In the spirit of...
the recent parallels drawn by many pundits (eg Paul Krugman) abou the similarities between the ratcheting up of rhetoric pre-Iraq and the current administration talk about Iran, I offer two (in my opinion) very concerning pieces of linguistic semantics:
In watching FOX news the other day (know you enemy and all that), I noticed two distinct trends when they discussed Iran:
1. Much was made of the fact that Iran is ONLY 51% Persian and therefore almost 1/2 the country is being oppressed by the Mullahs and yearns for freedom and liberation. The fact that the country is about 92% Shi'a is conveniently omitted, as is the fact that Iran is one of the very few Islamic countries which has Jewish and Christian minority rights enshrined in law, including setting aside parliamentary seats for those religions.
2. The talking heads are no longer talking about the idea that we can't let IRAN have nukes. More and more, it is about not letting Ahmadinejad have nuclear weapons. We can't let THIS man have WMDs and his finger on the trigger. Am I crazy or are they creating a concrete, discrete demon image to go fight?
People keep saying that Bush wouldn't be that stupid. That's what I kept saying until quite late in the game on Iraq. I was convinced that with so many realists (in the polisci sense of the term) in his defense establishment, he would see the pitfalls. I was wrong then, and I think that people who are relying on his better judgment may be sorely mistaken (though I fervently hope not). Iran is a country with roughly 2.5 times the population of Iraq over about 4 times the area, much of which is rugged mountains like afghanistan rather than conveniently flat desert plains as in Iraq. And we all know how much difficulty the US military has had rooting out resistance in Afghanistan just due to terrain...
In watching FOX news the other day (know you enemy and all that), I noticed two distinct trends when they discussed Iran:
1. Much was made of the fact that Iran is ONLY 51% Persian and therefore almost 1/2 the country is being oppressed by the Mullahs and yearns for freedom and liberation. The fact that the country is about 92% Shi'a is conveniently omitted, as is the fact that Iran is one of the very few Islamic countries which has Jewish and Christian minority rights enshrined in law, including setting aside parliamentary seats for those religions.
2. The talking heads are no longer talking about the idea that we can't let IRAN have nukes. More and more, it is about not letting Ahmadinejad have nuclear weapons. We can't let THIS man have WMDs and his finger on the trigger. Am I crazy or are they creating a concrete, discrete demon image to go fight?
People keep saying that Bush wouldn't be that stupid. That's what I kept saying until quite late in the game on Iraq. I was convinced that with so many realists (in the polisci sense of the term) in his defense establishment, he would see the pitfalls. I was wrong then, and I think that people who are relying on his better judgment may be sorely mistaken (though I fervently hope not). Iran is a country with roughly 2.5 times the population of Iraq over about 4 times the area, much of which is rugged mountains like afghanistan rather than conveniently flat desert plains as in Iraq. And we all know how much difficulty the US military has had rooting out resistance in Afghanistan just due to terrain...