Abizaid wobbles left

Now that he's retired, we get to find out what General Abizaid really thinks.

He thinks the world could live with a nuclear-armed Iran.

Justification number one is, "look, we've lived with Russia and China".

Number two is "Iran is not a suicide nation".

In my view, number two is simply a dangerously ill-informed statement that simply ignores many things we already know about Iran. While it may be true that the larger part of the Iranian population is not fanatically Islamic, we can't forget that the Shia sect believes in the 12th Imam, an apocalyptic messianic figure whose coming signals the end of the world and the beginning of a new magical Islamic one. Ahmadinejad himself is a big fan of the 12th Imam, and some say he sees the 12th Imam when he looks into the mirror. At any rate, Ahmadinejad is certainly disposed toward hastening the apocalypse, and cannot be trusted to be completely sane on the subject of worldwide destruction. And the disposition of the population is at this stage irrelevant, as Ahmadinejad and the mad mullahs are currently and for the foreseeable future in possession of the state goodies.

The little imam has also said the nation of Israel should be wiped off the map, as well as numerous other antagonistic and provocative things which would imply the consideration of the future use of nukes.

And this problem I have outlined with the number two Abizaid justification is that it invalidates number one, which was an attempt to consider Iran on the same political level as Russia and China.

Clearly, Russia and China are secular leftist nations with no desire or tendency toward self-immolation as a part of the dawning of a new age. They would not launch nukes as an invitation to world destruction, only to try to win a preemptive war.

They want to own the world, not to destroy it.

General Abizaid's talents are now on the shelf. His views should remain there as well. But because his views are less 'trenchant' than those of Bush, he can be presented as a retired general who opposes the Bush doctrine, and thus we will hear no end of him in the lamestream media.