Michael Coren, Nuke Iran

As one fifth columnist to a dumbass columnist

By Gary Reid

Wednesday, September 6, 2006

Count me in as one of the"usual suspects." In this case, I join the ranks of "post-Christian churches (whatever they are), the Marxists, the fellow travelers and fifth columnists" who Toronto Sun columnist, Michael Coren, dismisses as irrelevant to his completely inane call to arms in a recent column: We should nuke Iran.

I will paraphrase in italics what Coren said.

We have to drop the atom bomb on Iran.

Who is"we"? It couldn't be Canada, we don't have one. Is it China or France? Could "we" be Pakistan, the only Muslim nation with nuclear weapons? Would it be Israel, the one country with a really good reason to do it? Who is he talking about?

We have only weeks to do this, if we are to preserve world peace.

I love that -- atomic war shall bring us peace -- very Orwellian.

Of course it would a limited, tactical use, with minimal civilian casualties, because it would target only military installations.

What claptrap.

First, nobody knows whether such a scenario is realistic, since such use of nuclear weapons has never been put into practice.

Second, it should be obvious from the recent Israeli-Hezbollah dust-up that Hezbollah managed to survive the onslaught because it successfully hid its military infrastructure amongst the civilian population. Who trained Hezbollah? If you said Iran, give yourself a cigar.

Third, the Western powers do not have accurate intelligence about where Iran hides its nuclear technology and much of its military infrastructure. They cannot target such locations to minimize civilian casualties. A massive nuclear strike would be the only possibility-- and since this could be done at any time, even after a first strike by Iran, why do we only have weeks to do it?

Fourth, nuclear fallout from the atmosphere cannot be controlled and might not only contaminate a large part of Iran, which has significant oil deposits that could be rendered useless, but might drift into neighbouring countries and affect the health of their populations. Chernobyl's fallout blanketed all of Western Europe, and that was just a nuclear plant meltdown in the middle of the Soviet Union.

Fifth, unless you take out all of Iran, how will you achieve world peace if the balance of the Iranian population swears vengeance for the next thousand years on the infidels that rained such death on their people? Not to mention all the like-minded Muslims in other countries -- or worse -- those within our own.

This nuclear option is the only sensible one since diplomacy, kindness and compromise have failed to move Iran off its stated goal of all-out war against anybody it considers an enemy.

When did the Western powers ever offer Iran kindness? The United States armed Saddam Hussein and encouraged him to wage an 8-year war against Iran, in which there were more than a million casualties, mostly Iranian. Since then, Western powers have tried to ignore Iran as much as possible.

The current theocracy has been running the state since 1979. Other than Iraq, there can't have been too many countries Iran considers its enemies, since it has not waged all out war against anybody, including Israel. Hezbollah is Lebanese, not Iranian, and it only gets 2% of its funding from Iran.

Comparison to the Nazis in the 1930s is inaccurate, since Hitler had the large aggressive armies of France and the Soviet Union on his borders. Iran does not.

This is partly true. Iran does not have a large, aggressive French army on its borders.

But, neither did Hitler. The French army he faced was completely defensive, not aggressive, which is why it got overrun by the Germans in short order.

Further, the United States military, the most aggressive and the most deadly, with a number of advance bases in Iraq, squats over the border from Iran. Not to mention that nearby Russia has been waging a brutal military campaign against a Muslim province, Chechnya. And NATO is running around Afghanistan mowing down Muslim extremists.

One is left to wonder why Iran would be at all concerned about its borders and thinking about getting an atom bomb.

Then, after having admonished us to not draw comparisons with the Nazi situation, Coren proceeds to do exactly that, calling people like me the kind who supported appeasement with Hitler in 1938.

The big difference between now and then is that the world wasn't dealing with the consequences of nuclear bombs in the 1930s.

These weapons are in a class by themselves and should never be employed, if ever, until the circumstances clearly leave them as the only alternative --not the best, not the better, not the optimal, not the first, just the only.

Nothing about the Iranian situation suggests that the world has come to this pass.

What Coren's column does imply, by its notable absence of progressive thinking, is that the time has come to have an international agreement amongst the nuclear club and its wannabe members, like Iran, to get rid of these evil, unnecessary tools of mass destruction, once and for all.

Gary Reid is a freelance writer and a public affairs consultant. Gary Reid, Opinion 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002