There is no better place to monitor “realist” thought than The Christian Science Monitor. Last Friday, they ran an archetypal editorial “Being irate at Iran, but wisely,” which began by conceding that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nezhad “deserves condemnation” for denying there was a Holocaust and for calling for the relocation of Israel. “But after that, what?” the Monitor asks plaintively, as if any real action against the Islamic Republic of Iran would be wrong.
And yes, that’s exactly what they think over at the Monitor. They admit that diplomatic efforts to block Iran’s nuclear program have failed, but they want still more diplomacy: take “Iran’s defiance to the UN Security Council and threatening to deny visas and financial access in Europe to Iran’s elite.” They certainly don’t want military action, calling it “highly premature.”
All of this is based on the assumption that there’s a power struggle going on within the regime, between Ahmadi-Nezhad and the radicals, on one side, and “pragmatic” (the quotation marks are their own) leaders like former President Rafsanjani.
This is truly the triumph of ideology over reality, since the Iranians have provided twenty-six years of unrelenting antisemitism, support for anti-Israel and anti-American terrorist groups from Hamas to Hezbollah, as well as at least fifteen years of a covert nuclear program. The Monitor says that “Reading the Islamic regime’s real intentions about harming Israel or assembling a nuclear weapon has been like watching a group of men wrestle in a tent–from the outside.” But that is false. Even their own “pragmatist,” Rafsanjani, loudly announced a few years ago that Iran would be delighted to drop an atomic bomb on Israel, even if there were a response in kind. It would be a good deal for Islam, Rafsanjani said, because half the world’s Jews would have been incinerated, while only a small fraction of the world’s Muslims would have died.
There are none so blind as those who will not see.