David Warren: The Paths to War with Iran

David Warren's column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Saturdays in the Ottawa Citizen.

...The question here is not, "Should Israel hit Iran?" Not even Washington has the power to constrain Israeli action, when the issue involves, for Israel, the prospect of another Holocaust. Moral posturing is, in this case, a waste of precious time.

The great pacifist, Bertrand Russell, once gave his views on Russia acquiring nuclear weapons. This was an issue in 1948. There is controversy over the nuances of his lordship's argument, reported in the contemporary Daily Worker under the headline, "Earl Russell calls for atom war." He did not say that the United States should launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons. He only said, that would be the unanswerable humanitarian argument.

For all I happen to despise "Bertie" and most of what he stood for, he was a solid logician. He sketched out three possibilities, in what he considered to be the descending order of desirability. 1. West attacks a USSR still without nuclear arms, and wins easily. 2. West and USSR wait to have war until both have nuclear weapons, and West wins, after horrific destruction on both sides. 3. West lets USSR get and accumulate nuclear weapons, then submits ignominiously to Soviet-dictated peace.

As usual in human circumstances, some utterly unlikely fourth possibility emerged, via "containment." But we cannot know the future, and Russell was, commendably, confronting what we then knew....