Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent exercise in arrant knavery has received a gratifying amount of pushback, thanks to Fareed Zakaria, Roger Cohen, and Daniel Larison, among others. As Zakaria emphasizes, the current imbroglio is the result of the Bush Administration’s decision, back in 2005, to torpedo an earlier agreement that would have limited the Iranian nuclear program to a fraction of what it has now become—and it’s still very much a nuclear energy program, not a nuclear weapons program, no matter how much the Washington Post is determined to lie about it.
Peter Jenkins, who was the British representative to the 2005 negotiations, and who wrecked them on behalf of the U.S., says that the Bush Administration felt that the Iranians could be bullied into abandoning their nuclear program entirely, but that’s not quite right. The Bush Administration wanted not surrender but continuing conflict. Back in the day the Reagan Administration, in its negotiations with the Soviet Union over medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe, proposed the “Zero Option” as the optimal solution for both sides. In fact, as crafter-in-chief Richard Perle ruefully admitted after the fact, the whole point of the Zero Option was that it was so disadvantageous to the Soviet Union that they would never accept it. Because the best of the best for the Reagan Administration was not peace but an endless Cold War, with crisis after crisis stretching into the future as far as the eye could see.1
And so it was with the Bush Administration,2 and so it is with the right wing in both the U.S. and Israel today. Peace is not the best of the best but rather the worst of the worst. They cannot hope to maintain themselves in power without constant conflict. An Iran that meekly announced that it was canceling its entire nuclear program would be a nightmare to the right in both countries.
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Peace ultimately did break out, in large part because Reagan, a generation older than his advisors, grew up in pre-war America and wanted to go back there. Perle, on the other hand, was devastated, and wrote a highly amusing novel, Hard Line, in which it is proved that glasnost, détente, and all those other foreign words were just a bunch of commie lies. ↩︎
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The Bush Administration stopped pursuing Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan in 2003 for similar reasons, preferring instead to invade a country that had no involvement in 9/11 and posed no threat to the U.S. Killing Bin Laden early on would have deprived the War on Terror of its entire raison d'être. And then where would we be? ↩︎
