Cascade of gas centrifuges used to produce enriched uranium. This photo (courtesy of Wikipedia) is of the U.S. nuclear enrichment plant in Piketown, Ohio.
Or “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Murder.”
I am now and have always been of the “peace camp,” employing an activist’s zeal combined with an academic’s scholarship in support of peace and in opposition to violence and war, especially the nuclear variety. I’ve also rarely had much doubt about policies I espouse personally and recommend publicly, which makes me all the more uncomfortable as I monitor my own responses to a lengthy and disturbing article in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, titled “Will Israel Attack Iran?”
The piece was thoughtful, well-balanced, and highly informed. It laid out the major issues, reviewed much of the relevant history, discussed political as well as policy considerations, and concluded that some sort of attack was not unlikely, this year. (Gulp!) Perhaps the article was itself part of a propaganda effort designed to increase pressure on the Iranian mullahs, in hope of impressing them with the West’s resolve and in the process giving greater weight to the arguments of home-grown Iranian peaceniks … insofar as there are any.
My fear is that any sword-waving will have precisely the opposite effect. But that’s not the point I want to make here and now. Rather, it’s this: As I encountered detailed descriptions of the various successful attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists and military leaders, almost certainly conducted at the behest of Israel’s Mossad, and quite possibly with U.S. connivance … I actually found myself cheering quietly under my breath.
That’s right. Against my own judgment and expressed principles, I can’t resist a certain gut-level feeling that nuclear weapons are so horrible and the consequence of using them so intolerable, that anything—even outright assassination—is acceptable if it makes such use less likely. (I know: that’s a huge if.) I’m also quite aware of the enormous downsides attendant upon a full-scale “pre-emptive” strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, such that murdering a few key people here and there might well be a worthwhile tactic. (It’s hardly a strategy, since it’s merely a temporary stop-gap and one that is very risky as well as highly immoral. But so is just about everything connected with nuclear weapons.)
So far as I can tell, my self-surprising acquiescence in a policy of outright murder is not due to any special fondness for or defensiveness with respect to Israel. Am I pro-Israel? I suppose so, but only in the exact same sense that I am pro-Ireland or pro-Uruguay. I would mourn a nuclear attack on Tel Aviv no more and no less than I would a similar attack on Dublin or Montevideo. Or on Tehran. My grudging admiration for antinuclear shenanigans, even lethal ones, arises as a direct outgrowth of my horror at the prospect of nuclear weapons being used on anyone, at any time, a horror nurtured in turn during literally decades of fervent antinuclear activism when I immersed myself in the details of blast, burns, and radiation.
For a change, I am actually glad that I am not in the shoes of Israel’s current political and military leadership. Much as I loathe the Likud and all that it stands for, I can empathize with the anxiety attendant on making decisions based on genuine fear of annihilation on the one hand, yet with the likely consequence of immense misery and destruction on the other. Damned if they do and damned if they don’t. I desperately hope that they don’t … and accordingly, I find myself clinging to anything short of such an extremity, as the seeming lesser of evils. The ends justifying the means? Maybe so, in this case. Failing to give individual lives (Iranian victims of Mossad’s assassinations) their due as recipients of Kantian moral legitimacy? Regrettably, yes: I can’t help feeling that once people assume roles and responsibilities that threaten lives on a vast scale, they in fact have transcended the moral restraints and considerations to which they are otherwise entitled.
I truly don’t know the right course here. I’d love to see regime change in Iran, or at least, a change in their capabilities and/or intentions with respect to nuclear weapons, and I support the imposition of economic, political, and social sanctions against a government that has steadfastly refused President Obama’s willingness to “extend an open hand” if they would only “unclench their fist.” In this case, at least, I’m glad that I’m only a professor, not a policy maker. And at the same time, I’m both surprised and sad—very, very sad—to find myself lining up with a bunch of murderers and assassins.
