I'm beginning to think that Danny Goldhagen is trying to compete with Victor Davis Hanson for the title of Neocon Champion of Hackery.
Long, long ago, in the days before there were such things as blogs, Danny Goldhagen published Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996). In those days, e-mail was only beginning to be commonly used for personal correspondence, so we used to write things known as "letters". I must have written at least 50 blog posts worth of stuff discussing that book with people.
In the short version - the very, very, very short version, the book had some good, solid original research (although even that wasn't universally conceded) and it enjoyed a "popular" success, proving that even a tediously written, poorly edited academic tome on the Holocaust could become a best-seller. But virtually every Holocaust scholar - in America, Israel and Germany - rejected his analysis as badly flawed.
Today, Danny has the solution to the Israeli Defense Force's problems with Lebanese Hizbullah: Israel's Way Out by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen Los Angeles Times 08/08/06.
Danny says all Israel has to do is ... go to war with Syria and Iran!
Danny has figured out, you see, that Iran is "the epicenter of political Islam" and also "Hezbollah's master". Sure, Danny. I wonder if he knows that there are Sunni and Shi'a varieties of Muslims. Or maybe he just thinks a Muslim is a Muslim is a Muslim, and that Iranian Shi'a Khomenei-style Islamism and the Syrian Allawite government and Al Qaida are all pretty much the same thing.
Victor Davis Hanson would be proud of this one, though:
A nuclear Iran, sharing Hezbollah's and Hamas' enmity for Israel's very existence, is a foe with a million times the wealth and destructive might to found, fund and supply many more Hezbollahs against many more enemies, including the hated West.
Perfect neocon reasoning. It's always 1938, you see, and the forces of Western civilization are always on the verge of selling out Czechoslovakia at Munich. So to avoid that, you take an absolute worst-case projection, make it as urgent as avoiding that Munich sell-out that could happen at any second and just pretend like there are no risks to going to war.
For sample results of such an approach, see: Iraq, right now.
This is what Danny's lofty moralizing and his purist political analysis comes down to: recklessly, foolishly advocating for more wars of choice as though the disaster we know as the Iraq War never occurred. Good for you, Danny. You're doing a heckuva job.
For more on Danny and attacking Iran, see The Islamic menace, attacking Iran, and the slippery arguments of Danny Goldhagen The Blue Voice 03/09/06.
2 comments:
You are a better judge of Goldhagen's scholarship and you are right to be skeptical about any case to be made for war. A wise man must learn eventually, and the lesson we are being taught is that the advocates of war, and the people we entrust with their execution, are not up to the job -- and the unintended consequences dramatically outweigh any gains so far achieved.
Does anyone still argue that the world is better off without Saddam -- clearly if we could unwind all that has happened, we would be happy to have Saddam in charge in that accursed country.
But Iran is a legitimate cause for worry, and action. I would prefer that action to be peaceful, diplomatic, and effective. But we need to act.
I admire your work, Bruce, but I think you dismiss these concerns too easily.
By the way, Iran and Hezbollah are both Shiite. I didn't understand your comment above that suggested people wary of Iran are somehow ignorant of the varieties and internal politics of Islam.
Though, again, I will admit that your studies in this area surpass my own, and although it is clear that most Americans are pretty dense, I think most of the influential people who are worried about Iran's nuclear ambitions, sponsorship of terrorism, and apparent belligerence, actually have a sufficiently sophisticated understanding of the factions and sects that comprise our Islamic neighbors in the world.
It is interesting to me that our policy of containment and sanctions prevented Iraq from building WMD, and made our invasion unnecessary.
Why don't we try something similar with Iran?
It sounds to me like Iran is very vulnerable to economic sanctions. The key to making it work, though, is for the US to be able to organize a common front with the EU, China and Russia.
And Bush's cowboy foreign policy has drained an awful lot of American influence.
I think it was and is a mistake for the United States to publicly wave around the "military option" the way we've seen at times the last several months. The truth is, Iran is very aware that American military options are severely constrained right now by the Iraq War. - Bruce
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