Posted by David Bernstein: The Obvious Doesn't Occur to Roger Cohen: http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_04_05-2009_04_11.shtml#1239376152
[1]Roger Cohen says that Israel is "crying wolf" about Iran's imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons. He notes that Israeli leaders previously predicted that Iran would acquire such weapons by 1999, and then by 2004. It doesn't seem to occur to Cohen that it's entirely possible that if Israel and its allies had not been engaging in overt and covert efforts to impede Iran, to a large extent at Israel's urging, those predictions may have come true. It's analogous to criticizing Paulsen for crying wolf for predicting the imminent collapse of credit markets last Fall; there's no way of knowing if his prediction would have come true but for the intervention that he urged. Of course, I have no idea as to whether Israel's current predictions are right or not, but neither does Cohen. Cohen is right, though, that Israeli leaders have engaged in hyperbole about the threat from Iran's bomb. (Politicians engaging in hyperbole regarding national security issues? Imagine that!) The threat from Iran is not (primarily) that it will immolate Tel Aviv and thus gurantee Iran's own destruction, but that it will use its nuclear weapons as blackmail. Just for example, iff Iran threatened to nuke a major European city, or allow an affiliated terrorist group to do so, if the Europeans failed to comply with some unreasonable demand or other (say, cutting off all ties with Israel), how confident do you think Mr. Cohen, or anybody else, is that the Europeans wouldn't simply fold? The reaction to the brouhaha over the Mohammed cartoons hardly gives me confidence in European, or even American (remember how newspaper refused to publish the cartoons in stories about the controversy?) fortitude. Comments are open for four hours. References Visible links 1. file://localhost/var/www/powerblogs/volokh/posts/1239376152.html Hidden links: 2. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/opinion/09iht-edcohen.html?em _______________________________________________ Volokh mailing list [email protected] http://lists.powerblogs.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
