The Lapdogs Of War


Iranian General Hossein Kan’ani Moghadam announced Tuesday that his nation’s military has begun digging mass graves for our troops should the United States decide to level the Persian soccer pitch.  Speaking through the Fars “news agency” (described by London’s Daily Mail as semi-official, and clearly neither more nor less credible than MSNBC) Moghadam said:


Analysts suggest General Moghadam is saber-rattling, which is either silly (the 101st Airborne v. the Revolutionary Guard is Mike Tyson v. Marvis Frazier stuff), stupid (he’ll die) or both (his army will get beat like the French and he’ll still die.)

Ever since 2005 Seymour Hersh has been screeching about American plans to attack Iran.  While there is undoubtedly an American battle plan for the Islamic dictatorship—as there are similar contingency plans for attacks on every credible threat on the planet—no such effort has come to pass.  And with Barack Obama’s Presidency flailing like Keith Olbermann searching for talent, no such effort is likely to materialize. 

Not that I would mind if the Navy fired a cruise missile up Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s tailpipe, but Iran has been funding Islamofascist terrorism for the better part of three decades—so what would be the point?  Turning Teheran into a parking lot just to whack the world’s best-armed midget isn’t what I would describe as a good deployment of military resources.  That’s swatting a fly—with an F-18.

But here’s a question for the class:  even though we CAN beat Iran like a rented mule; SHOULD we?  Iran is developing weapons of mass destruction—the actual, nuclear kind.  Iran is a terrorist state.  But Saddam Hussein gassed, murdered and tortured hundreds of thousands.  The Taliban and al-Qaida have declared war on everyone who thinks women look better in clothing smaller than king-size bed sheets.  And we can’t agree on dropping them to the canvas long enough to let our military deliver a knockout punch.

Instead, duplicitous pontifications and politicians whom I wouldn’t trust with a potato gun have turned both Iraq and Afghanistan into multi-billion dollar reality TV shows.

In 1985, Studs Terkel won a Pulitzer for his World War II history “The Good War.”  Terkel, an otherwise unremarkable blowhard, doubtless chose the title as a clever allegory for the dichotomous American view of warfare. 

Only the most depraved or combative think of war as “good.”  In the utopian ideal, civilized humans would settle their differences with methods which didn’t involve artillery.  I’m the first guy to say I’d be a lot happier if the entire ruling class of Iran suffered simultaneous coronaries from getting overheated at a flash of ankle at Sid Sharia’s Burka Bar.  But that’s unlikely, so how long do we allow a circus freak like Ahmadinejad to shake his little fist before we pop him in the snoot with an AC-130?

While there may not be such a thing as a “good war,” there IS such a thing as a “good” war.  If a creepy Austrian with a terrible barber manages to convince an industrially-capable European nation to march across the continent in support of a world vision which includes gas ovens for 6 million to 12 million people—war is the only answer.  The alternative—which includes living on a planet controlled by thin, pale and excessively neat people who think the “Horst Wessel Song” is groovy—is too horrible to contemplate.

I am not preaching total war on a planetary scale.  It costs good men and women their lives and, less importantly, it costs money.  Moghadam is a lunatic in a third rate army which ended up sending 9-year-olds to get gassed at the front during a decade-long conflict with the other-kind-of-muslim lunatic next door.

Bellicosity from the world’s almost-nuclear junior varsity gives me pause.  Nearly 70 years after we took Hitler and Hirohito out behind the woodshed, we still have plenty of crazy in the neighborhood.  Putting aside our massive economic issues, major problems with border security and Nancy Pelosi, after seven decades we still can’t figure out when the next good war will be.

Since politics kept us from tossing al-Qaida, the Taliban and Islamofascism in general on the same historical ash heap to which we consigned the bad guys of WWII, I’m going to say no way on Iran. 

Some people DO deserve killing, but these guys aren’t worth the bullet.  


Personal Liberty

Ben Crystal


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