Imminent Threat Or Dramatic Failure?

By Cernig

The neocons have a new meme - Iran and Russia are the charter members of the latest incarnation of the Axis of Evil.

They had to do it - too many people were poking fun at their sudden about face - Ahmadinajhad wasn't the new Hitler, "Soul through his Eyes" Putin was! And he was the new Stalin too. So today point man Daniel Swammenthal of the WSJ (who last year wrote that the UN and EU were simply Israel-hating clubs) sets out the store for a pernicious conspiracy between Iran and Russia to nuke the West by proxy. Cold War paranoia meets Islamobigot fearmongering in a titanic clash of hawkish idiocy.

If Russia cannot be trusted in its "near abroad," there is little reason to believe it can be trusted any more in the Middle East. To the contrary. Moscow's dealings with the ruling mullahs should have long convinced Europe that Russia doesn't share its goal of stopping the Iranian bomb. How else could one explain Moscow's construction of a nuclear reactor in Iran, its delivery of advanced antiaircraft missiles to Tehran and its refusal to pass anything but the weakest economic sanctions?

...the Kremlin's support for Iran has probably bought Russia adequate insurance against the possibility of Tehran passing on some dirty bomb to a Chechen rebel.

Instead, Moscow can quite rightly assume that a nuclear Iran will hurt Western interests more than Russia's. And in Moscow's atavistic balance-of-power calculations, as long as the West loses more than Russia, Russia wins.

It is primarily Israel and American troops in Iraq that would be threatened by a nuclear Iran. Tehran's launch of a space rocket on Sunday, though, is yet another reminder that the U.S. homeland and all of Europe may at some point be within its reach as well.

Umm...about that launch. US opfficials are describing that attempt to launch a dummy satellite into orbit as a "dramatic failure" which hardly managed to leave its launch pad. Push the clock on Iran's entirely hypothetical ability to load an entirely hypothetical nuke (that US intelligence and the IAEA say they're not even trying to get) into an ICBM back a few more years into the mythycal never-never of amprphous fearmongering.

And, to apply Occam's razor for a moment - the reason Russia is supplying Iran with reactors and air-defense missiles is to make some hard currency (what, you really think those purchases weren't made in either Ecus or Dollars?) and the reason Russia is so sure Iran has no nuclear weapons program is because of its intimate involvement with both Iran's nuclear energy and defense establishments (what, you really think the Russians didn't use those sales and all those technical advisors as an opportunity to get some serious spying in?)

But back to Schwammenthal's paranoid meanderings:

The worst-case scenario of course remains that the Islamists may use the doomsday device to fulfill an apocalyptic vision of Shiite Islam. Any conflagration in the Gulf would send energy prices through the roof. And this is where Russia's stalling at the U.N. Security Council comes in. It increases Iran's chances of getting the bomb while at the same time it makes a pre-emptive Western attack on Iran's nuclear installations more likely. In either case, as a major oil and gas producer, Russia would stand to profit from the inevitable panic on the energy markets.

Oh yeah - Russia's using Iran as a proxy to nuke the Middle East's oil reserves so as to enrich itself beyond even the filled coffers it has attained via the current US-warmongering inspired high price of oil. Is the guy trying to write a Tom Clancy novel? Does he even stop to consider for a moment that such a "conflagration in the Gulf" would inevitably drag in both Russia and the US in any case, with the end result most likely a worldwide conflagration which would mean Russia's survivors would have no-one to sell their oil too?

But the rub is that even Schwammenthal's first premise is a bust. He writes that "Russia's rape of Georgia requires more than just a rethinking of how the West can protect other former Soviet states from a resurgent Kremlin." But Russia didn't rape Georgia. For a start, Georgia launched the first full-on attack with regular military strength. For a second, it was actually pretty lenient in military terms, especially given the Georgian army's emulation of Brave Sir Robin at the first sign of a real military enemy which could have allowed it to carry out so much more chaos with relative impunity.

And now it has begun a promised pullback. Unless Russia is doing this entirely because it always intended to (a definite possibility but one the hawks won't countenance) we're left with the inescapable conclusion that it's being forced to this action simply by the NATO countries threatening not to talk to it - not even sanctions required!

If so, then Russia's "imminent threat" to the West is just as much of a "dramatic failure" as the much-hyped Iranian one.

Update: Matt Yglesias gets to grips with the paranoia of the Right.

not only is Russia on the march beyond Tbilisi to Ukraine, Finland, and substantial swathes of Poland but that’s not even the transcendent issue of our time. And North Korea’s nuclear program is “the greatest challenge to U.S. security and world stability today” but that’s not the transcendent issue of our time. And Islamism is the transcendent issue of our time, but not a serious international crisis or an especially great challenge to U.S. security and world stability. Now of course there’s no way to make sense of that, because it’s not supposed to make any kind of sense. McCain just thinks that overreacting is the right reaction to everything. It’s a hysteria-based foreign policy.

Because scaring the American public out of their socks has been working for the GOP since the 50's.

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