Unthinkables

I find it fascinating how confidently people feel that the forces and rules of history do not apply to them and their time. Whether in economics, politics, or foreign policy the emotional consensus seems to be that “we” can afford the immediately expedient without concern for either the future or even the real prospect of immanent failure.

For example, with all the talk about entities “too large to fail,” has anyone considered that the US is NOT “too big to fail”? There is no such thing in reality as “too big.” Yet no one seriously worries about the potentially “unthinkable” consequences of the unprecedented economic moves to drastically expand the money supply, increase government spending, and further socialize the economy – they’re unthinkable after all.

Take another example, as nice as it would be if it were true, diplomacy is not a panacea - no matter how rhetorically gifted its practitioner. However the administration’s obsession with opening negotiations with Tehran, besides being a tried and failed approach, entirely disregards the self declared object of negotiation, the elimination Iran’s nuclear weapons program. According to both official IAEA and US estimates, Iran will have already acquired the capacity to produce nuclear weapons by the time discussions are tentatively scheduled to begin in mid 2009.

Yet the question over whether and how to open talks, incredible as such a debate is, completely ignores the fact that game has already finished, and Iran won. How can this obvious conclusion be so totally ignored when the consequences involve nuclear weapons if not for a deeply held secret belief that it doesn’t matter whether Iran acquires the bomb? If the public, the administration, or the media attached even a modicum of reality to the possibility that we could actually suffer a nuclear attack does anyone seriously believe we wouldn’t have already bombed Iran years ago? Again, the hubris that drastic unthinkable events could never happen in MY life and times, notwithstanding that such things occur “regularly” in history, is no matter if current events are not part of history.

Given the stakes however, wouldn’t prudence dictate that we at least consider the possibility that the “unthinkable” is only so because we deem it so? Reality is blind to consequences and meaning, and if we continue to insist otherwise our belief that the unthinkable just cannot happen will give way to the question of how we were so naïve as to feel that tragedy somehow couldn’t happen to ME and mine.