How Conservatives Went Crazy by Paul Craig Roberts

How Conservatives Went Crazy by Paul Craig Roberts: "When I was on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, the editorials were analytical and reformist. Sometimes we broke news stories. The page’s attention to the Soviet Union was based on the rulers’ aggressive posture and suppression of civil liberties. Today the editorial page is a fount of neoconservative war propaganda. All intelligence has vanished.

Consider the Review & Outlook of February 3, which declares Iran to be 'an intolerable threat.' Iran is portrayed as a threat because the country’s new president has used threatening rhetoric against Israel. But, of course, Bush and Israel are constantly using threatening rhetoric against Iran. To avoid being regarded as a wimp by his countrymen and by the Muslim world, the new Iranian president has to answer back. It doesn’t occur to the editorialists that Iranians might see the nuclear weapons of Israel and the US as intolerable threats.

Unlike Iran, Israel does have nuclear weapons. In view of this overpowering fact, it is difficult to see why Bush and Wall Street Journal editorialists think the US needs to protect Israel from Iran.

But what if Iran were to succeed in fooling the International Atomic Energy Agency’s nuclear inspectors and develop a bomb. Might not crazed mullahs drop it on Israel or give it to an al Qaeda terrorist, who might use it to blow up Washington DC or New York?

What would Iran gain aside from its own immediate destruction? If mutual assured destruction worked for decades against a powerfully armed communist state every bit as hostile to American 'bourgeois capitalism' as Iran is to the 'Great Satan,' why would it fail against a state that is puny compared to Soviet standards?

Iran does not require nuclear weapons in order to do all the things the editorialists marshall in their case against Iran. Indeed, a US or Israeli attack on Iran is likely to precipitate the dire deeds that the editorialists fear: a Shia uprising in"