| "I think it is very important for the international community to recognize the fact that if Iran were to develop the knowledge that they could transfer to a clandestine program, it would create a danger for the world. And so I view this report as a warning signal that they had the program, they halted the program. And the reason why it's a warning signal is that they could restart it." |
Maving happily missed out on instruction from the Harvard Victory School and the New Haven Seminary for Undergraduates, you at least, O Bones, can have no trouble placing that elegant specimen of Big Party pidgin poop under the most suitable rubric, namely ‘Lucus’ â non lucendo, "Let it be called a ‘danger for the world’ in light of the clear fact that it poses no danger." This movement of the mental bowels is notorious in the textbooks as a fallacy, but one does not actually meet it outside very frequently nowadays. Perhaps some part of one's response should be a muted cheer that so agreeable and venerable a dottiness has not gone extinct altogether.
Dubyapologists, mercenary or deluded, will classify their hot dynasty poop differently and appeal to other maxims and saws. Fas est et ab hoste doceri! From the point of view of the twistatorial Baní Rove, what is to be done with their head laddie's "And the reason why is ...."? There is no proverb ready to hand -- is there? -- that inculcates "Whatever can once be started can forever after be RE-started." That's no worse a fortune cookie than most received apophthegms, I daresay, but unfortunately for Big Management just at the moment, this one does not happen to have been received.
Merely for the fun of the thing, let us suppose the wooden figurehead of Grant's Old Party totters on the brink of absurdity deliberately, and not merely Yalewise. That strategy, if it existed, could bring Little Brother to a fallacy that is even more fun than â non lucendo -- to our old friend the Invisible Cat, who, whenever he sits down on a chair, immediately causes the chair to appear unoccupied. Sixteen hundred intelligence agencies, with or without SIGINT and G@@GLE, could not distinguish that situation from the case in which the chair is re verâ empty. We know the impossibility of such a demonstration in advance, we know it a priori, the philosopher might say, although some party poopers would speak instead of a trivial verbal deduction from the meaning of the word "invisible." Whatever the Faculty Club finally rules on that case, it would by no means poop the Big Party's schemes of invasionism and Preëmptive Retaliation™ to marry the Invisible Cat to the Qommie Nukes, as it were. "Clandestine," as Little Brother's speech therapist named the pertinent magic ingredient above, works both ways: decent political adults can no more absolutely prove the nonexistence of invisible felines than the lemmin's of Wingnut City can demonstrate it. (The upshot might seem a Mexican stand-off to a mere logician, but that only goes to show what makes logicians mere. There is no genuine deadlock here, not when Little Brother disposes of his Uncle Sam's hyperpuissance unilaterally, and the doubting Thomases cannot even write a valid traffic ticket. [1])
Himself went on to play at bein’ a nuke-you-larry scientist personally, just like Jimmy Carter used to. (Golly!)
| "And the thing that would make a restarted program effective and dangerous is the ability to enrich uranium, the knowledge of which could be passed on to a hidden program. The N.I.E. provides an opportunity for us to rally the international community — continue to rally the community to pressure the Iranian regime to suspend its program. You know, the N.I.E. also said that such pressure was effective, and that's what our government has been explaining to other partners in keeping the international pressure on Iran. The best diplomacy, effective diplomacy, is one of which all options are on the table." |
So then, let China and Peru (&c. &c.) simply agree that it is an antisocial act for anybody but a Crawfordite or the friend of a Crawfordite to enrich uranium for any purpose whatsoever, and we shall have arrived in Beulahland. How anybody can resist such an "opportunity" as that at Beijing and Lima is a mystery, Mr. Bones, but for some reason I feel confident that they will manage to do so.
As a matter of fact, I did not "know the N.I.E. also said that ... pressure was effective," and after examination of the unclassified "Key Judgments" of the Sweet Sixteen, I am afraid that I still don't know that knowledge for sure in the sense that Little Brother's speech therapist had in mind.
| We judge with high confidence that the halt, and Tehran’s announcement of its decision to suspend its declared uranium enrichment program and sign an Additional Protocol to its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement, was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work. |
As regards the protocol, that was obvious all along, like the protocol itself. The "halt" however is by way of being an invisible cat, and a newly unsighted invisible cat at that. The honourable and gallant spooks, like everybody else in politics, should be taken at their word as regards what they profess to believe with subjective sincerity unless it is impossible to do so without extreme mental contortions. So I judge with high confidence that they do indeed judge with high confidence. Whether they judge accurately as well as sincerely remains a different question, however. [2]
____
[1] Big Party neocomrade K. Rove's famous summary of the post-BigBang correlation of farces, as told to Mr. Suskind of Esquire , may not be attributed to the right neorightist perp, but it is not to be improved upon materially:
| "You know, Ron, guys like you are in what we call the 'reality-based community.' ... But that's not the way the world really works now. We're an empire of sorts, and when we act, we create our own reality. ... We're history's actors, who are willing to do what's needed, and you can study what we do. And if you start being nice to us --which you haven't been, maybe one of us will deign to visit you at that seminar you teach up at Dartmouth in the summers, in your tattered tweed blazer." |
One rather elementary analysis of the latest human events reported from Beltway City would be that sixteen "intelligence" agencies have decided, on balance, that they may safely bet against the Imperial neocomrade's splendid visions of reality-creatin’. Whether the cat-associated chair is vacant has now, as they suppose, reverted to being an old-fashioned Rechtfrage rather than a neo-Rovean Machtfrage, an "objective" rather than a "subjective" issue.
Princess Posterity is bound to think so in the long run, but I'd hesitate to affirm that the long run has already commenced as of 5 December 2007. The Tattered Blazer Folk run a genuine risk, as I consider, of coming out to dance on the graves of the Big Management enemies of the human race before all the troops of the latter have been disposed of and accounted for. Rovianity might be even become more formidable practically if trapped in the last ditch, for all that it is hooey conceptually and has never been otherwise. No band of Yale-based narcissists and greedies can ever set up a Rove World with the same boundaries as Uncle Sam's united states, but the creation of an intellectual ghetto, or Party theme park, exclusively for militant OnePercenterdom on a much smaller scale is not impossible at all. For one thing, our political landscape is already infested with Hoovervillains and AEIdeologues and Heritagitarians and jihád careerists who certainly are not gonnta vanish no matter who nukes whom in the Greater Levant --- not even if nobody gets nuked at all. Inside the Big Party's tanks of thought and its gated communities of the pricily credentialled, a shadow and subimperial Rovianity may linger for decades, quite unable to impose a general Weltordnung on the human race, but strong enough to make sure that nobody wearin’ a tattered blazer significantly exists anywhere in the immediate vicinity.
[2] As a parlor game, of course, anybody at all may stipulate the recently unsighted "halt" and speculate about its causes. ’Tis rather a silly pastime, though, so I shan't go farther than venturing to suggest that the evil Qommies might conceivably have concluded that nukes were not quite so urgent once the Busheviki had replaced the Ba‘thís next door in the former Iraq.
Those who take for granted that effacement of the Tel Aviv statelet is the only imaginable reason why a mad mullah would desire The Bomb will not care for any frivolous notion that defensive considerations might play some role.
Needless to say, God knows best what the Levantines are really up to, nukewise. And otherwise as well, for that matter.
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