Hanson on Appeasement

Everyone's favorite historian/warmonger/maniac Victor Davis Hanson has a new article comparing attempts to find a diplomatic solution to the current situation with Iran with pre-war appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s (link here).

Hanson takes Ahmadinejad's lunatic rhetorical flourishes about "wiping Israel off the map", and translates this into a serious plan to massacre all Jews. Apparently Hanson isn't familiar with the Iranian system of government; Ahmadinejad, as the president, is not even in charge of the nation's armed forces. As such, he cannot order deployment of weapons, he cannot declare war, and he cannot engage in any sort of hostilities. Combined with the fact that many in the Iranian government (though admittedly opposed to Israel) scoffed at such a suicidal policy, the probability of Iran actually launching a nuclear attack on Israel is pretty slim.

Ahmadinejad's comments are not representative of Iran's policy stance, and any attempt to cast them as such (as Hanson has done) is disingenuous. Ahmadinejad's comments are nothing but extremist rhetoric coming from an extremist president that has been somewhat marginalized even in his own government. Ahmadinejad has been openly anti-Israel for a long time, and has stated his opposition to the existence of Israel before. Just because he says it again doesn't mean nuclear war is imminent.

Since, as I have been posting lately, the threat of Iran developing a nuclear weapons program is vastly over-estimated, Hanson's rhetoric amounts to little more than a replay of the same old warmongering blather we saw in the rush to war with Iraq. Looking for a diplomatic solution is not appeasement, but immediately jumping for a military "solution" is certain to have negative consequences we cannot even begin to imagine.