Peter Robinson:
Norman Podhoretz, in an interview in Arutz Sheva, how is it pronounced? -
Norman Podhoretz:
Aruttz Sheva
Peter Robinson:
Quote, quoting you .. If Iran gets the bomb it is hard , if not impossible, to see how a nuclear exchange between Iran and Israel could be avoided" Close quote
Now you know the answer to that . The Soviet Union had the bomb and we had the bomb and we sat facing each other for four and a half decades and did not engage in a nuclear exchange.
Norman Podhoretz:
I will give you Bernard Lewis's answer to that question and than I will give you my own. Bernard Lewis points out that deterrence worked with the Soviets and the Chinese because the Soviets were not suicidal and they knew that if they launched a first strike there would be a second strike tha which would annihilate them --- mutual assured destruction
Peter Robinson:
And it worked
Norman Podhoretz
Mutual Assured Destruction can't work in relation to Iran because these are people who are in love with death
Bernard Lewis:
For them it is not a deterrent, it is an inducement
Peter Robinson:
Truly? Truly?
Norman Podhoretz:
Now I will give you my answer to this. That's' Bernard's answer to the question My answer to the question is to imagine a scenario which most people are horrified . I've tried this in speeches all the time, people shy away from it. Imagine that Iran gets the bomb. OK and the Israelis are siting there and asking themselves, do we wait for them to hit us and then retaliate out of the rubble or do we preempt it first? The Iranians are asking themselves the same question. Do we wait for the Israelis to hit us or do we hit them first . We've never had a hair trigger situation like that since the invention of nuclear weapons . If you just imagine the rulers of Iran asking themselves that question . Somebody is gonna beat the other to the punch . And I can't see that unstable situation lasting for very long, maybe even as along as a few weeks or months
Peter Robinson:
And you would agree ,here is what I find so striking
You will hear it said among people who are not deep students of this situation that the notion that glorious death is an inducement to the the radicals in the Muslim world, not a deterrent, and here I sit across the man who has devoted his life to the study of Islam, who is universally regarded as the greatest living historian in the world of Islam, and he says, yes as a matter of fact , that's exactly right, it is an inducement, deterrence would not work. You confirm that
Bernard Lewis
Yes I would do , yes, with those who are committed believers in the old sense
And here is the whole interview:
excerpt:
Peter Robinson:
Throughout the Cold War there was a base of
expert knowledge and through most of the Cold War a high degree of public
debate on the issues. And when I talk of the base of expert knowledge
I mean that we have right from the get-go George Kennan’s Long
Telegram which lays out what became the Containment Policy, as I
recall 1946, it is right from the get-go because there were
scholars who had been studying the Soviet Union, we had scholars of
Russian history. There were lot of people who understood what was going on, and
they had to reflect on it. From the get-go there was an understanding in this
country of the nature of the treat, and then throughout the Cold War in every
presidential campaign right up until the fall of the Soviet Union Cold War
Policy was the a central aspect of the debate. That was then. Now we come to
the struggle against radical Islamo-Fascism . It has been more than a decade
since they hit the Twin Towers and I would argue that there has not been a Long
Telegram . We have the two of you, there are a few others, but we have no
consensus in the State Department and the foreign policy apparatus.
