Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

More on Preempting

More on Preempting

I have been reading rhetoric on a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear bomb making facilities. The past head of Isreal’s Mossad thinks it is a bad idea and the Chairman of our Joint Chiefs of Staff essentially agrees.

Gingrich was critical of the Chief’s view… said we should not attribute reason to some of the actors who are clearly unreasonable. Now this is an interesting statement. “If a person is unreasonable, i.e. (They do not use the scientific process in their decision making, then we ought to blow them up.) If that is the case Speaker Gingrich ought to ride the bomb like that cowboy general in the Dr. Strangelove movie.

I agree with him and I disagree. Even in Western countries the use of reason in its pure form is not a common thing. If the Speaker had applied it to his personal life he'd be carrying less baggage today. On the other hand he is correct… We assume that because we use the process (at times) that the Arabs do too…. With political leaders like Ahmadinejab we know clearly that this is not the case… so we have a range of people from scientists, who use it a lot (except weather scientists) to business men and women, who use it some, to everyday people who use it occasionally to politicians who use it only rarely.

What I am referring to is the formal reasoning process where a problem is.
defined, facts and assumptions set forth, candidate courses of action assessed and compared, conclusions reached and a plan formulated.

This doesn’t happen much anywhere, a bit more among the developed nations and to a much lesser extent in the Middle East. This is not to say that the Arabs can’t be sent to our Universities and learn the process but rather to say it hasn’t percolated down to where it is understood and accepted at the visceral level by most Arabs.

Now let me pause here to say that while they don’t understand or embrace the process in its entirety, they are intelligent enough to use some of the components.
For example they understand the “This is better than that Component.” They are perfectly capable of understanding the difference between a big semiter and a little one.

They understand the difference between weakness and strength… the difference between the Rat-tat-tat of an AK-47 and standing there with noting in your hand but the proverbial “You know What.” They understand the difference between posturing and actually carrying through with an action…. They might not understand yet how to optimally use the tools of the full reasoning process but they are not totally brain dead and have managed to get by for a long time.

So Gingrich is right in a sense… they don’t think the way we do, but they aren’t clueless either. Mutually assured Destruction was not what I would call a “Reasonable” policy but it worked after a fashion…

It will probably work with the Arabs and if it doesn’t then a preemptive strike is just kicking the ball down the road. If they are prevented from building a bomb, what will keep them from purchasing one eventually, or getting one as a gift from a sympathetic ally? Better the problem come to a head while the capability is in its infancy then later on when it becomes better developed. Blowing up Iran is only going to create more problems than it solves…

Israel will lose the moral high ground…. You laugh but the Jews have been playing the Moral card for the last fifty Years… and snapping it loudly. Remember that six million died in WW 2. Now they want to pull the trigger first over an assumption and start a landslide of chaos… in which some really bad things are certain to happen, things worse than doing nothing.

Don’t do it is all that I can say….Preemption is a really bad idea.