Certainty

Sy Hersh has another outstanding piece in the New Yorker on the Bush Administration's fascination with Iran - a definite must read.

A couple of things: all of Hersh's sources talk with an eerie sense of certainty, discussing what will happen when Iran is brought into compliance with the dictates of the "international community."

This sense of certainty is amplified a hundredfold when I read statements like this:

A retired American diplomat, who has experience in the Gulf, confirmed that the Qatari government is “very scared of what America will do” in Iran, and “scared to death” about what Iran would do in response. Iran’s message to the oil-producing Gulf states, the retired diplomat said, has been that it will respond, and “you are on the wrong side of history.”

Being on the right side of history. When I was still a kid - probably up until I went to college - I used to have this sense of being on the "good" or "right" side of history.

Then I learned that history is a bloody complex affair, and what once seemed like a clear moral struggle between the forces of good and evil becomes an ambiguous affair tainted by foibles and fanaticisms of humanity.

So it really bothers me to see this sort of certainty, this ability to label one's self as "good" (simultaneously downgrading their enemy to "evil" or "sub-human" status). These appeals to a grand narrative of history are pervading the policy decisions of both the Bush Administration and the Iranian regime, and they obscure what should be the real issue. I'm down with nuclear non-proliferation and making sure that Iran doesn't develop nuclear weapons (I'm also in favor of the United States working to eradicate its own nuclear arsenal). Let's do everyone a favor and genuinely talk about and work on non-proliferation. A nuclear weapons program can be bargained. You can't, on the other hand, negotiate a final settlement between "Good" and "Evil."