In the Jul-Sept 1990 edition of Ultimate Issues, in the aftermath of Iraq’s conquest of Kuwait, Dennis Prager wrote an essay entitled, “And now…the Arab Threat.”
The parallels between Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler are as true as they are often made…
Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait is the test of the post Cold War era just as Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia and Hitler’s of Czechoslovakia were the tests of the pre-World War II era…
Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, like the invasions of the 1930s, will determine our future.
Given that the average Iraqi IQ is 87 and the average German IQ is 102 (and was higher before WWII when it had millions of Jews, also Germany had the second biggest economy in the world prior to WWII while Iraq had only the 40th largest economy when it annexed Kuwait), it is impossible for Iraq and its ilk to pose a threat to the world in anything like the way Germany did, but Dennis Prager, being deliberately obtuse, does not believe that IQ measures anything important and so he refuses to see reality.
Iraqis and Iranians (only in the last 30 years have a majority of their populations become literate) have lower average IQs than Mexicans and who worries about Mexico posing an existential threat to anyone? The Soviet Union developed a nuclear weapon just four years after America, while Iran started its nuclear program in the 1950s and has yet to produce a bomb. Perhaps it has something to do with Russia’s average IQ being 13 points higher than Iran’s? As Steve Sailer points out, “Muslims, for all their obnoxiousness, are simply too incompetent to be an existential threat to America.” Yet, on Dec. 18, 2013, Deliberately Obtuse Dennis said, “You can’t write on a more important subject in international affairs today than Iran.” Huh? Iran in 2014 has the world’s 32nd largest GNP and the 31st biggest military budget and it has no nuclear weapons. What about China? It only has an average IQ of 100, the world’s biggest population, second biggest economy and second biggest military.
Physicist Gregory Cochran does believe IQ measures something important, which enables him, in some ways, to see the world more clearly than Dennis does. In a Sept. 9, 2007 interview, Dr. Cochran, who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, said:
I think that most people writing about international politics don’t have much useable history. They keep making the same two analogies (everything is either Munich or Vietnam)…
I also think that they have zero quantitative knowledge. Comparisons of Saddam’s Iraq and Hitler’s Germany used to bug me, since Germany had the second largest economy in the world and was a real contender, while Iraq had the fortieth largest GNP and didn’t have a pot to piss in.…In the same way, people who equate the dangers of jihadism with that of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union really don’t know big from small, don’t know anything about the roots of national power.
