Sunday, June 22, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
Let's say the US does set back the Iranian nuclear program by a long way, and Iran is just too afraid or too weak to really do much in response. So it's a success, right? But over what time frame? I mean you could have said that the US had a big success when it overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in the fifties, because he was going to nationalize oil industry and do things that America didn't like, and it might have been for years after that it looked like a good idea. But you were laying the groundwork for a politics in Iran that was ultimately going to lead decades later to the overthrow of a pro-American leader, and the emergence of a militant anti-American leadership. The point, is, when you do things, you produce political consequences that play out over long, long periods of time and you don't know what the long term consequences are going to be.
I've mentioned a number of times that Beinart is a master propagandist, and this is yet another example of how he uses propaganda techniques brilliantly to promote a completely wrong and immoral anti-Israel and anti-American position.
After all, he has a point: there could be very bad long term consequences of any action by the US, or Israel, that could be worse than short term gains.
This actually is true of every decision we make, big or small, international or personal. Beinart gives examples of decisions in the Middle East that may have caused bad long term consequences. So, everything must be done with caution, and Beinart says that the US did not use the proper amount of caution.
There are three problems with his argument, and they are difficult to see without realizing that Beinart always frames his arguments to preclude serious disagreement.
The first one is simple: yes, sometimes the consequences are bad. And sometimes they are good. Israel decimating Hezbollah last year resulted in Hezbollah not raining down tens of thousands of missiles on Israel, today. That is a pretty good consequence! Similarly, Israel's destruction of Syria's clandestine nuclear program cannot be regarded as anything but a success. So consequentialism goes both ways, and there is no way for Beinart to know the long term consequences any more than anyone else - whether they would be good or bad. So should no one ever make any decision because we cannot know every possible consequence? That is absurd, but if we accept Beinart's logic, that is the result.
In the real world, you make the best decisions you can based on the information you have now. You don't stay paralyzed because you might make the wrong decision. Beinart knows this, but he doesn't want you to think about it.
Secondly, Beinart describes possible downsides of military action. But he ignores, completely, not only the possible upsides or action, but the the potential negative consequences of inaction. Iran clearly was hiding a secret nuclear program that is only compatible with weaponization. No one can seriously doubt it. What are the consequences of a nation that is the world's biggest sponsor of terror, that funds terror groups worldwide, having a stockpile of nuclear weapons? Beinart frames his argument in terms of actions, not inactions, so the casual consumer of his ideas does not realize that Beinart is creating a straitjacket in his argument that does not allow the thinking outside the box that Beinart deliberately constructs.
The third problem is when Beinart says:
I think Jewish tradition, like most other moral traditions, has some version of the idea of “what goes around comes around.” In Hebrew, it’s, “midah k'neged midah.”
Guess what? Jewish ethics is not consequentialist. In Jewish ethics, the top priority is preserving life, your own and your nation's before your enemies. Iran's actions that clearly point towards building a nuclear weapon, plus its genocidal rhetoric against Israel that goes back to 1979, all point to the fact that Iran intends to destroy Israel - either with nuclear weapons or by using the threat of nuclear weapons to attack with impunity without fear of, yes, consequences.. This is not morally acceptable under Jewish ethics. Beinart's argument here indicates that he does not give a damn about the survival of the Jewish state or the Jewish people who live there.
So when Beinart tries to use a Jewish ethical argument that Iran's nuclear weapons program must not be attacked, he is not only being deceptive. He is tacitly supporting the idea that Israel should not have the right to defend itself.
And it is hard to think of something more immoral than that.
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