Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Hear the sabres rattling

According the Ezra Levant, the Publisher of the Western Standard magazine, a strong case exists for going to war with Iran, which he characterizes as a bunch of "hotheads and nutbars". Levant's argument is echoed by a clutch of like-minded, right-wing commentators who were interviewed by Richard Foot of CanWest News Service for a column that went over the wires today and will likely appear in most CanWest papers. Their view is that the world must smash Iran else it wake up one morning with a North American city flattened by an Iranian nuclear weapon.

“The Iranian regime is not bound by any concepts of international law,” says Levant. “The Soviets were containable by the notion of mutually assured destruction. Ahmadinejad regards himself as a messianic figure who exults in the death cult of Islamo fascism. You cannot use statecraft to fence in someone like him.

“They’re not just a rational evil like the Soviets were. “They’re an irrational evil. Together with the leader of North Korea — the last two pieces of the ’axis of evil’ — they’re a collection of hotheads and nutbars.”

If you thought that was an extreme view (not surprising from someone who hosts the Shotgun Blog, as wild a collection of spitting-mad and vituperative opinion from the far right as you're likely to see), just look at what some of the other commentators quoted said:
“If Iran gets nuclear warheads, we will surely awaken to a morning much like Sept. 11, 2001, when it will have been cities, rather than merely buildings, that have been immolated,” says David Harris, a former agent with CSIS, Canada’s spy agency, who is now an Ottawa-based senior fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, a national security lobby group. “I don’t know how far they are from that ability,” says Harris. “It could be decades, or it could be months.”
“At the end of the day, Hitler pushed the West so far it realized it had no choice but to fight, but it avoided doing so as long as it could, and tried to rationalize its avoidance by thinking that negotiations would make everything OK,” says David Bercuson, director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary. “The trouble is, Hitler’s formula was not negotiable. And I think we’re at that same point with Iran.”
“Iran’s mullahs are about to produce their first home-built nuclear weapons this year [says U.S. political author Thomas Holsinger]. If we permit that, many other countries, some of whose governments are dangerously unstable, will build their own nuclear weapons to deter Iran and each other from attack,” he wrote. “This rapid and widespread proliferation will inevitably lead to use of nuclear weapons in anger, by terrorists and by fearful and unstable Third World regimes, at which point the existing world order will break down.”

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

OK, so who's really the nutbar here?

3:23 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

War with Iran? I say only on one condition---that we honor Ezra Levant by putting him at the head of the first wave of attackers, preferably wearing a bull's eye.

And since when did this blog begin republishing sketchily researched hate literature anyway?

4:16 pm  
Blogger D. B. Scott said...

I reject utterly the charge that this is hate literature and the implication that it was wrong to make people aware of it.

It is a viewpoint being promulgated by the publisher of a largish (25,000 circ) and (arguably) influential western magazine backed by the people who form the current Prime Minister's most fervent supporters and base.

And it is being syndicated by one of this country's large media oligopolies. Seems like two good reasons to let people know what is being said, without in any way endorsing the views.

5:40 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

When are people going to wake up and realize that you just can't believe everything you read in the media specially in the Western Standard. Wasn't the same US government claiming that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq! Should we once again be sucked into political propaganda? As far as Ezra Levant goes I think he is desperate to get some publicity for his magazine. After all this is the same publication that decided to publish the cartoons claiming that this was the big story of the month.

8:30 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You had me at 'oligopolies'

9:07 am  

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