Jeffrey Goldberg, reporting in the Atlantic on an interview with Israel’s new prime minister:
“The Obama presidency has two great missions: fixing the economy, and preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu told me. He said the Iranian nuclear challenge represents a “hinge of history” and added that “Western civilization” will have failed if Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons.
In unusually blunt language, Netanyahu said of the Iranian leadership, “You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.”
Unfortunately, our current leadership in Washington does not see this issue with anywhere near the clarity that Netanyahu does…indeed, Obama seems more upset by American nuclear weapons than by the prospect of nuclear weapons in the hands of the Iranian regime. The same is true of a substantial number of Americans, especially those who consider themselves to be political “progressives” and who work in the media and in academia.
Ralph Peters: One of the most consistently disheartening experiences an adult can have today is to listen to the endless attempts by our intellectuals and intelligence professionals to explain religious terrorism in clinical terms, assigning rational motives to men who have moved irrevocably beyond reason. We suffer under layers of intellectual asymmetries that hinder us from an intuititive recognition of our enemies.
Paul Reynaud–who became Prime Minister of France just two months before the German invasion of 1940–incisively explained what was at stake at that point in time, and why it was so much greater than what had been at stake in 1914: People think Hitler is like Kaiser Wilhelm. The old gentleman only wanted to take Alsace-Lorraine from us. But Hitler is Genghis Khan.
Obama and his acolytes seem to think we are dealing with Kaiser Wilhelm-like figures in Iran and North Korea. It is a shallow and dangerously naive way of looking at the world.
Why do people who are highly educated, and often fairly intelligent, so often fail at comprehending and predicting the behavior of thugs and fanatics?