Aerial view of Nagasaki bomb
The increasing likelihood that the Iran Deal is going through has fostered desperation among some of its opponents. And they’re bringing up… Hiroshima. In a positive light!
First, George Jonas in the National Post last week, on why nuking Hiroshima was necessary and why the west should be prepared to do it again:
Dropping the bomb is a harsh but possible method of stopping proliferation; banning the bomb through international treaties is not. Ban-the-bomb campaigns and negotiated agreements ensure only that the most aggressive and fanatical regimes possess the most destructive weaponry.
Negotiated agreements– that’s about Iran. Jonas is a big supporter of Israel.
So is Bret Stephens. The neoconservative true believer has been campaigning against the Iran Deal, and never lacking for certitudes, went to Hiroshima last week for the Wall Street Journal to discover that Japan is thriving today because it went through the necessary horror of being nuked. Who knew!
The bomb turned the empire of the sun into a nation of peace activists…
Modern Japan is a testament to the benefits of total defeat, to stripping a culture prone to violence of its martial pretenses… It is a testament, too, to an America that understood moral certainty and even a thirst for revenge were not obstacles to magnanimity. In some ways they are the precondition for it…
There are lessons in this city’s history that could serve us today, when the U.S. military forbids the word victory, the U.S. president doesn’t believe in the exercise of American power, and the U.S. public is consumed with guilt for sins they did not commit.
Watch the lights come on at night in Hiroshima. Note the gentleness of its culture. And thank God for the atom bomb.
There are a number of Iran dogwhistles in there. Like, the lessons that can serve us today, when the “U.S. president doesn’t believe in the exercise of American power.” And there’s the neocon doctrine, that our magnanimity toward an adversary should only follow on “moral certainty” and the “thirst for revenge.” That’s a rebuke to everyone who wants to normalize relations with Iran.
Stephens told a Christian audience two weeks ago that rather than the Iran Deal he would prefer an option in which the Congress rejects the deal and Iran goes on to pursue a nuclear bomb. “It gives the next president more options than [Obama has now].”
Stephens was on a panel at Yeshiva University when Sheldon Adelson said that President Obama should nuke Iran, in the desert, to get them to give up their nuclear program. Stephens had no objection to the comment at the time. Later he defended Adelson against the charge that he was supporting genocide, and Stephens went on to say “I’m opposed to dropping nuclear weapons in deserts or anywhere else.” He has now thought better of that position.
http://mondoweiss.net/2015/08/celebrating-columnist-insinuates
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