What’s Wrong with the World

James Bowman has an interesting essay in the current New Atlantis. Its general theme the replacement in our culture of heroism by utopianism, and it is well worth a read; but I want to focus on one point near the end of the essay.

It has long been a puzzle to me why the Liberals give President Bush no credit, none, for grounding his foreign policy on Liberal principles. Few public men have ever embraced democracy with a much enthusiasm as George W. Bush; few have spoken more highly of the spread of freedom by American might; few have appealed more frequently to the liberty-loving part of man, or depended more confidently on its power to overcome other aspects of his character. This is Liberalism through and through; indeed, I will say it is the best of Liberalism. And yet Liberals hate him. Why?

Will Wilkinson and Daniel Larison have been carrying on an interesting exchange concerning, ultimately, the moral legitimacy of national borders, with relevant crosstalk by Tim Lee and Jeff Martin (aka Maximos). (And yeah, I know I left out a bunch of stuff...but you'll find it all, if you're interested).

Rather than offer a blow-by-blow account, I'll try to reduce the argument to its fundamentals:

[UPDATE 10/2 - Will Wilkinson has posted an interesting response. Unfortunately, some very local obligations will keep me from giving it the attention it deserves until this evening. In the meantime, go check it out!]

In a discussion sparked by this fine essay by James Pinkerton, a correspondent asks me to expound upon my notion of “Christendom,” which concept he is deeply skeptical of. I explained myself this way:

In a forthcoming magazine I have a long essay that ends in an emphatic call for Christian unity against the Jihad. It says nothing about the activity of the American state; but it says that we who profess Christ should strain toward unity against this menace. I believe that Christ opposes wickedness; I believe that the Jihad is wicked. Therefore I feel that it should be opposed. In my essay I make this call specifically in the context of all the Christian brothers oppressed by the Jihad. We should unite against this oppression.

This story is pretty outrageous.

The government re-introduced wolves in the 90's, telling ranchers they could not hunt them, even when the wolves are killing their cattle. The more recent "liberalization" of the law is merely that now the wolves don't have to be actually biting the livestock for the ranchers to be allowed to shoot them. How nice. You don't have to wait for your livestock to be torn by wolf teeth before shooting the wolf. Now, you get to shoot the wolf if he's in the act of attacking your livestock, before he bites them! But you still can't hunt the wolves, even if the animals that are your livelihood are being killed by them regularly.

To me the saddest part of this story is the requirement the rancher obviously feels to engage in PC-speak, to say that he "supports the ESA" and that he thinks it's just hard to understand, easy to make mistakes, and what-not. He has to be penitent for having hunted and killed a couple of wolves. And he knows it.

Ranching is and ought to be an iconic form of that rugged American independence we're in favor of. But now you have to kow-tow to the government to be allowed to do it.

Speaking of keeping the wolves away from the cattle, The New Atlantis brings us this eye-opening book review by Cheryl Miller.

She asks too whether feminists’ commitment to equality and “social justice” is compatible with the eugenic possibilities of ART [assisted reproductive technologies - ed.], particularly the way clinics divide women into the different “categories” of donors and surrogates. “Most surrogates I come across are not typical donor caliber as far as looks, physical features, or education,” one doctor explains. “Most egg donors are smart young girls doing it for the money to pay for college. Most surrogates are—you know, they need the money; they’re at home with four kids—of a lower socioeconomic class.” Or as another physician more succinctly explains the value of this “breeder class” of women: “Moo.”

“[I]t is insufficient to consider only the welfare of the child, which cannot, in any case, be isolated from that of the parent. Thus the primary concern should be for the welfare of the family as a whole.”

... what he means is ...

"The most important thing is fulfilling the narcissistic desires of adults. If we have to feed a few untermensch children-accessories, sperm donors, and breeder-women into a meat grinder in order to carry out the will of the free and equal superman, so be it."

I should hope that the following won't have me designated a stalwart poseur, but I consider it necessary to make a sort of meta-point concerning our relationship to the natural realm, a subject on which - as I believe some of the subtexts of the infamous crunchy-con debates disclosed - some conservatives are woefully confused.

Nature, then, may be considered as an end in itself, an end prior to all human purposes, its value not contingent upon those purposes - this, by virtue of its Creator's original donation of being, and subsequent declaration that this natural reality, having been given being, is good. Good, that is, in itself, and independent of the existence, and therefore, purposes, of man. The natural environment is good because it participates in being, in the Great Chain of Being, if you will; that is, nature is good because it is.

An interesting discourse on the economics of globalization.

(HT: A Thinking Reed)

Any introduction I would try to give to this story would be gilding lilies. But trust me, you'll find the brief video interesting, and it is on topic for themes we discuss here at W4.

HT Grasstops USA apparently via WND.

Will Wilkinson observes that "the point of the difference principle in Rawls" is to ensure that "the system benefits everyone, and not only those with the most power to ensure that it benefits them," since "a system of institutions requires that everyone living within it have reason to support it, and to comply with the terms of association it lays down, if it is to be well-ordered and stable."

Summarizing the existential significance of Sudden Jihad Syndrome, in connection with an outbreak of the mysterious, aporia-inducing contagion in Vienna, Srdja Trifkovic observes:

The list will continue for many years to come, and the victims’ blood is on the hands of the Western elite class, in Vienna, Denver, London, and any other place that is blessed and enriched with the presence of a Muslim “community.” The ongoing refusal of the elite class to protect the people they rule from Islamic terrorism is the biggest betrayal in history. It is rooted in the mindset that breeds the claim that “force is not an answer” to terrorism, that profiling is bad and open borders are good, that Islam is peaceful and the West is wicked. The upholders of such claims belong to the culture that has lost its bond with nature, history, and the supporting community. In the meantime, thanks to them, the quiet onslaught continues unabated, across the Mediterranean and through every major airport in Western Europe and North America.

This malevolent presence is only found among us for reason of our self-loathing, of a perverse and decadent psychology by which we direct ressentiment inwardly, upon ourselves, reproaching ourselves for our very historical achievements; for these achievements belied our 'faith' that a primal equality was the natural condition of mankind. In order, therefore, to atone for this transgression of the Prime Directive, we must become the Other, and the Other must become us. But just as God is not mocked, neither is Islam mocked by such craven obsequies - albeit for different reasons - and intends to laugh last, and laugh longest.

And so these lurid little dramas will be reenacted until we have become surfeited with them, inured to them, world without end - until our world splutters and whimpers to an ignoble end. Unless.

We are pleased to present an excerpt from Professor Anthony Esolen’s recent book Ironies of Faith: the Laughter at the Heart of Christian Literature, © 2007 ISI Books.

In this fine volume, Prof. Esolen, a professor of English at Providence College, and editor and translator of the Modern Library edition of Dante's Divine Comedy, gives the reader a survey of Christian literature with an eye toward the marvelous myriad ironies, both gentle and shattering, depicted by literary men in the Christian tradition. Esolen’s scholarly range is enormous, his intellect sensitive and humane, his pen elegant: the book is a tour de force. We are honored to excerpt it.

We pick up the narrative near the end of Esolen's rich section on the ironies of time in Christian literature. The Incarnation of Christ, that God dwelt in the flesh here on earth, has forever transformed time itself. Time is for us a particular blessing, and one of its profound ironies is that mortal men are oriented toward the eternal by means of the often oppressive (from our view) rigidities of temporal time. Earlier chapters dealt at length with St. Augustine, Dante and Shakespeare's The Tempest. But Esolen intriguing concludes the section with a searching analysis of a lesser-known work: J. R. R. Tolkien’s story “Leaf, by Niggle.”

[Warning: this is one long blog post. It is, however, emphatically worth your time. So grab another cup of coffee, steady your eyes for some serious screen-reading, and settle in for the long haul.]

The upcoming BSC has turned my mind to matters Byzantine, and so it was a happy coincidence that I came across a new volume of Byzantine history before I left for Toronto. Princeton University Press describes Judith Herrin's new Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire in some fairly surprising terms:

She argues that Byzantium's crucial role as the eastern defender of Christendom against Muslim expansion during the early Middle Ages made Europe--and the modern Western world--possible.

This is all absolutely right, but still it is a little surprising (more on that in a moment). It's interesting that I came across this, by way of an Economist advance review of the book, because I had just been thinking earlier today of the far greater military and strategic significance of the Byzantine victories of 678 and 718 compared with the much better known Battle of Poitiers of 732. No offense to Charles Martel, who was a great defender of Christendom (and whose image adorns our "masthead"), but had Constantine IV and Leo III failed to hold Constantinople the ability of the Caliphate to project power across the Mediterranean and up through the Balkans would have been tremendous. Medieval Christendom as it came to exist would have never come into existence, and our civilisation as we know it would not have existed. Three cheers for Greek fire, obviously, and the Syrian Christian who invented it.

I say it is surprising that the book description frames the issue this way, because in certain Byzantinist circles it has come to be seen as old-fashioned and undesirable to emphasise Byzantium as the bulwark against Islam and protector of European civilisation. This interpretation of Byzantium-as-saviour is enshrined in the magisterial work of Ostrogorsky, and so is not going to disappear for a long time, but there has been a strange, if somewhat understandable, move in Byzantine studies to define Byzantium as its own separate civilisation--since medievalists initially were not concerned to include it as part of "the West"--and so to keep it apart from European history proper. The impulse to do this comes from two sources: the first are the Orthodox apologists who would like to keep Byzantium unsullied from both traces of heresy and later secularism of the West whose origins they locate in the medieval western world, and the other comes from the Byzantinists who are willing to admire Byzantium, but who want to admire it because it is unlike medieval Europe, or at least western Europe. Even Sir Steven Runciman, whose works were probably among the earliest and most eloquent arguments on behalf of the superior civilisation of the Byzantines, was effectively separating Byzantium from western Europe in his admiration for the former.

In my view, the drive to try to separate or distinguish sharply between Byzantium and the west is mistaken. Until at least 1204, the two undoubtedly formed two parts of the same civilisation, and just as in some important ways we today share Europe's fate as part of the same civilisation so, too, did western Europe share Byzantium's. When the Eastern Empire was gone, it was western Europe that had to bear the burden that Byzantium had carried for centuries before. Different cultures there were, as one would expect, but there was still a single Christian civilisation to which all their heirs still belong to one degree or another.

For the green-lighting of the Empire State Building in honor of Eid, that is.

This semi-facetious characterization comes from Schlussel herself, who explains: Ten years ago, her nine-year-old cousin Mallory (this is a female name) wrote a letter asking that the Empire State Building be lit up in honor of Hannukah. Her request was granted in a highly publicized fashion. But as Schlussel points out, this pushing of a relatively minor Jewish holiday which happens to fall at about the same time as Christmas, and doing so for purely egalitarian reasons, furthered the notion that everyone is "entitled" to public religious holiday recognition. And now, of course, we have what Schlussel aptly calls "the religion of hijackers" honored by the lighting up of New York City's tallest (surviving) building, in the same egalitarian vein.

This sort of problem was foreseen by Schlussel's own late father, at a time when everyone else in the family was thrilled by young Mallory's fame. Good for him. Sometimes father does know best.

HT LGF

The free man practices and values the virtues of honesty, courage, reverence, justice, and self-restraint not so much because they are good in the abstract as because he shares a general taste for them. It is only within such an ethical and civic context that it makes any sense to speak of pursuing or loving truth. Philosophy, as Aristotle points out, is a dangerous pursuit for people have not been properly brought up by family and friends, because they will only learn how to justify their vices. Even the paltry bits of philosophy studied by Ayn Rand and her chief apostles hardened them in their selfishness, arrogance, and lewdness. Even if Rand or the Brandens had read a few good books, they would probably have turned them to evil purposes. We need only look at the example of Straussians who spend entire careers twisting and distorting every great political thinker from Plato to Jefferson. What is the result of all their lying? The kind of mad arrogance that overtook Bloom and Jaffa. (Thomas Fleming, from the September issue of Chronicles

Which reminds me of one of my favourite minor texts of conservatism, Whittaker Chambers' magisterial review of Ayn Rand's turgid and indigestible tract for a dictatorship of the meritocratic, technocratic-capitalist superman, Atlas Shrugged.

I hate property taxes. In fact, I probably, upon reflection, detest them even more than mere income taxes, for there is something more perverse about them. The income tax, however intrusive, presupposes only that a certain percentage of one's income is owed to the government, for the maintenance of public goods. The property tax, however, presupposes something more, and in this lies its monumental perversity, from which many particular evils flow.

Property taxation, it seems to me, presupposes one of two things. Either, first, that the properties upon which tax is levied generate income, of themselves, such that a portion of this is owed to the government for public goods and so forth. Except that, for the overwhelming majority of us, our property is simply real estate, which does not of itself generate income. To be sure, there is an expectation, now fading, that real estate can only appreciate, yielding income at the time of sale; but there is another term for this: capital gains. All of this is to say, then, that the property tax seems to presuppose something like feudalism: one held a piece of land in fief, and owed a certain percentage of its produce to one's lord. The fief generated wealth, and some of that wealth was due for the provision of public goods and services.

We, obviously, do not live under a feudal regime, though property taxation seems to presuppose such a regime. A feudal regime would also be a more distributive state, but we obviously do not live in one of those, which renders this tax doubly absurd to my mind: the properties which are taxed are neither income-generating, as they would be under feudalism, nor distributed as they would be under feudalism. So, despite the rhetorical appeal some have occasionally found in likening this tax to feudalism, it seems a safe conjecture that it is not a relic of feudalism.

Or, second, the property tax could be a sign of something else altogether - not a vestige of a long-discarded social order, but a sort of implicit rent payment: we are all renting, in this sense, from our local governments, with the tax representing the fee paid for the privilege of having shelter. After all, contrary to the feudal system, in modern rental arrangements, the only presupposition is that of use, as opposed to income generation. And it strikes me as perverse in the extreme to proclaim, even tacitly, that governments are universal landlords.

In closing, I note only that I have pointedly ignored the pragmatic rationales for property taxation: the ease of financing local governments and schools, and so forth. These rationales elide the many inequities of such systems of finance, and in any event, the use of a thing does not exhaust its significance. And it is the significance of property taxation, its symbolism, apart from the numerous pragmatic purposes and injustices (elderly folks losing homes because, on fixed incomes, they cannot pay the tax and, well, eat as well), that renders it manifestly perverse.

The story in brief:

Four Navy SEALs on a covert mission come across some unarmed civilians in remote Afghanistan. They now face a moral dilemma: kill the civilians and thereby assure that they are not exposed to local Taliban, or let the civilians go and risk betrayal and exposure.

Their natural sense of honor supported by the legislated morality embodied in their formal rules of engagement, the SEALs let the civilians go. The civilians promptly betray them to the Taliban. Three of the SEALs and sixteen members of a reinforcement team give their lives as a result of the choice to release the civilians rather than summarily executing them.

The badly wounded sole survivor of the original four SEALs, Marcus Luttrell, is taken in by a group of friendly Afghans. As Luttrell puts it, "I probably killed one of their cousins. And now I'm shot up, and they're using all the village medical supplies to help me." These Afghans go for help from the US Marines, carrying a note from Luttrell, and Luttrell is eventually rescued.

In a world with less honor in it, nineteen American soldiers would still be alive. The commander of the four-man SEAL team, Lt. Michael P. Murphy, has been posthumously awarded the Navy Medal of Honor. It is hard to imagine anything more appropriate. These men valorously and quite directly gave their lives for no other objective purpose than to preserve the honor, the integrity, the basic goodness of America. What we do both reflects and makes us into what we are. Heaven help us if we alter our rules of engagement - Heaven help us that we have already altered our rules of interrogation - in such a way as to dishonor the sacrifice made by these men.

While touring the blogosphere rather aimlessly this morning, it seemed as though everything I read was destined to occasion aggravation. The first three articles I happened upon left me 0-for-3 in the reader-satisfaction department. At a suitable level of abstraction, there may even exist a common thread, perhaps something like, 'obliviousness to the obvious.'

The first item, Bradford Plumer's endorsement of a Sentencing Project critique of sentencing guidelines, contained this nugget of incomprehension:

The second striking bit comes when Mauer compares U.S. sentences with those abroad. Burglars now serve an average of 16.2 months in prison in the United States, compared with 5.3 months in Canada and 6.8 months in England.

If I had the graphics ability, I'd make the header for this entry one of those circular signs with the word "pediatrician" and a slash across it. Read this story if you have minor children. Read it all the way through. And then if you'll take my advice, don't, repeat, don't, send your child to a pediatrician. (Technical note: There's something strange about the way the first page of this Boston Herald article comes up when you click on the link. The first time it comes up page 1 is very short, and you miss some of the information to which I refer in what follows. If you click the number 2 to go to page 2, then go back to page 1 by clicking on the number 1, you should get the complete page 1 with the story about the author's thirteen-year-old daughter and her recent pediatrician visit.)

Here's the deal: The American Academy of Pediatricians has become a wacko advocacy group and has issued "guidelines" to its doctors suggesting that they ask scary-crazy questions of children during routine checkups. And in the case of teenagers, these questions are to be asked if possible without parents present. The questions include how much the parents drink, whether they have a gun in the house, and (this is the worst of all) whether teenage girls' fathers "make them feel uncomfortable." Let me emphasize: These are not cases where there is probable cause of abuse. The doctor is supposed to ask these questions routinely of girls who come to him for, say, a sports checkup for school.

A friend and colleague at Redstate, our Managing Editor Erick Erickson, has a rousing post calling for unity within the Republican Coalition. Well worth reading in full. He concludes by asking for ideas for how this unity — one thought to hold pretty well from the early days of National Review through Reagan and even up to George W. Bush — might be reconstructed. Below is an expanded version of my comment:

(1) Shift the focus of what is called the war on terror, beginning with public rhetoric, toward the domestic front; take heed of the subversives and saboteurs in our midst; strike at them. This combined with: (2) reconciling the Party to that deep skepticism verging on hostility, which comprises the majority opinion on Iraq in this country.

I really doubt that the Democrats (were they to gain Executive power) shall conduct foreign policy as the reflexive anti-patriots of their base would like. A gradual but steady reduction of American troops in Iraq seems far more likely than immediate withdrawal.

For the fiscal boys, it’s much cheaper. We don’t need huge new expenditures of money. We need to carefully craft some laws whereby we can expose the doctrines of the enemy to vigorous prosecution. Our work will largely be a matter of legal savvy and above all public and democratic will. We may need a new prosecutor, investigator, or orator now and then. We will not need to spend even a fraction of what we are spending in Iraq right now.

For social Conservatives, it's the whole enchilada: the maintenance of the character of the Republic. Who are we? Are we a people that is going to shelter and protect the Jihad like its principles are mere Free Exercise? or are we a people confident enough to say we will stand against this wicked thing?

What was the glue that held the old Coalition together, from the early glory days of NR to Reagan?

It was a clear single thing: the Communist Enterprise; and a unified antipathy for a wicked system. Well the Jihad is no less wicked, and it has already stuck us blows no Communist ever dared.

So let us unite against it. Let opposition to the Jihad be one of our principles.

Chesterton wrote a small book (pdf) on William Cobbett, a late-eighteenth century farmer, medievalist, and contrarian blessed with unparalleled a talent for the polemic. Cobbett grounded his fierce slashing rhetoric on a firm foundation of Christian realism. This is his greatness. He shares with Chesterton an opinion on Capitalism (not very high), and a grand reverence for private property; but he possessed none of Chesterton’s infectious generosity in his writing. He thought the Reformation in England was but an usurpation designed to beggar the rural civilization flourishing there and plunder its wealth. The book is worth reading, though I would not count it among Chesterton’s classics.

As with virtually anything Chesterton has written, there are in this book flashes of jocular genius, of that playful intuition of being which was the great man’s great gift, that almost make you laugh out loud. Here are two examples, one from early in the book, and one from near the end.

Hegemonism, the attempt (it should be acknowledged at the outset that the ambitions of the hegemonist can never be fully achieved, save upon mountains of skulls) to provide for the security of one's own nation, not by defending her by means of a military deterrent, alliances, and geopolitical balancing, but by reducing, degrading, subverting, and subordinating other nations to one's own, reducing them to a state of vassalage, is not an expression of patriotism, but its negation. The contemporary conflation of hegemonist policies with a patriotic love of place and people is but one reflection of a profound moral disorder, an ideological deformation of loyalties and obligation that, by nature, are concrete and circumscribed, ethically and geographically.

Patriotism is an almost tangible thing, a love of a man for the very soil (I dare say that he will not call it dirt.) of his homeland; it is an instinctual attachment to the very specificities of his place in the world: its rivers, hills, plains, towns, villages, and irreducibly, the customs, traditions, mores, legends, histories, memories, heroes, villains, and articulated order that make of those natural features a human environment, and not mere physical things. Patriotism, then, is above all a virtue, a mode of piety: a veneration for a certain community of memory and history, a community, moreover, which is not to be confused with those presently living, but receives its very substance from those who now rest from their labours, and hopes to transmit that substance to posterity. Patriotism is a love of neighbour expressed as a democracy of the dead and the as-yet unborn. It is thus particularistic; the nature of the thing excludes the possibility of a universalist patriotism. To combine such terms, and to attempt thereby to conjure a complex meaning from their conjunction, is a fully absurd as to posit square circles.

What follows is a discussion of an issue with many empirical aspects to it. Because pro-lifers have been urged to get on board with the proposal in question, I think it's important for us to have an informed opinion. The empirical statements in what follows all have evidence for them, but I am interested in and open to corrections of any of them, the more so as I am not an embryologist and have studied these matters only as an amateur.

The procedure in question is called ANT-OAR: Altered nuclear transfer oocyte assisted reproduction. My position is that ANT-OAR is wrong, not primarily because the entities it would produce would be human embryos (in one current versions of the proposal, I'm presently inclined to think that they would not be), but even if the entities it produces are not human embryos. My position against ANT-OAR is thus, as far as I know, original in the debate.

Unaccountably and inexcusably, I missed James Poulos' response to my August argument (to be found towards the conclusion of the piece) that a man of the character and connections of Alexander Litvinenko (the former Russian intel agent who fell in with Boris Berezovsky and the Chechens, made outlandish and unsubstantiated allegations of Russian complicity in terrorist actions on Russian soil, and got himself whacked by Polonium-210 poisoning, for those keeping score) could reasonably expect to be whacked.

My argument, as quoted by Poulos, was that...

Someone must speak the Derbyshirean hard truth here, which is that someone who makes a name for himself as a defector and associate of a man loathed and wanted on criminal charges in Russia, and as a tacit apologist for the Chechen cause, just is liable to get whacked on someone's orders - or even by freelancers or rogues. Contrary to the idea that the Russian policy, whoever applied it in this case, was unduly concerned with one man, that policy was very much concerned with an entire nation: the pet causes of the West have no purchase in any corridors of power, because they are bad for Russia.

To which Poulos responded:

In the end the question is whether the onus is on a country -- Britain, which had just unwillingly hosted a high-profile, exceedingly clumsy, and distressingly inventive assassination -- to figure out precisely how 'official' of a killing it was, or whether, in fact, the onus is on the country -- Russia, from which both perpetrators and victim had come -- to deal with the fallout when the host country rebukes them for an all too useful lack of oversight.

Here’s the story, in brief:

Bob Dylan appears in an ad campaign for Cadillac. A “multiplatform” campaign, they call this — TV, print, Internet, etc. In the first series, he utters a couple of terse, jocular remarks. The ads end.

Naturally this appears as a topic for discussion on Dylan fansites and message boards. On one, The Never Ending Pool, not ten messages have been posted before two posters have declared their wish that Dylan’s house burn down, the second one even after being admonished that such talk is most unfortunate considering that in southern California many houses are, even as we type, burning down.

The reason for this perfectly unembarrassed malice*: apparently any association with Cadillac means that Dylan is indifferent to climate change. His “contribution” is to the side of gas-guzzlers; that is to say, to the side of the enemy. Treason! is the charge against Bob Dylan. May his house burn down!

To all this comical stupidity — its ugliness made amusing by absurdity, and by the fact that Dylan has done this to the Lefties many a time — one can only add:

Well, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Yes, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Well, you must tell me, baby
How your head feels under somethin’ like that
Under your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

Well, you look so pretty in it
Honey, can I jump on it sometime?
Yes, I just wanna see
If it’s really that expensive kind
You know it balances on your head
Just like a mattress balances
On a bottle of wine
Your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat.

“Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” by Bob Dylan
(Copyright © 1966; renewed 1994 Dwarf Music.)

I don't lie awake at night wondering about the plans of the Iranian Mullarchy to become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds, plunging the world into a sea of nuclear flame. In fact, the thought seldom occurs to me at all, and when it does, I find it somewhat amusing, actually.

There. I've said it.

Now permit me to explain myself. I'd rather that a regime such as that of the Mullarchy not possess nuclear weapons, and on principle. Such regimes, combining several undesirable qualities - Islam, evil, general contumacy - are not the sort with which one would trust such weapons, were there an option. Nevertheless, the development is animated by a certain logic, which would obtain even in the absence of the Mullarchy, and which, moreover, militates against the use of such weapons by the Mullarchy.

The linchpin of this logic? Iran is desirous of becoming the regional hegemon, the dominant power of the Near East, a long-term geostrategic ambition antedating the Mullarchy, which would outlast that regime. Iran could be liberated from the shackles of the Islamic Republic, and Persian nationalist sentiment would keep alive the both the ambition and the nuclear program itself, which would be both symbol and surety of that status, should it be achieved. This regional ambition has two main consequences, as far as the nuclear program and the West are concerned. First, a first-use of nuclear weapons on the part of Iran, whether directly, or by means of proxies - such as Hizbollah - is highly improbable, since the logical conclusion to be drawn in such a case will be precisely that Iran has used/supplied the weapons, and Iran will cease to exist as a functioning, post-medieval state. Israel and the United States will see to that, morally licit or not.

Second, and in consequence of the first consideration, any use of nuclear weapons merely suspected to originate in the Iranian program will entail the permanent demise of Persian ambitions for regional preeminence. And I would suggest that, the apocalyptic rhetoric of a former Tehran traffic engineer aside, the Iranian powers-behind-the-presidency are more than worldly enough to value that ambition over the annihilation of the Zionist Entity. Incidentally, this is the reason for the low probability of Hizbollah being provided the eventual products of a mature Iranian nuclear program. One does not hand the keys to the kingdom to third parties one cannot completely control.

Finally, as a concluding observation, a the development of a nuclear program in Iran is more or less inevitable for another reason: Iranian oil and natural gas production is declining, and I consider it highly doubtful that Iranians will be willing to contemplate a return to premodernity, merely because the only long-term means of avoiding that fate is one of which the West disapproves. This is not to argue that Iran needn't be countered in Syria or Lebanon, nor that such countering need never involve military action of some sort. It is only to argue that a nuclear Iran can be deterred. And, as regards regime change - well, have we learned nothing?

Would the American foreign policy establishment be willing to jettison its geopolitically counterproductive and morally illicit hegemonism with respect to Russia, a hegemonism that not only ties our hands with respect to legitimate threats from disparate Islamic sources, but devalues the legitimate and instinctive patriotic sentiments of other peoples, Russians particularly, but not exclusively, in order to mitigate the Iranian threat? Hear Stratfor:

Via the U.N. Security Council, Russian cooperation can ensure Iran's diplomatic isolation. Russia's past cooperation on Iran's Bushehr nuclear power facility holds the possibility of a Kremlin condemnation of Iran's nuclear ambitions. A denial of Russian weapons transfers to Iran would hugely empower ongoing U.S. efforts to militarily curtail Iranian ambitions. Put simply, Russia has the ability to throw Iran under the American bus -- but it will not do it for free. In exchange, it wants those treaties amended in its favor, and it wants American deference on security questions in the former Soviet Union.

Russia could be encouraged to throw Iran under the American bus. But there is a price, and that price would entail the abandonment of hegemonism.