Jeff Goldberg deems this dimwitted column arguing that Muslims have a proclivity for "national suicide" to be convincing. In fact, as Farley and Drum argue it's silly. In particular, anyone who really thinks that Saddam Hussein "could have avoided war and conquest by allowing UN inspectors to search for (the apparently non-existent) weapons of mass destruction wherever they wanted" is so far out of touch with reality that you'd have to worry he was the delusional fanatic with whom no compromise is possible.
Beyond that, all these efforts to convince people that the Iranian leadership is longing for its own destruction are based, it seems to me, on trying to get people to forget that the Iranian Revolution is almost thirty years old. Sure, in 1981 we might have needed to guess about whether or not the revolutionary leadership was suicidal and self-destructive, but surely the fact that they've never chosen martyrdom over survival over the past several decades is dispositive here.
Anyways, check out this column.
Yes, it's a particularly idiotic thesis in the case of Iran. It goes all the way back to those who argued that Ayatollah Khomeini provoked the United States because he wanted be a martyr. As was often pointed out in response, religious leaders with ample opportunities to fulfill their martrydom complexes don't often survive into their seventies.
It's amazing that this idiocy survives. Ahmadinejad may [or may not] be nuts, but the state he controls is a very rational actor.
Posted by Gene | May 23, 2008 1:12 PM