Iran’s nuclear program and the Cult of Paranoia

Another day, another helping of potential doomsday scenarios courtesy of Iran. You’d think if these guys didn’t want the west threatening them with war and invasion, they’d stop poking the hornet’s nest. But they keep a-doin’ it, and now the announcement comes that enrichment is up to 20%, apparently because they couldn’t come to an agreement with the US.

And of course, with an announcement re: Iran’s nuclear activities, comes the inevitable causes for concern.

The West fears Iran could use the enriched uranium to produce an atomic bomb, while Iran — a major oil producer — insists its nuclear program is intended solely for peaceful purposes.

“If the international community will stand together and bring pressure to bear on the Iranian government, I believe there is still time for sanctions and pressure to work, but we must all work together,” said U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, speaking at a news conference in Italy on Sunday with his Italian counterpart, Ignazio La Russa.

There’s a reason I used the phrase “cult of paranoia” in the title of this post.

Obviously if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would give them a bargaining chip that, frankly, I don’t trust any of their leaders with (I’m not sure I trust our leaders with it, but I digress). Be that as it may, we don’t have any evidence of nuclear weapons proliferation beyond that they’re enriching uranium, which is a little like arresting a girl for prostitution because she’s out after midnight and possesses a vagina.

The problem is that the “take out Iran NOW” crowd has already decided what the conclusion is. To them, we aren’t dealing with an uncertainty here, we know that Iran is trying to make a nuclear weapon and we know they’ll either drop it on DC or Jerusalem, they’re just hiding it, so we have to do something before they get the chance to start a war.

It’s a case of starting with a conclusion and fighting for justification and evidence (or just going without), which is how this whole “war on terror” thing has always run. We knew Iraq had WMD’s, we know everyone picked up on the battlefield is guilty, we know that there are sleeper cells in the US that cannot be thwarted conventionally.

And so a whole school of thought has sprung up, a “by any means necessary” ideology wherein nothing is out of bounds because danger lies under every rock and behind every corner. As he usually does, Glenn Greenwald put it well in discussing the whole Yemen dealie.

As we well know from the last eight years, the authoritarians among us in both parties will, by definition, reflexively justify this conduct by insisting that the assassination targets are Terrorists and therefore deserve death.  What they actually mean, however, is that the U.S. Government has accused them of being Terrorists, which (except in the mind of an authoritarian) is not the same thing as being a Terrorist.

That belief extends to nations as well as people. Someone gets accused of something threatening to the US, people think that means acting as though they’re guilty of it is justified. Guilty until proven innocent and all that.

I’d hoped this would have died out when Obama came in, but so far we haven’t gotten there. It’s another grand example of “conventional wisdom” that the right has managed to force onto all of us.