What do the Real Men™ really want?
by digby
This piece by Peter Beinert in the Atlantic called “The Moral Case for Ending America’s Cold War with Iran” opened my eyes to another reason why the Real Men™ are so intent upon “going to Tehran”:
One day, I suspect, the people obsessing about the details of an Iranian nuclear deal will look a bit like the people who obsessed about the details of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. in 1987. In retrospect, what mattered wasn’t the number of ballistic and cruise missiles each side dismantled. What mattered was ending the cold war.
When the cold war ended, America and the Soviet Union stopped viewing every third-world regime as a chess piece in their global struggle. They realized that by fueling civil wars in countries like Angola and Nicaragua, they were wasting money and subsidizing murder. Once the world’s superpowers scaled back their arms sales and began urging their former proxies to reach political agreements, some of the world’s most horrific wars stopped.
The best thing the United States can do for Syrians, by far, is to reach a nuclear deal with Iran.
Obviously, U.S.-Iranian relations today differ in many ways from U.S.-Soviet relations in the late 1980s. But today, as then, the two sides are waging a cold war that is taking a horrifying toll on the people whose countries have been made battlefields. One hundred and thirty thousand Syrians have already died. More than 2 million are displaced. Many are at risk of starvation. Polio is breaking out. The best thing the United States can do for Syrians, by far, is to reach a nuclear deal that ends its cold war with Iran.
(I’ll just link back to this post from yesterday about Robert Gates when he was at the CIA and his history of being wrong about this for context.)
Just as they were determined to “beat” the Soviets in a real war with real casualties no matter how much they had to lie about the dangers to provoke it, these same Iran hawks cannot conceive of the middle east eventually calming down to the point at which people can stop killing each other on a daily basis and the contentious issues can be hashed out in a civilized fashion without violence. Real Men™ want war. They always want war.
Read the whole Beinert essay. I’m not entirely sure what I think about it but it’s certainly provocative.
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