MAD is Dead turns two

I started MAD is Dead on July 27, 2011.   After 84 posts and 29000 pageviiews, what have I learned?  I guess, I have learned that what Churchill said in 1935 is true.  Mankind is unteachable.  

   

I does not matter that scholars have been warning that the doctrine of mutually assured destruction would not work with Iran.  The mainstream media do not consider it important enough to bring the topic up. It is still a taboo topic. When PM Netanyahu quoted Bernard Lewis in his UN speech, most people asked who this Bernard Lewis was, if they even bothered to read the speech. There was no follow-up discussion on what Lewis actually said.  When Moshe Ya’alon, then strategic affairs minister, gave an interview to  Ha’aretz and said that Israel should   BOMB OR BE BOMBED, he was completely ignored in the US. Not that the Israeli media is much better.  Of all the interviews Ari Shavit conducted on the Iranian threat not one of the people interviewed happened to be a scholar of Islam, let alone a scholar of Shia Islam.

I must admit that I was truly surprised that my links to quotes by Bernard Lewis and other scholars were censored and deleted in The Atlantic, The Washington Post  and  at times even in the Jerusalem Post. Having lived 6 years in the USSR where our apartment, elevator and car had been bugged and the Soviet press had been not free, I always had this, at the time, true belief that the West was more mature and was not afraid of diverse opinions.  Unfortunately, that is not true anymore.  I am convinced that Russians reading Samizdat in the 1970s were better informed about the US than are the readers of The New York Times on Iran today.  For the readers of the New York Times the Iranian threat is, to use Rumsfeld’s terminology, – an unknown unknown. 

Is there hope that this will change?  Not much. At least I am convinced that the Israeli leaders are fully aware of the danger and will act accordingly. 

Here are a few statistics from the blog:

Articles with the most pageviews:

Matthias Küntzel - Antisemitism, Messianism and the Cult of Sacrifice:The Iranian Holy War

Why are Bernard Lewis's views on MAD ignored?

David Grossman vs. Bernard Lewis. Whom do you trust more on Iran?

Be'er Sheva under Grad attack  

MAD is Dead

Two years on – who was right on the Egyptian crisis?

The cartoon Obama should hang in the Oval Office

I am ashamed of American Jews

 MAD is Dead is read in these countries: 

The number of pageviews is increasing, but not fast enough. ( the graph is rough so it looks as if there is data from before July 2011) . The spike was Mathias Kuntzel's article. 

But I will go on.  Since no one wants to write about the death of MAD, I will. Last time the world ignored warning  signs in May of 1940, the results were catastrophic.   From The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, page 47

The timidity of the French high command had exasperated Churchill ever since the war’s outbreak. They had rejected every initiative suggested by him – bombing the Ruhr, for example, or mining the Rhine – on the grounds that it might invite Nazi reprisals. “This idea of not irritating the enemy,” he later wrote, “did not commend itself to me….Good, decent, civilized people, it appeared, must never strike until they have been struck dead”. This Gallic trepidation even ruled out air reconnaissance, which defies understanding because the Luftwaffe was overflying French lines every day. Had Allied planes done the same in early May, they would have been astonished at enemy preparations below. Eight military bridges had been thrown across the Rhine, and three armored columns stretched back from the river one hundred miles.

In fact, one French pilot did see the buildup on the evening of the eight of May. He was over the Ruhr, returning from a propaganda mission, dropping leaflets urging the German people to overthrow Hitler and thus bring peace. Above Dusseldorf he looked down and saw a sixty-mile line of tanks and trucks headed for the Ardennes. They were driving with their lights on. He reported his discovery. It was dismissed as not credible.

This was not the first time such intelligence has been dismissed, but it would be the last. Five months earlier, as Europe slept away the winter a German airplane carrying two staff officers was blown off course and forced to land in Belgium. The officers tried, and failed, to burn the papers they carried, which happened to contain OKW’s revised operation orders for the invasion of the Low Countries, including a thrust through the Ardennes. British intelligence perused the captured papers. The high arts of deception and double-cross being well practiced by bot the Germans and the British, it was concluded that the papers were a plant, a ruse, and therefore unbelievable.