Last Sunday's Toronto Sun featured and article in its comment section by Eric Margolis, the Sun's foreign correspondent. The gist of the article was that a nuclear Iran posed absolutely no threat to the rest of the world, as the Iranians were a) cognizant of the fact that if they did start a nuclear incident they would be totally annihilated by the americans and B) Iran did not possess the technological capability to deliver a nuclear weapon to a selected target and C) the americans and Israelis with their nuclear capability were the real threat to world peace.
In the article Margolis made a number of claims that were highly dubious, if not outright lies and I questioned the competence of the Sun's fact checkers printing his piece without the usual due diligence. For instance, Margolis claims that he was opposed to the invasion of Iraq in 2002 because he knew that Iraq couldn't possibly be a threat, even if they were in possession of WMDs, as they did not have the capability to deliver them. Margolis claims that Saddam's most advance missile could only fly a distance of some 130 kms.
a quick check of the Federation of american Scientists' (FaS) web site would have revealed that not only did the Iraqis have missiles that went a lot further than what Margolis claims they were capable of, they were actually used against Israel and Saudi arabia during the first Gulf War in 1991. according to the FaS, the Iraqis' al Husayn and al Hijarah scud-type missiles had a range of well over 600 kms, sufficient to reach most of Israel. Short memory or loose ethics?
Margolis also posited that the Mullahs in Iran were from 5-10 years away from perfecting nuclear weapons, so there was no need for the world to get its knickers in a knot. Wasn't that the same attitude that the Clinton administration had toward North Korea when it attempted to "negotiate" them out of completing a WMD program? Today North Korea is capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to many parts of the United States.
Most galling of all was Margolis's cavalier rationale why Iran would never nuke Israel. He conceded that the Iranians were capable of hitting Israel as well as some american bases in the Gulf, but claimed they would not do so as any nuclear strike in that region "would blow back on Iran".
Maybe Margolis was sleeping last week when the chief Iranian nutter, ahmed ahmadinejad said they don't care if there is a nuclear exchange with Israel, as there are only six million Jews (an interesting number) in Israel versus nearly a billion Muslims in the world. Israel could conceivably be eradicated with two or three nukes, as the area that Israel covers is slightly less than that of New Jersey. at its narrowest point Israel is only about 8 miles wide.
Margolis rationalizes that if Iran is really developing nuclear weapons it is for reasons of "national prestige and self-defense", because Israel and the evil Jews have an estimated 200 nuclear weapons ready to go.
He also dismissed the idea that Iran might give nukes to terrorists, claiming that Iran was at odds with both the Sunnis of Iraq, al Qaeda, as well as the Taliban. He also explained that nuclear weapons are easy to trace because of each nuke's unique signature. So if Trenton, New Jersey disappears into a smoking mound of radioactive rubble the americans will be able to track down the source and obliterate it. My question is if a country loves death as much as many fundamentalist Islamic nations do, what do they care, so long as they inflict grievous harm on the Great Satan, america.
I think Margolis's anti-Bush, anti-neocon (read that as Jews) and anti-Semitic sentiments have gone to his head and have affected his sense of reason. That's a shame. But a greater shame is that such drivel finds its way into what was once a fine newspaper.
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