Every language I speak and every language I used to speak but have now forgotten feature a saying that goes something like this: You are looking at the world through colored glass. The saying is meant to convey the idea that what we see depends on the color of the glass we hold to our eyes. We may see the world as a rosy, carefree and joyous place or we may see it as a dark, scary and threatening place or we may see it as something between the two extremes. Of course, this is a metaphor to convey the notion that the frame of mind with which we live, plays a role akin to the goggles we may wear. An outcome of this notion is that people who are subjected to intense pressure can develop a frame of mind that will distort their vision of reality.
And so it is with Victor Davis Hanson who is a skillful writer but seems to wear glasses that impact negatively on his talent. He wrote an essay titled: “Iran's win, win, win Bomb” which was published on April 3, 2012 in the National Review Online. The essay also has a subtitle that summarizes the author's point of view. It is this: “Nuclear capability and feigned lunacy are a winning combo for a rogue regime.” But there is more to the essay than just that, including what I consider to be pivotal points of reference. I call them by this name because when modified a little, such points can make a big difference in the way that the beholder perceives the world. This being the case, a small tweaking of the facts by a propaganda machine can so impress the opinion makers of a nation and its political leaders as to influence their decisions and change the course of history.
The good thing about Hanson's essay is that he says at the very beginning how he views the subject he is writing about, and why he views it the way he does. Thus, he makes it clear that he believes Iran is enriching uranium in order to obtain a weapon, and that negotiations will not persuade it to give up trying. He adds that things are the way they are because they have to do with Iran's way of thinking. Simply put, nuclear-weapons capability has no downside and anyone who says otherwise is a liar, says the author. He then goes on to debunk a number of the reasons that diplomats usually cite to show the downside of having such capability. And this leads him to conclude that Iran will someday have the bomb; and he can think of no one who is able to deter it or that will be willing to try.
Another good thing about this essay is that it is put together with artistic flair. In fact, if it were a stage play, all of the above would constitute act one of a story in three acts. To see what this does, it is useful to remember that a well written drama is made of acts that are self contained in the sense that each can stand on its own as a block. This means, there has to be a break between one act and the other at the point where the curtain is slated to come down. And there has to be the feel of a change in direction when the curtain rises again at the start of the next act. But being part of a complete play, the acts depend on each other to tell the full story. This makes it imperative to maintain continuity from the beginning of the first act to the end of the last act. The challenge for the writer, therefore, is to make the action flow naturally and flawlessly from act to act to act despite the breaks between them and the changes in direction at the start of each act.
Thus, we see a break at the end of what can be considered act one of the story told in the Hanson essay. The writer then starts act two by hitting the reader with a change of direction that could not have been expected, but a change that still blends naturally and flawlessly with the rest of the storyline. This is how he does it: “Once a rogue regime has the bomb, it seems immune from foreign decapitation.” You see here the change in direction, and you also see how a skillful writer accomplishes a number of tasks with a single sentence. He establishes the character of the regime as being rogue, the hints that someone will want to decapitate it and he predicts that the regime will remain immune from that fate. Also, having started the sentence in general terms: “Once a rogue regime,” he tells the reader that there exist other such regimes. And this opens the door for him to tell what happened to other actors who lived through somewhat similar circumstances but met different fates. They are Pakistan, North Korea, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.
And this is where I get the feel that the goggles he is wearing are the wrong ones. It is that I see him try hard to accomplish a number of things but fails despite his great skills. Here is one bad entry: “We fought two wars against Iraq only because Saddam Hussein's nuclear-enrichment plant had been blown up earlier by the Israelis.” No, this is not true. In fact, it is absolutely false. The Americans fought the first Iraq war because they were hired by the Saudis and were paid to do a job. They fought the second Iraq war because the W in the White House was told he can better his father by “finishing” the job that the father started but failed to complete. It was to go all the way to Baghdad, which is what he did.
Moreover, Iraq never had a nuclear-enrichment plant and did not want one. What the nation was doing at the time was construct a civilian nuclear power station -- and this is what Israel bombed; a harmless commercial civilian enterprise. The mentality of World Jewry was then (as it is today) that no one in the Middle East but Israel should accumulate sufficient knowledge in the nuclear field that they can become a rival to Israel and be a threat. Thus, it was not the power station as such that they feared, it was the knowledge that would accrue to the Iraqis as a result of having it.
Also, the Americans believed – or so they stated, perhaps to deceive the world – that Saddam had WMD including nuclear bombs when they attacked him the second time. In fact, this was the reason that the W gave several times for attacking Iraq. The American military also thought that Saddam had shells tipped with radio active material, and they warned him not to use them or they will vaporize Baghdad if he did. The point is that the W would have attacked Iraq anyway which means that the claim America attacked because Israel bombed the nuclear station is a lie that someone of Hanson's caliber would have known it is. Thus, we must conclude that he lied deliberately and the question is why? The answer is that he wears bad goggles; and they are showing him a scary picture he is not talking about. What he fears is not the bomb, something he later admits in a passage that can be summarized like this: “Nuclear weapons instill fear not because one bomb is more lethal than napalm but because it could be. Today we talk of Hiroshima, not of the firebombing of Tokyo which killed more thousands.” Rather, what scares him is the religion of Islam, something he does not admit in this essay.
Hanson makes the same point about Syria but here again, you can see the fallacy of his proposition when you realize that the reason why no one has tried to intervene in the current civil war of that country is not the fear that it may have nuclear weapons but the fact that it has a powerful military which is armed with conventional weapons including a sophisticated air defense system. Even if what Israel bombed in Syria were a nuclear reactor, it would be the first time that this country had ventured in the nuclear field. If so, how long would it have taken the Syrians to produce a nuclear weapon? Considering that Syria is viewed as being way inferior to Iran whose effort in the nuclear field goes back three decades -- and has not yet produced the bomb -- to think that Syria was an immediate threat is pure absurdity. What can be concluded from all of this is that the Jewish propaganda machine in America has distorted reality so badly that a skillful writer was made to produce an essay that is technically well put together, but an essay whose historical content is mutilated in the Jewish style. It is said about computers: garbage in, garbage out. It can be said about human beings: BS in, BS out. And when it comes to writing history, no BS stinks more than the Jewish BS.
Sensing that he cannot get away with this much falsehoods without explanation, the writer tries to justify what he has done by impugning evil motives to the actors he has described. And the main motivation he advances is that: “Nukes are often hailed as proof of national prestige.” He gives the example of Dr. Khan whom, he says, is still a hero in Pakistan. Well, Einstein is still a hero to many people decades after his death not because his work suggested how to build the atom bomb but because he was a good scientist. Another example that Hanson gives is this one: “North Koreans are daily reminded how the world comes to Pyongyang's nuclear doorsteps with gifts.” But the fact is that no one has sent a smidgen of a gift since Pyongyang detonated an atom bomb. Hanson gives a third and lengthy example – this one about Iran – in which he makes several points; all of which being the sort of speculation you would attribute to someone you consider to be evil. In fact, it is what the Jewish propaganda machine has been spewing for decades; a reason why not to repeat them here.
The writer then breaks to get to the third act, at the start of which he takes a new direction like a well written drama does. He begins the act like this: “Rarely do intelligence services ever discover another nation's nuclear timetable.” What he tries to do here is reinforce an idea that was put out long ago, but one that nobody mentions openly because it is a horrifying principle to uphold. It can be put succinctly like this: “If you suspect but you're not sure, bomb anyway and claim self-defense.” And he gives several examples about Pakistan, North Korea, South Africa and Israel having eluded the “West”, having shocked it with a nuclear explosion or having left it in the dark as to whether or not they set one off.
And then the inevitable happens. The bad content of the drama overwhelms its good form and causes the collapse of the third act. Heartbreaking. You realize it when you ask this question: If the author believes in what he wrote up to this point, how could he have been so certain that Israel had the correct information when it bombed something in Iraq and something in Syria? Could it be that these were the sort of mistakes which added to the reasons why Israel is the pariah that it is in the eyes of the world? Does he, as an American, want the same fate for his country? Puzzled, you scratch your head and ask why he is doing this -- and the answer dawns on you. It is this: By the time he had reached this point, the writer must have been mentally exhausted.
You hit on this idea when you look at the opening sentence of the third act once again, and you see that it begins with the word “rarely” followed three words later by “ever”. Depending on how much rarity you ascribe to the word rarely, when you twin it with the word ever, you get either a contradiction or a redundancy. This tells you that the writer was mentally worn out by now; but it also warns you that the rest of the article will inevitably prove to be shoddy. In fact, you find it to be a compilation of old clichés, and the idle sputtering of the Jewish propaganda machine.
One idle sputtering is this: “The sad truth is that nuclear capability and feigned lunacy are a winning combo.” He gives false examples about Pakistan and North Korea when in fact; this is vintage Jewish game that only Israel has played. You see this as the secrets of the 1973 war slowly come to light. A picture is emerging about the Israelis advising President Nixon that they had a dirty nuclear bomb. They threatened that if he did not rescue them from the Egyptian advance in the Sinai, they will drop the bomb in Lake Nasser behind the Aswan Dam which will poison the Nile waters for years to come and threaten the entire civilian population. This would have been the fulfillment of the age old Jewish dream of plaguing Egypt as they still imagine has been God's promise to them. Be that as it may, the Jewish lunacy is not restricted to ancient history; it continues to this day with Israel threatening President Obama to ruin his chances at being reelected by bombing Iran if he did not order his military to do it for them.
The trouble is that if you are a writer and you start talking like this, you plunge into a cesspool of stink from which you find it difficult to come out. Everything you write after that becomes the kind of stuff which is only good for the toilet. What you do is speculate about what will happen, and you write about it with the certainty of a prophet. In short, you find yourself mouth-crapping loads of Netanyahu shit like this one: “As long as … Iran can convince the United States it would … lose Teheran in return for taking out San Francisco … the money will start flowing.” The fact is that Teheran does not need money from America; it has enough resources to lend money to needy America if China decided to end the practice. And when it comes to dressing up the cost and benefits of war, Israel is the country that advertizes how many people it is willing to lose in return for the pleasure of attacking someone.
Hanson ends the essay by saying that Iran will get the bomb if it is not preempted which is his way to suggest that it should be preempted.
All I can say is too bad this much talent was used to produce crap and little else. My advice is this: Change those goggles, Vic, and join the civilized world.