Second Holocaust
By Shorter Benny Morris:
Iran will inevitably use its nuclear weapons to destroy Israel, even if it doesn’t use its nuclear weapons to destroy Israel.
I wish there was more to it than that, but there you go. His analysis rests, of course, on the assumption that Iran will behave differently than any country with nuclear weapons has ever behaved, including the Soviet Union under Stalin, the People’s Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution, and North Korea under Kim Jong Il. He rejects any careful analysis of the decision-making of the Iranian state, building his argument around Ahmadinejad but failing to note that there is almost no chance that the current President of Iran will be in power when (and if) Iran develops a nuclear weapon. He notes in passing that the rest of the Iranian foreign policy elite also favors the destruction of Israel, which kind of makes me wonder why Ahmadinejad matters at all. Indeed, if Iran can destroy Israel without even using its nukes (and he approvingly cites Ephraim Sneh’s argument on the point), then I’m rather curious about the point of invoking Iranian nuclear irrationality in the first place. He asserts that Israel’s limited conventional military resources are unlikely to be capable of meeting the challenge of defeating a country with vastly inferior conventional forces, a claim I’m still trying to fathom.
Really, though, parsing through this is just pointless. Invoking the Second Holocaust isn’t meant to be a serious argument. It’s not intended to contribute to a discussion. It’s meant to justify war against Iran, and to associate anyone who rejects such an option as an accomplice to the annihilation of the Jewish people. Indeed, his real target is American critics of an attack on Iran, since he pointedly notes that only the United States has the military resources to destroy the Iranian program, and asserts that American isolation will be the proximate cause of the Second Holocaust. This is perhaps a better Shorter Benny Morris:
If you oppose an Israeli nuclear or an American conventional strike on Iran, then you hate Jews and want them all to die.