George Will—or “George F. Will,” as they like to call him at the Gabbing Geezer—when he isn’t sniffing and harrumphing over the “unraveling” of the Obama administration, sometimes gets it right. A case in point is
a recent column on the administration’s recent agreement with Iran regarding its nuclear program. After directing a variety of sneers and snickers at the administration’s supposed naiveté—since George is smarter than the entire State Department—he finally concedes that even in the worst worst case scenario (which he in fact regards as a given)—that Iran goes ahead and develops an atomic bomb—well, things won’t be so bad. Or, at least, things won’t be as bad as they would be if we took effective action to prevent that from happening, because the only truly effective action would be for the U.S. to invade and conquer “a nation with almost three times the population of Iraq and nearly four times the size.” So if you don’t like the president’s policy, Sparky, says George, are you up for something about three or four times worse than the recent “disastrous war with Iraq”?
Afterwords
George may have gotten some blowback from the neoconians once so rife on the pages of the Wash Post editorial page, because he follows this column with another on the same subject, drawing, in part for cover, heavily on the writings of Mideast “expert” Kenneth M. Pollack (George is nothing if not a respecter of middle initials). George quotes approvingly from Ken’s harrumphs regarding the low moral character of Iran, noting, for example, that the Iranians invented the word “Manichean” (okay, two thousand years ago, but still). Yet, for all that, says Ken, the Iranians are not really “insane millenarians.” In fact, they’re not even “imprudent,” putting them one, or two, or three, up on George Bush and Dick Cheney, not to mention Charles Krauthammer.
Your harrumphs are forgiven, George, as long as you keep calling the U.S. invasion of Iraq “disastrous.” Because it totally was.
