From last night’s GOP debate:
[QUOTE=Newt Gingrich]
The fact is this is a dictator, Ahmadinejad, who has said he doesn’t believe the Holocaust existed. This is a dictator who said he wants to eliminate Israel from the face of the Earth. This is a dictator who said he wants to drive the United States out of the Middle East. I’m inclined to believe dictators
[/QUOTE]
This was in response to an assessment by the Chairman of the JCOS that Iran was a rational actor and that Israeli strikes would destabilize the region.
I don’t want to debate the part where Newt obviously either doesn’t know or doesn’t care who actually calls the shots in Iran (hint: he wears a turban). I want to debate the part in bold.
Is there any reason we should be inclined to believe a dictator? Shouldn’t we be doing our own assessments of their capacities and likely actions? Didn’t believing a dictator get us into a mess in Iraq? Castro, Chavez, Kim - all of these guys say outrageous things all the time. Is there any reason I should be inclined to believe a word from any of them?
Ahmadinejad isn’t a dictator. The Supreme Leader, Khamenei, is a dictator.
But I don’t think you can generalize. And let’s get this one out of the way right off the bat-- when Hitler said all that shit about the Jews, should we have believed him? When Kim Jong Il said he got 10 holes-in-one the first time he played golf, should we have believed him?
Exactly right about who the dictator is - and one would hope Newt would know that, being the historian he is.
Ali Khamenei: “we are not seeking nuclear weapons because the Islamic Republic of Iran considers possession of nuclear weapons a sin … and believes that holding such weapons is useless, harmful and dangerous”.
I’m loath to defend Newt Gingrich, but it seems pretty obvious that he was saying threats from dictators should be taken seriously because they’re able to act on those threats. That doesn’t really apply to Ahmadinejad, who isn’t the dictator in Iran anyway, and while threats should be taken seriously, they don’t need to be taken at face value.
I believe what Gingrich was saying is that if a dictator, or whatever you want to label them as, makes a threat that he’s going to take them at their word. I see nothing wrong with such a statement as it’s probably prudent to do so.
But that’s exactly how we ended up invading Iraq, which was an utterly useless and costly endeavor. Saddam acted like a tough guy and boasted about being dangerous, having WMDs, etc. (to keep Iran and other neighbors at bay, as it turns out), and then we invaded and—whoops! No WMDs. Turns out maybe we shouldn’t commit trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of people just because some jackass in another country says he’s tough.
But the problem is that some number of these statements will be either insincere posturing or unfulfillable dreams. Surely we should consider whether the claims being made are truthful independently of what is coming out of the leader’s mouth.
Dictators, schmictators… I don’t believe Gingrich, in the sense that I don’t believe that he really believes what he’s saying; he’s just trying to score cheap political points.
Not exactly a brilliant observation on my part, I know.
If the question is, should our intelligence services and defense in general treat threats seriously, then of course I don’t think anyone disagrees. If the question is, some asshole is making threats and should we rally the public, then he’s as much of a jingoistic idiot as the people he’s discussing.
One: Ahmadinejad is not technically a dictator. He’s corrupt, but he is still a constitutional officer of a republic, and has to share power.
Two: If we believe what Ahmadi says, Iran is only seeking power plants. This is consistent with their behavior. They’re refining their own uranium rather than use Canadian materials, which is unsurprising considering they don’t want to be at the mercy of the hated English or their satellites. So no problem, then!
Three: As for the general principle, well, sometimes dictators tell the truth, sometimes they don’t. Newt is blustering.