I’ve heard it variously attributed to Niels Bohr and Yogi Berra but it’s hard to make predictions, particularly about the future. You might want to read this prediction of future disaster following an attack on Iran in 2009 from Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian. There are plenty of free flights of fancy in the piece but the implication that inaction is always better than action troubles me.
Tim Blair responds, excessively, with what would appear to be a counsel of total extermination on a precautionary basis. Patrick Porter of OxBlog scolds Tim and notes, correctly, that exterminatory war is precisely what we’d like to avoid. Let’s not make any false equivalences. Here in the United States we still have freedom of speech and of religion and we still have some degree of self-determination. The regime in Iran doesn’t want its people to have any of those things and they’re hiring bully-boys from all over the Middle East to put down dissent.
That innocents may be harmed or that action may have implications should urge us to greater reflection but shouldn’t deter us from creative action: the longer we wait the fewer alternatives we may have.
Macbeth: If we should fail?
Lady Macbeth: We fail! But screw your courage to the sticking place and we’ll not fail.
What exactly is “the sticking place?”
And you should be more accurate in your descriptives. Iran isn’t just hiring “bully boys,” as if they were simply interesting in breaking a strike by some longshoremen. They’re hiring cold blooded killers from Hezbollah. There’s a SIGNIFICANT difference. And that should be noted.