President Trump has just decertified
the Iran deal. The media reaction from the left is negative, the
one from the right supportive. And yet both sides have one thing in common
which is that for some weird reason nobody seems to care what Bernard Lewis
says. And what he has been saying for many years is that “For
people with this mindset, MAD is not a constraint; it is an inducement....”
One would have thought that a
statement of this importance which states that the main doctrine that kept the
USSR and the US from blowing each other up (and the whole world along with
them) during the Cold War does not apply to Iran would be discussed and checked
for accuracy. Not at all, it is being completely ignored. In the last 5 years
only Netanyahu at the UNGA and Michael Oren in the LA Times quoted it.
How can we explain
this? Five years ago I gave this explanation “And yet, the reviewers do not know
what to do with MAD. On the one hand, here is a most erudite, respected
scholar and on the other, he is saying such, to them, off the wall things
no one else dares to mention. What to do? The best thing is to ignore
it. Perhaps if someone else in the media would volunteer and bring up the
topic, they would pitch in. No one in the main stream media does”.
Has anything changed since 2012? The Iran deal
was covered extensively in the press in 2015 and it its decertification is being analyzed
yet again now, still with no mention of Bernard Lewis.
So it is time to ask the journalists
explicitly: Why do you, Charles Krauthammer, Bret Stephens, Yaakov
Katz, Caroline Glick never, ever quote “For people with this
mindset, MAD is not a constraint; it is an inducement....”? What do
you think about what Bernard Lewis has been saying?
