Jeffrey Goldberg and Andrew Sullivan are having some sort of pointless debate in which they both (unknowingly?0 support a war on Iran by simply taking it for granted that Iran is building nukes, and that Iran's civilian, IAEA-monitored, economically-justified, nuclear energy program is actually a weapons program. I address this sort of sloppy thinking previously:
The intentional conflation of a nuclear weapons programme with a nuclear-energy programme takes several forms. For example, in addition to overt references to a weapons programme, there may be references to Iran's nuclear "threat", or vague statements about Iran's nuclear "ambitions", or even more tenuously, allusions to Iran's "intentions" to obtain a nuclear-weapons "capability".
Then, they proceed to discuss the old "slipper slope" fallacy according to which an Iranian nuclear "capacity" (whatever than means) will essentially lead to the end of the world as everyone else in the Mideast goes nuclear -- never bothering to explain why Israel's existing nuclear weapons have not had this effect they attribute to Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons. I've written about this precise point previously too:
[I]t is highly ironic that Iran's mere capability to build nuclear weapons can supposedly spark this uncontrollable cascade of nuclear proliferation in the Mideast, and yet Israel's existing nuclear weapons are not believed to have this effect. Indeed, if we are to accept, as the fallacious argument assumes, that one country's nuclear capability will force other countries to acquire their own nuclear deterrent, then the real regional culprit for proliferation must be the original nuclear power in the region: Israel. Note also that similar predictions of regional arms races have not been made when, for example, Brazil recently acquired the same nuclear technology that Iran is seeking to develop. Finally, the argument assumes that the other countries in the region aren't already working to develop their own nuclear programmes.
Of course, both of them also proceed on the assumption that Israel's possession of nuclear weapons is 'stabilizing' -- nevermind the fact that a few months ago the Isaeli was busy flattening Beirut, refuses to declared its own borders, espouses the creation of "Greater Israel", presses fo yet another US war in the region - and is otherwise hardly "stablizing".
It is precisely these sorts of pundits'�intellectually bankrupt, factually�erroneous and artificially limited "debates"�which actually legitimize�invasions and wars. Why?�because their debates�proceed on unquestioned assumptions which legitimize war. Indeed, these sorts of loaded debates serves to propogate the pro-war assumptions build into them - if even out of�sheer stupidity.�Specifically:
I previously�noted how the the Mojo blog's� online discussion by a bunch of Mideast pundits on the question of�"Whether" Israel should attack Iran, never bothered to ask "Why" should Israel attack Iran in the first place - and instead the whole debate�simply took it for granted that Israel was justified in attacking Iran if it wanted to do so. (I was happy to see Scowcroft and Brzenziski make the same point later.
Similar assumptions are taken for granted in this current debate between Goldberg and Sullivan: their only debate�is essentially over�whether a nuclear-armed Iran can be deterred or not. In framing�and limiting the debate in this manner, they�they both take it for granted that Iran is in fact building nukes or desires to do so, that Israel is "threatened" by this.
None of those assumptionns are�true.
In�fact, not only�do Israelis themselves say that they're not really "threatened" by Iran,�there absolutely no evidence of a nuclear weapons program, and not only has�Iran offered to place additional restrictions on its nuclear program that would prevent it from even hypothetically secretly making nukes, but the entire nuclear issue is simply a pretext that is being artificially kept alive as a justification for another policy entirely.��
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