I've been mulling this one for a while now, but I can't sit by and let it pass:
Reuters News Service, April 22, 2008:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton warned Tehran on Tuesday that if she were president, the United States could "totally obliterate" Iran in retaliation for a nuclear strike against Israel.
Yes we could. We really, really could. We've got the goods to do it, just sitting in bins out in New Mexico or wherever.
And, depending on the school you go to, this kinda talk works wonders. Think about how your guts turned to goo when the biggest, toughest kid on the playground threatened to fuck you up. Whatever you were doing to piss him off, you probably stopped doing it in a heck of a hurry.
Statements like this have a uniquely American ring to them. One thinks of Teddy Roosevelt, and JFK declaring himself a Berliner, and Ronald Reagan intoning, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!"
And the wall came tumbling tumbling down. So there's historic precedent for making use of threats of O -- BLUE -- teration.
Candidly, however, I expected a more reasoned response from a female presidential candidate, one who is usually so well-informed in her remarks.
We know from having obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki how a small nuclear strike looks before, during, and after. And we know from the Chernobyl meltdown how a radioactivity leak looks before, during, and after. The thing about this obliterative weaponry is that it is non-discriminitory and can waft on the prevailing winds hither and yon.
Iran nukes Israel, the fallout streams westward. The U.S. nukes Iran, you'll likely have dead babies stretching all the way to Myanmar ... where ... unrelated, I guess ... we're all wondering what we can do to help???
Grand talk of wars and rumors of wars is the hallmark of the Republican Party. Is there any way that a Democratic candidate can get the job done in a different way, perhaps without resort to words like "obliterate?"
I'm sorry, but when I hear that word, the image that comes to mind is Auschwitz. "Obliterate" is a Final Solution kinda word.
As for the possibility that Iran will nuke Israel, we at "The Gods Are Bored" feel pretty strongly that the average Iranian is probably as astonished at his or her bad leadership as many of us are here at home. We can only -- and always -- hope that cooler heads prevail.
Voter in search of a cooler head, I remain,
ANNE
THE MERLIN OF BERKELEY SPRINGS
6 comments:
Well, hell, of COURSE we'd nuke Iran into a glass puddle if they (and we could PROVE it) set off a nuclear device in Isreal, and frankly, they'd deserve it, but yes, I think threatening someone insane enough to actually do something stupid like nuke Isreal is not going to have that much of an effect, to tell the truth. Crazy people tend to remain crazy despite any threat to their physical well being, especially people who think that dying as martyrs get them big bonus points in the hearafter such as 72 virgins. The threat did not have to be made in public. A simple message sent by diplomatic channels would have sufficed.
Candidates who try to score points on the road to the white house by catering to blood lust bother me.
Heck, Hillary just wanted to be one of the boys.
Really, why does every presidential race turn up no one worth voting for?
Speaking of obliteration, I had a post at my web site earlier today about a series of jarring photos of the aftermath in Hiroshima that were recently released for the first time. I think that Hillary is like far too many other people in this country, in that she doesn't really understand the horrors of nuclear war, or for that matter war in general, because we've all been dealt a sanitized version of the wars this country has particiated in. Especially the war in Iraq. But the atomic bombings in Japan are also a good example - most people know that this happened, and that thousands of people died, but they don't really appreciate the gravity of it. If she wants to talk about obliterating people, she should take a look at these photos and others like them, even from places like Dresden that weren't nuked but were firebombed with complete disregard for human life, and get a better understanding of what obliteration involves.
Hillary has been such a disappointment generally, especially on foreign policy. She's a product of the DLC, and they have this hairbrained idea that in order to win elections, Democrats have to be more stupidly belligerent than the Repubs or they risk looking weak. What I like about Obama is that he doesn't buy into this bullshit. I do think he would take military action when it's needed, but at least from my point of observation, he doesn't feel the need to go around swinging his cock like McCain and Hillary have done. Okay, bad metaphor...
But more generally, Hillary seems to have decided that she needed to morph into a Republican to win. Which really doesn't make sense when you consider how much most people hate the Republicans these days. Thankfully, I think she's just about played out, and we should have a nominee in the next couple of weeks.
big tex:
You are correct, about it being a bad metaphor--for McStrangelove, anyway.
Let us not forget why the Iranians elected President Ahmawho'syourdaddy? In the run-up to the Iranian elections that year, George Wimpkins Bushit was threatening the Iranians and scared them into electing the asshole. They wanted to hav a crazy fucker who was crazier than our crazy fucker.
democommie
The rich monkeys and the political monkeys and the religious monkeys are just a lot of stupid monkeys playing games with each other.
I'm just going to sit back and watch it all with a beer.
personally i think even the most crazy mother fucker ruler of the most fucked up country is not going to nuke anyone..they know that the return volley will wipe them off the map..no one wants to get wiped off the map..Im more worried about biological wars...that are sneaky and can do so much damage before anyone knows what happens..and no way to tell who did it to retaliate...
great post by the way...as always..
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