Cold War?

by CKR

David Sanger and Elaine Sciolino have produced a remarkably wrongheaded analysis about the United States and Iran. They get one important thing right:

This is still not a contest between nuclear powers — Iran is not believed to have a bomb yet, and intelligence estimates say that day is still 5 to 10 years away, assuming there is no clandestine effort that no one has detected.

Instead, it is an effort by the United States and some other nations to refashion the nuclear rules. They want to declare that even if Iran is legally entitled under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to enrich uranium for civilian purposes, Mr. Ahmadinejad cannot be trusted to do so. By deceiving the nuclear agency about its activities, President Bush and British, French and German officials say, Iran has given up whatever treaty rights it once enjoyed.

It’s hard to know where to start on the rest.

They produce no clear analogies to the beginnings of the Cold War. That was between two major powers. In the wildest of Iran’s fantasies, there is no way it ever stands equal to the United States.

There is a great deal of heated rhetoric, true, but heated rhetoric can hardly be considered characteristic of the Cold War and no other time.

"We have not conceded the point and we will not concede the point that Iran will become a nuclear weapons power," said R. Nicholas Burns, who directs the diplomatic talks for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

It might have been useful for Burns to have cited the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Iran, as a signatory, has given up the right to become a nuclear weapons power. The beginning of the Cold War had not yet brought us the NPT. It's not every nuclear power for himself.

Sanger and Sciolino go on to observe that both sides may have overplayed their hands (duh!), Iran’s national pride (puffed up by US rhetoric, supplied to be defied), and that the strategies have hardened each other’s positions.

I don’t know why Sanger and Sciolino settled on the Cold War as today’s simile. It doesn’t work, and it doesn’t give any insight. Maybe they’re getting as tired as I am of writing about two theocrats, Presidents Bush and Ahmadinejad, butting heads.

What keeps us writing, I guess, is that threat of nuclear war. The sick feeling I get about the US’s nuclear saber rattling is the same one I used to get during the Cold War. Maybe that’s what Sanger and Sciolino are harking back to.

Phila has dug up a relevant cartoon from those beginnings of the Cold War, one of my all-time favorites. Much better than what Sanger and Sciolino have done.