Arnaud's Column

This is a response to the latest column by Arnaud de Borchgrave, who argues against a US strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. Or, actually, I guess he's arguing against an accidental war with Iran.

Anyway, you should read his article first. Here is my response. Blogwar in the Blogosphere - Alternate Version The time: 5 years from today. None of what de Borchgrave predicted has happened. The US was stared down by Russia and China, and allowed Iran's nuclear projects to continue unscathed.

At noon, Tel Aviv disappears in a nuclear fireball. Israel doesn't bother to ask who did it, because no country is going to accept responsibility for the 21st century's first act of genocide. The problem for Israel, now facing its most dire existential crisis in a long history of dire existential crises, is that it has to respond to survive as a nation. They cannot wait around for their next-biggest city to evaporate into a radioactive cloud. The Jews acquiesced the last time this happened, and by God, they are not going to do so this time.

The nuclear weapon that destroyed Tel Aviv came from one of three places: Iran, Pakistan or Syria (having destroyed one of their weapons reactors in 2007, Israel knows they have a nuke program). All three nations deny any involvement and condemn the loss of life, but point out that it is Israel's policies that have brought it so much hate, and it only has itself to blame. Israel doesn't know who did it, so they have a choice, and its a bad choice. Either do nothing and wait for the next nuke, and the next one and the next one until there is no more Israel, or attack everyone who could have done it.

They launch fifteen of their 150 nuclear missiles at suspected nuclear facilities in Iran, Pakistan and Syria. Let's say the Israelis are really, really nice about it and they don't target population centers. Still, the blasts and the fallout from this little middle-eastern nuclear war kill, oh, ten million people in Israel, Syria, Iran, Pakistan and anywhere downwind from the detonations, which includes most of the middle east and India.

Does anyone believe that a religious fanatic who has declared that Israel should be "wiped off the map", who has spent billions of dollars of his country's money supporting terrorism against Israel for no other reason than because it is full of Jews, is incapable of doing this? But back to our future scenario.

On the bright side, and most importantly, the U.S. didn't get its hands dirty, the Chinese still had cheap oil (well, until Iran's oil fields started glowing in the dark), and the Russians can still pretend they are a world power because they stopped America from stopping a religious fanatic from getting an atom bomb. Golf clap.