The Giant Conspiracy
May 19th, 2009 by Nick SaintThe other day, I dismissed something Dick Cheney said as crazy - a natural enough impulse - but I’m suddenly having second thoughts. Here’s the quote, in all its glorious context :
“We fail to recognize the fact that we’re alone out there in terms of trying to achieve the objective of forcing the Iranians to give up their nuclear weapons,” Cheney said at a dinner following the Intelligence Squared debate, in which Elizabeth Cheney and former Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Dan Senor debated former diplomat Nicholas Burns and Mideast scholar Ken Pollack on the topic of negotiations with Iran.
The former Vice President characterized the Iranian goal in negotiations on ending that country’s nuclear program as mere stalling for time, and the Europeans as trying to “restrain the U.S.” from military action.
“Everybody’s in a giant conspiracy to achieve a different objective than the one we want to achieve,” Cheney said.
That first sentence, of course, really is crazy. There is plenty of disagreement over just how bad it would be if Iran had nukes and to what lengths we should be willing to go to prevent this, but most countries are right there with the United States when it comes to having a preference for a world in which Iran is not a nuclear power.
That last bit about the conspiracy sounds crazy as well, but on further reflection, I think it’s actually a pretty obvious truth, on this and every other issue. Of course everybody else is working to achieve things other than what we want to achieve - that’s what makes them part of them, rather than part of us. No two countries - and no two people, for that matter - have exactly the same interests. So whoever you are, the world is united in not wanting things to go your way. Of course, since they all disagree about what they do want, it’s not usually a very idiologically coherent or effective conspiracy, but it’s still pretty irritating.
Hell is other people, Dick. Have some ice cream.
