KRAUTHAMMER ADDENDUM. I think Ezra's comments on Krauthammer's column are apt, but surely his most dubious claims come right after the passage Ezra cites. It's straightforward, after all, that Iran's strategic position in the region would at least be strengthened by becoming a nuclear power, notwithstanding Krauthammer's stronger claims about that. Not at all straightforward (or "undeniable," in Krauthammer's words) are his exceedingly strong claims about the dangers of "permitting nuclear weapons to be acquired by religious fanatics seized with an eschatological belief in the imminent apocalypse and in their own divine duty to hasten the End of Days." He goes on: "The mullahs are infinitely more likely to use these weapons than anyone in the history of the nuclear age...Against millenarian fanaticism glorying in a cult of death, deterrence is a mere wish." This kind of talk is tough to take seriously -- "infinitely," for example, is sort of a difficult quantification to assess and verify. And these descriptions of Iran's Islamic regime simply don't jibe with that regime's actual 25-year history on the world stage. This is the Islamic version of the dubious "madman" critique of deterrance; it's impossible to definitively disprove such claims, but it's certainly wildly inappropriate to bandy about speculations in such certain and emphatic terms -- not that this is a surprise coming from Krauthammer, or from the editorial page that publishes him and is about to add Michael Gerson.
--Sam Rosenfeld
