Hear the sabres rattling

According the Ezra Levant, the Publisher of the Western Standard magazine, a strong case exists for going to war with Iran, which he characterizes as a bunch of "hotheads and nutbars". Levant's argument is echoed by a clutch of like-minded, right-wing commentators who were interviewed by Richard Foot of CanWest News Service for a column that went over the wires today and will likely appear in most CanWest papers. Their view is that the world must smash Iran else it wake up one morning with a North American city flattened by an Iranian nuclear weapon.

“The Iranian regime is not bound by any concepts of international law,” says Levant. “The Soviets were containable by the notion of mutually assured destruction. Ahmadinejad regards himself as a messianic figure who exults in the death cult of Islamo fascism. You cannot use statecraft to fence in someone like him.

“They’re not just a rational evil like the Soviets were. “They’re an irrational evil. Together with the leader of North Korea — the last two pieces of the ’axis of evil’ — they’re a collection of hotheads and nutbars.”

If you thought that was an extreme view (not surprising from someone who hosts the Shotgun Blog, as wild a collection of spitting-mad and vituperative opinion from the far right as you're likely to see), just look at what some of the other commentators quoted said:

“If Iran gets nuclear warheads, we will surely awaken to a morning much like Sept. 11, 2001, when it will have been cities, rather than merely buildings, that have been immolated,” says David Harris, a former agent with CSIS, Canada’s spy agency, who is now an Ottawa-based senior fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, a national security lobby group. “I don’t know how far they are from that ability,” says Harris. “It could be decades, or it could be months.”

“At the end of the day, Hitler pushed the West so far it realized it had no choice but to fight, but it avoided doing so as long as it could, and tried to rationalize its avoidance by thinking that negotiations would make everything OK,” says David Bercuson, director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary. “The trouble is, Hitler’s formula was not negotiable. And I think we’re at that same point with Iran.”

“Iran’s mullahs are about to produce their first home-built nuclear weapons this year [says U.S. political author Thomas Holsinger]. If we permit that, many other countries, some of whose governments are dangerously unstable, will build their own nuclear weapons to deter Iran and each other from attack,” he wrote. “This rapid and widespread proliferation will inevitably lead to use of nuclear weapons in anger, by terrorists and by fearful and unstable Third World regimes, at which point the existing world order will break down.”