So how many hours a day does your average Lancaster County conservative spend cringing beneath the bed, quaking in fear over how Mighty Iran might destroy us?
A lot, probably. If your average Lancaster County conservative watches Fox News — which of course they do — they hear things. Like when one network anchor last week asserted that scary, scary Iran has a missile which "could actually hit — I think — some military installations in the United States."
Run for the hills!
But no. Iran has missles that could hit U.S. bases in the Mideast. But the distance from Tehran to Washington, D.C., is 6,340 miles, and Iran has nothing with that range. False alarm.
But, you know — maybe! It could happen! And so, even after Iraq, conservatives want to shoot first, think later.
The fabrication that Iran is an existential threat to the United States finds a hungry audience. At the heart of modern conservatism lies a barely controlled panic, a feeling of being outnumbered and surrounded. That fear is not grounded in reality.
We spend 10 times more on our military than all Middle Eastern countries combined. To the extent that Iran may be aiding insurgents in Iraq, yes, Iran poses a threat to U.S. forces, U.S. interests; and Iran could fund terrorist attacks against the U.S. (and might, if we attack them first). But this idea that
Iran could destroy us aaaaaiiieee! is simply ridiculous.
Does Iran pose a threat to Israel? Perhaps — but Israel and the United States are not one and the same.
Israel is an ally, and the U.S. may need to respond to an attack on Israel. But an attack on Israel is not the same thing as an attack on the United States. Nor should the United States wage preemptive war on behalf of Israel, or any other nation.
We fret that Iran is trying to get a nuclear weapon; and we assume that the moment it does, it will fire it at Israel — even, as the misinformed Fox News anchor would have it, at the U.S. itself! Yet this would immediately trigger an overwhelming response. Israel itself has a nuclear arsenal sufficient to turn Iran into a smoking crater.
Conservatives seem to believe that Iranian leaders — and remember, Ahmadinejad is not the one calling the shots — would do it anyway; that the nation would act as one big suicide bomber. But the logic of the individual does not necessarily translate into the logic of the state. It is far more likely Iran wants a bomb as a deterrent — to Israeli action. Or, more plausibly, to American action.
And the real fear is that this deterrent could constrict our freedom of action. For while Iran poses no convential military threat to the U.S., it indeed threatens our interests in the Mideast — chief among them, seeing that the region's oil gets to the world market where hungry nations (like us) might buy it.
Iran sits upon up to 11 percent of the world's oil reserves, up to 16 percent of the globe's natural gas reserves. In an energy-starved world,
of course a hostile regime cannot be permitted to control such vital commodities. So the Iranian "threat" is to our energy security, our economic security — and our ability to remain the globe's unquestioned hegemon.
Problem is, conservative leaders fear the average American can't grasp the broad nature of this threat, or wouldn't back war against Iran even if they did. So, as in Iraq, the threat is hyped so as to frighten the average American. Look how scary the Iranians are! They could wipe us off the map ... somehow!
Only when we're panic-stricken can the necessary action be taken. Or as a right-wing FDR might have said: The only thing we have to fear is a lack of fear itself.
Gil Smart is associate editor of the Sunday News. E-mail him at gsmart@lnpnews, or phone 291-8817. 