It's Not Just About Israel

by Christopher Hitchens - August 16th, 2010 - Slate

With Russia's ever-helpful policy of assisting Iran to accelerate its reactor program, allied to the millimetrical progress of sanctions on the Ahmadinejad regime and the increasingly hopeless state of negotiations with the Palestinians, there is likely to be no let-up in the speculation about an Israeli "first strike" on Iran's covert but ever-more-flagrant nuclear weapons installations. I have lost count of the number of essays and columns on the subject that were published this month alone. The most significant and detailed such contribution, though, came from my friend and colleague Jeffrey Goldberg in a cover story in the Atlantic. From any close reading of this piece, it was possible to be sure of at least one thing: The government of Benjamin Netanyahu wants it to be understood that, in the absence of an American decision to do so, Israel can and will mount such an attack in the not-too-distant future. The keyword of the current anguished argument—the word existential—is thought by a strategic majority of Israel's political and military leadership to apply in its fullest meaning. To them, an Iranian bomb is incompatible with the long-term survival of the Israeli state and even of the Jewish people.

Why is it that only the atheist Christopher Hitchens, among liberal writers, truly understands what is happening in the world of Islam. I would love that to be an exaggeration, yet I have seen little evidence that it is anything but the truth. This is the most recent article in which Christopher makes it clear that Iran must not be allowed to gain nuclear weapons. To put such weapons in the hands to the extremists of that nation is to guarantee it is only a matter of time until a global nuclear war is a reality. It may start with the destruction of Israel. It will not end there.

Meantime, back in the lala land called Washington DC, President Barack Obama is single handedly dismantling our nuclear arsenal so that he can prove his belief that all these other nations are only seeking nuclear weapons because they fear that America is going to bomb them into a nuclear glaze. Obama is certain that a good faith removal of our nuclear capability will end their search for these weapons and assure that they will stop threatening to destroy western civilization to restore the caliphate. Obama feels Islamic domination of the world is not really what they want. Those threats are just bluster, don't you see? Of course if he is wrong it will be George W. Bush's fault.

If Obama ever read this article he would reject the premise out of hand, assuming he even understood what the word existential meant.