WorldNetDaily: “Time to Nuke Iran” !
Given a certain set of assumptions, calls for preemptive strikes on Iran are at least understandable, even if they are misguided and dangerous. But a call to nuke—as in “drop a nuclear bomb on”—Iran preemptively is far over the top no matter what you may assume.
Yet this is what WorldNetDaily columnist Larry Klayman has just called for.
After laying out the most extreme scenario of foreign affairs in Iraq, Iran, and Israel available anywhere in the media, Klayman concludes that “if there ever were a time to use nuclear weapons, like radiation-reduced neutron bombs, to excise a cancer such as this, now is the moment.”
Klayman prefaces these comments with the admission, “Ironically.”
Ironically indeed. Apparently, the best way to stop proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is to use them ourselves? In order to prevent an alleged nuclear bomb, we have to drop several actual ones? In order to prevent an allegedly, maybe, possible (according to some) nuclear strike, we need to initiate a real nuclear strike, and thereby risk an even greater actual nuclear war if Iran’s ally, China, decides to retaliate? Indeed, the people who hyped the comment from Iran to “wipe Israel off the map,” want to wipe Iran of the map instead, and thus risk wiping us all off the globe.
This is foreign policy at its most insane and wildly, apocalyptically dangerous.
Klayman resorts to gross analogies: “Much like taking out a small lump in a cancerous female breast, the operation could have been simple and done with. Now a total radical double mastectomy is required.”
These are images that should characterize Islamic extremism, not American exceptionalism applied to foreign policy.
Klayman’s claims seem greatly exaggerrated and incendiary. He says Iran is the “equivalent of Germany prior to World War II,” and he drastically shortens the time frame for a coming holocaust of both Jews and Christians to “within months”:
Iran will within months acquire atomic weapons that can be delivered through missiles, as well as planes and ships, and has threatened – in the face of increased sanctions – not only to annihilate Israel and attack us too, but also to set ablaze the Strait of Hormuz, which is the gateway to oil shipments from Middle Eastern producers throughout the world.
It seems he’s also trying to help, or hinder, certain political candidates in the U.S.:
We are just days from the Iowa caucuses, and some of you may look to a new Republican president in 2012 to solve this and other major problems. Even were a great leader to emerge, which, given the spate of Republican “pygmie candidates,” as I call them, is not going to happen, we cannot wait until early 2013 to crush the mullahs in Iran. And frankly, no Republican candidate has advocated a massive strike to end the Islamic regime.
That was true, at least, until a couple of days ago. Rick Santorum exhibited similar war lust on Sunday:
I would be saying to the Iranians, you either open up those facilities, you begin to dismantle them and make them available to inspectors, or we will degrade those facilities through air strikes.
ABC News adds,
This isn’t the first time that Santorum has used aggressive language to articulate his Iran policy.
“On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that’s a wonderful thing, candidly,” Santorum said at a campaign event in October.
Meanwhile, even as Iran announces its latest advances in both nuclear energy and missile technology, Israel’s own head of intelligence has said even a nuclear-armed Iran is not a real threat to Israel.