Well, in case you were wondering, we now know why Danielle Pletka, distinguished senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, hasn’t been found in an alley with a bullet in her head: she isn’t important enough to kill! Because murder works!
Okay, Danielle isn’t quite that brazen. In her recent, unfortunately (or not) paywalled article for Foreign Policy, Why Does Israel Keep Assassinating Iranian Officials? Because It Works., makes the case for murder as an essential part of Israel’s foreign policy toolkit, which is not to say, of course, that the U.S. should practice it. Hey, Israel and the United States, two different countries! So, totally different! Totally different! Danielle isn’t saying that she ever murdered anyone! Why would you even think that? Even though she is Andrew H. Siegal Professor in American Middle Eastern Foreign Policy at Georgetown University's Center for Jewish Civilization (and Murder).
The indispensable Daniel Larison, at his substack blog Eumonia, strikes a skeptical pose regarding Danielle’s enthusiasm for wet work:
As with anything a government does, when someone says that something “works” our first question should always be, “works to do what?” Do sanctions work? If the goal is to impoverish and starve people, then they work very well in their cruel, sadistic way. If it is to achieve constructive changes in policy or changes in regime, they usually never work. The same goes for assassinations, as our government’s practice of targeted killing with drones should have already taught us long ago. Killing someone at the top can temporarily disrupt a terrorist organization, but in practice it tends to make that organization more dangerous and radical. Leaders can be replaced, and others will step up to fill the role that the dead men had. Short-term “successes” often lead to long-term failure. The entire “war on terror” is a huge, bloody cautionary tale that you cannot kill your way out of these problems.
I’m afraid I’m just a little bit more skeptical of Danielle’s intentions than Daniel. You see, I think Danielle and her bloody minded (bloody minded and bloody fingered) crew aren’t trying to “kill [their] way out of these problems”. Rather, they’re trying to kill their way into these problems, permanently—seeking to maintain the threat of war between “them” and “us” at a nice, comfortable temperature of 211° F forever.
1984, George Orwell’s classic dystopia, never goes out of style (unfortunately), but while Orwell’s classic dissection of the totalitarian mind, symbolized by the mythical figure of “Big Brother”, has never been forgotten, few remember the ultimate justification for Big Brother, the fictitious war between three superstates, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia—which, of course, in no way correspond to the U.S., Russia, and China. Of course not.
Well, they don’t. No one believes that Israel and the U.S. constantly harass Iran and murder its civilians because they want the Iranians to hate and fear us and constantly resist our attempts to expand our influence in the Middle East at their expense just so that people like Danielle Pletka can have important jobs and go to important conferences and eat fine lunches, do they? A few centuries ago Alexander Pope mused that “wretches hang so that jurymen may dine”. Nowadays, Iranian wretches get blown to bits so that Danielle Pletka can lunch on poached salmon and roasted vegetables.
Afterwords
Paul Nitze, the true godfather of the Neocons (International Edition), devoted his life to preventing any relaxation of international tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, rallying the troops against the dread outbreak of detente under Richard Nixon with unfortunately almost complete success, establishing as a fundamental tenet of Republican foreign policy that no agreement signed by the Soviet Union should be honored by the U.S., because the Soviets would never sign an agreement that did not advantage them and disadvantage the U.S., something that was manifestly untrue, but never mind. It is “interesting” that Nitze, after fighting the good fight against peace for decades, suddenly, in 1982, at age 75, on the verge of retirement, took a “walk in the woods” with Soviet Ambassador Yuliy Kvitinsky, outlining proposals for, well, détente on steroids, that later bore fruit in the form of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed by President Reagan in 1987 causing a still-youthful (46) George F. Will to bellow “Reagan has accelerated the moral disarmament of the West—actual disarmament will follow”—the only time on record that George was ever wrong.
Well, Danielle is 55 (55 with a stunning perm). So, peace in 20 years, more or less? Sounds good!
