides it would totally ruin my reputation as a dumb redneck washed up rock star…
MacDuff wrote:
Obama could give a crap about Louisiana…what has he said concerning the storm that dumped tons of rain in Louisiana….oh he had an interview with Reddit (spelling) while the storm was bashing Louisiana with heavy rain and basically stalled for a while. Yeah we feel your love obama for Louisiana/not. Him coming Monday is a disgrace to be honest.
RIX wrote:
Yep they would have. They are bashing the Republicans and staying away from obama’s failures or in this case what he wanted to transform the United States into a 2nd or 3rd world country.
doriangrey wrote:
No, no, no! It is your damn commie keyboard! Anyway you should do a guest post…tell it like it is!!!!!
@ Lily:
The Dems have complete loons like Chris Matthews &
Debbie Wasserman Schultz running around.
Matthews thinks that even mentioning Chicago is racist.
That’s a tough one because if my club gets to the World
Series, they will have to be referred to as the “From an
unknown location White Sox.”
Schultz gets called on a lie about a newspaper story, but
she was cool with it because that “should” have been the story
@ RIX:
Everything is racist is to them ..Holding Down the Fort
Rule of thumb…saying Chicago…where will it end.
/according to the obama administratiion he has divided this nation like I have never seen before..but he was suppose to be the great uniter…how has that been working out??? Badly.
RIX wrote:
The more I study 20th century history,the more today’s Democratic Party reminds me of the Warsaw Pact political system.
Lily wrote:
Rush Limbaugh correctly said the other day that an obsession with race is the very definition of racism.
RIX wrote:
Or, you could alternately call it Anarchia….
Speranza wrote:
Hence, my signature for the Demo☭rats…. 8)
@ Speranza:
They do, disinformation & outright lies.
@ Macker:
That would work.
@ doriangrey:
hey at least you don’t rant about Nazis on a daily occasion!
@ Lily:
Since the Zimmerman thing happened, racism has lost all
meaning to me.
They don’t care if he is actually guilty, they just
demand a sacrifice.
@ Speranza:
You should do a thread on the comparisons.
@ Speranza:
@ RIX:
@ Macker:
OMG, the election is over!
Chafee will speak at Dems’ convention as Obama backer
@ Rodan:
Boy, they’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel, aren’t they? Chaffee? Oh he’ll change a lot of votes. We get Artur Davis and they get Lincoln Chaffee. I think we win that one.
@ Rodan:
@ Iron Fist:
Iron Fist is right. We win that trade!
RIX wrote:
I think that all went out the window with the OJ Simpson case, personally.
Even today, there’s almost a perfect split along racial lines as to whether people believe he was guilty.
God…now Alan Colmes is implying that calling phony “greens” watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) is racist.
I’ve been using that term since before anyone ever heard of Obama.
lobo91 wrote:
One half of Skeltor’s face is racist toward the other half and vice versa
lobo91 wrote:
In a way it is good those low-lifes, such as that scum bag alan colmes, are resorting to blatantly false charges of racism for everything and anyone who disagree with them.
The charge of racism seems to be the only arrow left if their quiver. Overuse in and of itself reduces its impact. Stretching as they are to make the charge will hasten to make it an empty joke.
lobo91 wrote:
There is something rodent-like about Alan Colmes demeanor.
Rodan wrote:
Lincoln Chafee is one big creep!
RIX wrote:
Abusive political rhetoric and an inclination towards purges.
Rodan wrote:
I ought to. I am reading a book about the 1950′s purges in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Albania, Rumania and Bulgaria. We are all familiar with the 1930′s Soviet purges. Stalin was really freaked out over “Titoism” i.e. national communism.
If the RNC is smart, they will do an advertisemnt concerning Lincoln Chafee’s anti-Israel record when he was a Senator from Rhode Island.
I am surprised that Chuck Hagel is not listed as a speaker at the Democratic convention.
Iron Fist wrote:
As an illustration, when you were growing up, did you ever have a waterfight with a kid who didn’t care if he got wet? Totally makes the game not fun and unwinnable. That is the kind of thing we are up against here on a much more mature and deadly scale.
Iron Fist wrote:
All you can do is grant them their wish -- kill them!
Macker wrote:
That’s not as extreme as it sounds. After all, no one would tolerate a resurgence of the Thuggee cult, why does civilization tolerate a cult that espouses the subjugation or destruction of those who do not accept the beliefs of that cult?
MacDuff wrote:
Good ol’ “I’ve got a bracelet too” leading from behind again.
doriangrey wrote:
Gotta contemplate that word combination there for a while …
Iron Fist wrote:
They also got Charlie Crist. So basically we got Artur Davis, they got Chaffee and Crist and an un-named third round draft pick.
AZfederalist wrote:
Romney’s campaign is running like a finely tuned Maserati while Obama’s is akin to abused MG.
I seem to be talking to myself here. Now I know how Lily feels.
AZfederalist wrote:
It takes a certain skill
Speranza wrote:
win win as far as I am concerned.
@ AZfederalist:
But, Obungler *planned* his trip first:
http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/08/carney-obama-louisiana-trip-planned-before-romneys-133998.html
Hey, it’s the thought that counts.
As Rush would say, “sybolism over substance.”
Rodan wrote:
And Gov. Charlie Crist too. We’re doomed
AZfederalist wrote:
Like McArthur, I have returned.
AZfederalist wrote:
Chafee is a scum bucket, Crist is just a sun tan.
@ RIX:
Another loser. Again, we pulled in Artur Davis. They have a pantheon of losers. I think we win.
Iron Fist wrote:
They have a pantheon of nasty people as well.
@ RIX:
The migration from Republican to Democrat is flotsam and jetsam, while that from Democrat to Republican is an actual brain drain.
@ AZfederalist:
Obama is just inviting white guys.
Does that make him RACISTS!!!??????
Macker wrote:
They want to die. I’m okay with that.
unclassifiable wrote:
Are they pasty faced white guys like a creep from Culver City?
MacDuff wrote:
True dat.
.@ Speranza:
Well as you mentioned above Crist maintains one of those oompaloompa tans but he is still white. I guess that makes him toast.
As for the Culver City Lump. Well that there is just your average grabastict piece of amphipian excrement.
@ MacDuff:Libetarianism is pretty bad even without Stossel.
Libertarians hate Israel (with a few honorable exceptions). They have justified Muslim terror. I have had many nasty arguments with them and as they do not argue logically, I clown around with them since I don’t want to lose my temper with them licking their lips at what they believe wll be the destruction of many of my family members in Israel. One of them is featured HERE.