Not every crisis equals WWII

In the age of mass media, political propaganda imitates TV melodrama. Particularly in the United States, the discussion of foreign affairs — crucial questions involving the lives of millions — follows the conventions of the action/adventure film: an idealistic American hero, a villain with his wicked henchmen, a dramatic “crisis,” redemptive violence, and, after an imagined resolution, order and tranquility restored.

Americans have been sold the identical scenario many times, most recently in Iraq. A “madman” materializes somewhere in the third world. Even when, like Saddam Hussein, the villain may have been a U.S. client, he’s depicted as motiveless and malign, an “evildoer” who “hates freedom.” His deluded followers are always painted as robot-like drones. There’s no time for critical thinking. We must destroy the brute before he attacks.

That’s not to say that the evildoer may not, in reality, be a thoroughly nasty piece of work, like Saddam. Nor that, everything else being equal, the world wouldn’t be better off without him.

Indeed, it’s their dreadful solemnity that’s the problem. To the typical pro-war pundit, Glenn Greenwald points out on his Weblog “Unclaimed Territory,” “the world is forever stuck in the 1930s. Every leader we don’t like is Adolph Hitler, a crazed and irrational lunatic who wants to dominate the world. Every country opposed to our interests is Nazi Germany.”

It’s a dangerously seductive emotion. Many of the same propagandists who drove the United States to war over Iraq’s mythical WMDs, who wrongly predicted that Iraqis would welcome American troops as liberators, and who foolishly denied that sectarian strife would impede democracy’s march, now clamor for an attack on neighboring Iran. (Persia.)

So what if the main strategic effect of the Iraq war has been to weaken Persia’s traditional Sunni Arab enemies? The same word processor warriors at the Weekly Standard are once again dragging the Nazis into it. “It is not ‘moral progress,'” William Kristol warns, “to put off serious planning for military action to a later date, probably in less favorable circumstances, when the Iranian regime has been further emboldened …”

Once again, President Bush has denied hostile intent, just as he did for many months after secretly ordering the Pentagon to draft detailed war plans against Iraq. Writing in The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh suggests that all systems are go at the White House, including possible use of tactical nuclear weapons against targets on Iranian soil. He hints that the neoconservative ideologues around Dick Cheney have deluded themselves that bombing Iran would lead to internal rebellion and the overthrow of the nation’s Islamic regime.

So how is Iran like Nazi Germany? Well, President Ahmadinejad makes screwy anti-Semitic pronouncements. But he’s no dictator. Iran’s elected president serves at the pleasure of the ayatollahs, who also command the nation’s armed forces.

Meanwhile, we’ve got them surrounded. There are U.S. bases in every country bordering Iran: Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Saudi Arabia. More than twice the size of Texas (and five times larger than Iraq), Persia would be difficult to invade and impossible to occupy.

Meanwhile, here’s what a “pre-emptive” tactical nuclear attack against a purely hypothetical threat would do: According to the National Academy of Sciences, it would incinerate more than a million Iranian men, women and children, and spread cancer-causing fallout across the region.

And on the day it happened, America, as we have known it, would cease to exist.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a national magazine award winner. You can e-mail him at [email protected].