Jonah Goldberg’s not happy that people are happy with the new National Intelligence Estimate:

The attitude among many people — like say, John Edwards — is that we dodged a bullet with this NIE. But that’s only true if this NIE is right. Indeed, as a matter of national security, it seems to me one could make the case that it would be better for the NIE to be wrong the other way. That is to say, if the NIE is wrong, better it be wrong on the side of caution. Which would you rather: An NIE that says Iran isn’t pursuing nuclear weapons when it really is? Or, an NIE that says Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons when it really isn’t? How you answer that question probably says a lot about how you view foreign policy generally.

I think this kind of thinking was quite prevalent before the invasion of Iraq. Before 9/11, when contemplating starting wars with other countries, most people were inclined to err on the side of caution — which is to say not starting wars. After 9/11, things looked different. Maybe the Iraq situation was a bit unclear, but best to err on the side of caution — which was to say starting a war.

It’s easy to understand how that happened, but surely the notion that alarmism is a form of caution should have died in the sands of Iraq.

One thing that I guess I could have learned just pondering the world from my chair but that I don’t think I really understood until I went to the Netherlands and talked to people involved in politics there is the extent to which the “new atheism” — which is mostly like the old atheism but involves people acting like jerks — is specifically bound up with some problematic anti-Muslim sentiments. Previously, things like this Christopher Hitchens column bashing Hanukkah had struck me as merely weird; something along the lines of the contrarian tick that led Will Saletan to proclaim the truth of white supremacy only to be embarrassed when the thesis turned out to be primarily backed by white supremacists, except taking on a much less harmful form.

That’s because here in the states, we understand “religion” to mean “Christianity” (and predominantly Protestant Christianity at that) and in public life the “secular” alternative is understoo- as encompassing a vague pluralism that’s friendly to minority religious groups, not the strident anti-religious sentiments of a Hitchens or a Richard Dawkins.

In Europe, though, the face of “religion” is increasingly Islam whereas elements of the secular consensus are part of a national identity that elements of the right can embrace. It was explained to me, for example, that one thing Dutch people worry about when they worry about Muslim immigrants is that socially conservative Muslim immigrants might spoil their same-sex partnership law. I joked that conservatives should love immigration, then. But in reality the forces of indigenous religious conservatism are way too weak for anything like that to happen. So instead of a system of cross-currents, where both a cosmopolitan left and a traditionalist right find something to admire about growing diversity, you get a substantial block of people pushing against Muslim immigrants from both a secularist and a nationalist perspective.

From the point of view of an American liberal, it’s an awkward situation. One doesn’t want to say “you guys should get rid of your progressive views on gender roles because it would make it easier for Muslims to assimilate” but at the end of the day it is much easier for Muslims to go along get along in a country like the US where traditionalist attitudes have more political clout. Of course, if more American conservative Christians decide to go the Pat Robertson route and decide to support Rudy Giuliani on the grounds that fighting Muslims is the ultimate expression of Christian values, then our advantage here will rapidly erode.

It does bear reiterating that as Headline Junkie says even if Iran doesn’t have an active nuclear weapons program there’s still ample reason to be concerned about Iran’s behavior with regard to nuclear issues. The hope should be that this report will help put a dagger through the heart of loose talk about preventive military strikes and regime change — talk that had become part of the problem — and lay the groundwork for a more rational approach to the Iran issue.

It continues to be clear that there are things the Iranians are more interested in than nuclear research, and it also continues to be clear that the decades of animosity between the United States and the Islamic Republic aren’t serving the interests of either party very well. Bush seems too deeply invested in his BS to make any bold strokes at this point, but it’s always worth pointing out that it was Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who co-chaired the CFR task force proposing a “grand bargain” with Iran, working alongside Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security advisor and now in some sense affiliated with the Obama campaign. The wisdom of this approach, not just “diplomacy” but specifically diplomacy aimed at ending the conflict through mutual concessions, is pretty clear even if the US politico-media system often seems too screwed up for anyone to articulate it.

Here’s an interesting nugget:

None of the leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination is likely to embrace that, said [Michael] O’Hanlon, who suspended his ties to the campaign of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) after he wrote that Bush’s troop buildup was yielding positive results.

Since O’Hanlon was still being quoted in the media as a Clinton supporter a few weeks ago, I have to imagine the campaign (finally) got sick of him and got him to buzz off. But of course things can change when one shifts from “primary mode” to “general election mode” and I’m not sure what “suspended his ties” is really supposed to mean. What’s more, O’Hanlon’s always got Opportunity ’08 to play around with.

Steve Clemons says Israeli Labor Party MK Ephraim Sneh told him he doesn’t believe the new Iran NIE, sees the release of this report as an abdication of American responsibilities, and concluded by saying “When I get back, I will call together our intelligence establishment, and I will do all I can to begin seriously preparing the ‘Israel option.’” Sneh’s not a hugely influential politician at this juncture, but he’s also not someone with a particularly hawkish record. Meanwhile, based on this Haaretz article, Ehud Olmert seems to be trying to respond in a reasonably responsible and restrained manner, but Labor ministers like Ehud Barak and Binyamin Ben-Eliezer are trying to call the credibility of the NIE into question.