The fallacy of Islamic 'national suicide'

A new buzzword is arising from the network of Israeli think tanks and security-oriented academic departments bent on instigating a U.S. attack on Iran: "national suicide." The term describes a supposed Arab Muslim tradition of politically motivated suicide at the national, not just individual, level. Arab Muslim regimes have purportedly launched ruinous wars they could not have reasonably hoped to win, condemning their nations to destruction.

The notion of an "irrational" and thus untrustworthy Iranian regime has already been widely discussed in the U.S. It is regularly invoked by Sen. John McCain on the stump. The term "national suicide" advances the notion and gives it a patina of academic respectability.

Israeli jurist and former Knesset member Amnon Rubinstein recently editorialized on "national suicide" in the Jerusalem Post. Citing Israeli army Lt. Col. Ari Bar Yossef, Rubinstein offered Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat and the Taliban in Afghanistan as exemplars of this new construct.