Suppose we discover a new species on this planet or any other planet where the young are begotten and raised to accomplish a specific task; one that is designed for each individual at birth. As long as the individual follows the course for which it was designed, it is allowed to go on living and to function normally. But if the individual deviates from its course, it is cloned and made to disappear. The clone is then made to pick up the task from the point at which its predecessor left it. This would be a weird planet; don't you think? Well, we have something like it right here on Planet Earth. The thing is that the species is not a biological one; it is a philosophy of life you will find to be weird.
If you want to see how that works, you will need to look at the Bret Stephens column that was published in the Wall Street Journal on March 21, 2012. It is titled: “The Bogus Iran Intelligence Debate” and subtitled: “Ignore the media leaks. Tehran's nuke program is hiding in plain sight.” At first, you may get the feeling that this is a “Road to Damascus” sort of conversion but after devoting a little more thought to the subject, you will find that the reality is a lot more profound than that.
To set you on the road to thinking that he converted from an old position to a new one as a result of a chance encounter he had with an expert on building nuclear bombs, Stephens says the following right at the start of his article: “To better understand the debate … it helps to talk to someone who has built a nuclear bomb.” He goes on to describe that encounter and what sounds like the factors that may have contributed to his conversion. And by the time you reach the middle of the article, he hits you with this: “In other words, having a debate about the quality of our Iran intelligence is mostly an irrelevance”. And you shout it to yourself: History is dead, long live history.
But was this a conversion or was it a species of philosophy that has been with us for as long as there was a Jewish cause to fight for, and Jews like Bret Stephens to fight for it? In fact, one of the most avid participants in the debate he now calls irrelevant has been none other than the man himself, the very man that has just killed the thing. So you wonder why he did it, and his answer pops at you: “The serious question … isn't whether Iran will … It's whether Iran should be allowed...” But this is exactly what the old debate was about, for heaven's sake! Yes, he says. In fact he corroborates your observation with this: “That is the essence of the debate the Obama administration is now having...”
It is natural that when you see someone kill his own baby, you want to go back in memory to a moment when someone that looked like he enjoyed a normal state of mind suddenly flipped to a state that made him commit what amounts to a moral infanticide. Apparently that fateful moment came about when Stephens asked the bomb building expert how hard it would be to build a nuclear bomb, and the man responded that anyone can build it. This brought to the mind of Stephens the old reports that were put out by the various US intelligence agencies and by Israel's own Mossad to the effect that Iran had not decided to pursue a weapon. And then it happened that one of the most important founding fathers of the old history flipped and decided to kill his own progeny. And so he planted the following dagger in its heart: “All this sounds like it matters a whole lot. It doesn't.”
Now that the narrative of the old history is very dead and safely buried deep underground, Stephens begins to nurture the new narrative that will replace it. He does it by creating an analogy. It is the story of a drinker that is holding a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a glass full of ice in the other. What is important, says the columnist, is not that we try to guess whether he will pour himself a drink; it is to deprive him of the opportunity to do so in the first place. And this is where you shout it to yourself: The new narrative is an exact clone of the old narrative. Long live the baby narrative – at least till such time that the founding father decides to replace it with Clone the Third.
Now that he has a new baby which is an exact replica of the old baby, he goes on a badmouthing rant to destroy the old and to make a new crucible inside of which the new baby will sit, play and grow in comfort. And this is how the author of the article begins the charge against the old: “That's what was so misleading about the 2007 NIE, which relegated to a footnote the observation that...” And this is how he places the new baby in its crucible: “To have sufficient quantities of enriched uranium is … the whiskey of a nuclear-weapons program. By contrast, 'weaponization' … is merely the glass.”
Now that the baby is safe and living in comfort, it needs to be nurtured. The most important part of nurturing a baby being to feed it, Stephens does that, showing all the care of a good parent. But guess what he feeds it? You won't believe this; he feeds it the same old stuff he rejected earlier. Here it is: “And thanks … to the regular reports of the international Atomic Energy Agency, the world doesn't need to rely on spies or shady sources to figure out just how much uranium the Iranians have enriched.” Same old, same old. And this is when he comes up with the sentence you see in the subtitle of the article.
And now that he is back to square one, standing side by side with a baby that has grown muscular enough to step into the arena and do battle with him, Bret Stephens takes on the President of the United States. He throws the first punch: “The president has stated flatly that he won't allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Good. But Israelis worry...” and he rehashes the same old argument. He continues the fight by attacking the President's Administration not only because of the policy it has adopted -- one that he regards as being inferior to the policy of Israel -- but also for the way that the Administration is fighting this battle. He complains that it is done by leaks to the media.
But he throws his strongest attack yet against the intelligence community which he accuses of having ideological axes to grind when it is supposed to be neutral, and supposed to provide only “disinterested analysis” for people like himself and the Israelis who will then tell the American Administration what to do to help them grind their own ideological axes. Nothing can be more Jewish than this, of course, unless it is more of the same. It is that he has advice to give, as well as insults to hurl at America's spooks. He tells them that they should be seen and not heard from because they are like English children.
And now that he flattened the whole landscape, and there is nothing left against which to lien and make the big decisions involving war and peace -- where the weapons of mass destruction could possible be used -- he says that there is one sure-fire test by which to make such a decision. It is also the one thing that is so simple, even a spook can grasp, he adds. Here it is folks: “...consider that a regime that can take a rock in its right hand to stone a woman to death should not have a nuclear bomb within reach of its left.”
If you wonder who that may be, you only need to search the religious books to see who allows the stoning of women and who does not. You will find that the Jewish bible is full of stories about stoning women that commit adultery, and that nowhere else is such a crime mentioned, let alone accepted.
If a primitive tribe somewhere in the world that may have been “educated” by Jews is still practicing this crime, it should be uneducated and reeducated to do things differently. In the meantime, the religious fanatics in Israel are multiplying, and they are forcing a return to the ancient abhorrent practices. They may well revive the practice of stoning women.
For this reason, like says Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal, we should keep an eye on Israel and not on Iran.