The Republican Fear Campaign

Paul Krugman has another great op-ed piece -- this time about the Bush administration's campaign of fear:

In America’s darkest hour, Franklin Delano Roosevelt urged the nation not to succumb to “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” But that was then.

Today, many of the men who hope to be the next president — including all of the candidates with a significant chance of receiving the Republican nomination — have made unreasoning, unjustified terror the centerpiece of their campaigns.

Consider, for a moment, the implications of the fact that Rudy Giuliani is taking foreign policy advice from Norman Podhoretz, who wants us to start bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible.”

Mr. Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary and a founding neoconservative, tells us that Iran is the “main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11.” The Islamofascists, he tells us, are well on their way toward creating a world “shaped by their will and tailored to their wishes.” Indeed, “Already, some observers are warning that by the end of the 21st century the whole of Europe will be transformed into a place to which they give the name Eurabia.”

Do I have to point out that none of this makes a bit of sense?

Needless to say, the right is outraged by Paul Krugman's disinclination to continue the Bush administration's strategy of conducting foreign policy via hysterical, unreasoning fear.

I thought this response, however, was particularly hilarious -- all the more so because it's meant to be deadly serious [my emphasis]:

Tom Maguire of JustOneMinute points out how Krugman's Iranian terror theory runs contrary to the 9/11 Report. The Islamic Republic has worked along side Sunnis and Arab regimes for years, with the endgame being to push the West out of the region and exert their hegemonic authority throughout the Islamic world (not a caliphate, but serious enough).

Chilling. Truly horrifying. Just the thought: Iran seeking hegemony in its own part of the world! Serious enough indeed. What right does Iran have to even be in the Islamic world? That's our sphere of influence, not theirs!