Max Boot in his December 1,2011 column for the Los Angeles Times titled The Iran Threat fully commits himself to the analogies of the rise of Nazism and the dithering and equivocations of the politicians, who should have been more prescient about the danger of a mad man and his allies, posed to the Democratic West and to the fate of European Jews. This is the rhetorical frame within which he constructs his latest piece of political hysteria mongering, with Iran as the central protagonists, as historical stand-in for Hitler and the Holocaust. Mr. Boot pulls out all the stops- he makes manifest the notion of crisis as real and present – the Holocaust waits in the wings, as another political generation equivocates and rationalizes the existence of the political toxin of the Iranian Revolution, and it’s pernicious ambition to acquire atomic weapons. Now, the fact of Israel’s production and possession of from 100 to 400 atomic weapons is not relevant to the project that Mr. Boot undertakes: which as a Neo-Conservative is about the political imperative of war making as a policy of first resort. The choice of enemy as being Political Islam as the natural antagonist to the Zionist project, an integral part of the the Neo-Conservative political mythology and it founders Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol. If one had any doubt of this abiding political/theological connection one need only consult Mr. Murray Friedman’s friendly history of the this political creature, The Neo-Conservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy. Mr. Boot is only one of the many voices that can be heard in the Establishment Press calling for a ‘preemptive strike’ against Iran in the name of the crisis: one is reminded of the of the virulent Cold Warrior’s calls for ‘preemptive strikes’ against the Soviet Union in that, past, benighted age. One can also see, in the caricature of Iran sketched by Mr. Boot, the perfect reflection of the Iranian Revolutionary propaganda of the ‘Satan of the West’. Any attack on Iran will not be confined to the ‘region’ but will engulf the world, a prospect that Mr. Boot and his allies, among them the braggart and bully Mr. Netanyahu, have failed, in their limited strategic thinking, to realize the danger of their own ideological and perceptual blinders. Even the act of consideration of the existence of such impediments, of checks on possible actions, seems beyond the ken of these political actors. There is the danger, the inability to consider an alternative, to consider the possibility of another course of action, predicated on a different view, of the perceived political alternatives. Or are we, the readers of this essay, to come to the conclusion that Mr. Boot is simply another propagandist for The Party Of War?

Political Observer