[quote]DBCooper wrote:
[quote]Otep wrote:
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
I understand your argument about placating North Korea and Iran, but what else is the U.S. supposed to do? War is in no one’s best interest and fostering massive anti-American sentiment isn’t in our interest either. But if we were to enact crippling economic sanctions against North Korea or Iran all we’ll do is make the people who are best able to change those regimes without us getting involved hate us even more.
If we place heavy sanctions on Iran, the Iranians will hate us even more, which on the surface doesn’t seem like such a big deal. But it will also lead to a legitimizing of the deep anti-American sentiments in Iran that have allowed that country to get as far out of whack as they are. Right now, they’re divided over there; half the people don’t want to see the govt continually try to egg us on and the other half gets a real big kick out of telling us to go fuck ourselves. But if you want to see that country galvanize itself really quickly, watch how fast it would happen if we enacted huge sanctions against Iran far beyond what we’re trying to do right now. Those crazy fuckers will see it as nothing short of an all-out attack on their way of life and will unite against us just like this country galvanized itself right after 9/11.
Of course, the sanctions might create a lot of anti-Ahmadijenad sentiment instead and have the opposite effect described above, but if it doesn’t and the above scenario happens, we’ll set our diplomatic efforts back for decades, at which point Iran will probably have a nice little arsenal of nukes.
Now the other option, besides what Bush and Obama have been trying to do, is to simply blow through there with a few F-22s and decimate all the nuclear reactors. Or give Israel carte blanche to do it instead. But this will only galvanize the ENTIRE Middle East against us, probably permanently. We would eliminate their nuclear capabilities, but then we’d have a whole new set of problems that we can’t even fully envision now. Plus, a lot of countries around the globe would condemn us for foregoing diplomacy, regardless of how fruitless our diplomatic efforts were, and we’d be hard-pressed to find anyone, outside of Britain and maybe France, to go along with any efforts we made to clean up our mess in the Middle East.
It’s almost a situation in which we don’t want the ball in our court because there really aren’t any good options for us, so we’ve attempted to put the ball in Iran’s and North Korea’s court instead. Many countries look at us and say, “why should we not pursue nukes, why should we get rid of ours? You have them.” We aren’t going to get rid of ours to make them happy, but we are trying to tell them that if they don’t pursue nuclear weaponry then they won’t have any reason to fear us and our nukes anyways. But if they do try to pursue nukes, they are only creating a scenario in which we will become increasingly more likely to use them.[/quote]
You make a good point of showing how American administrations suffer from a lack of options. I think though, it has more a lack of political will than political options.
What should have happened, is that the moment the US or any reasonable democratic government received intelligence that Iran, Nkorea, or Pakistan was trying to develop nukes, they should have invaded and laid the heavy hand of justice upon the rogue nations. Nukes are too important to be entrusted to a government without a clear separation of powers and the safeguards of an honest democracy. Russia’s bad enough- the world should not be held ransom by madmen, and it’s the responsibility of it’s leaders (leaders being the rich, prosperous, developed nations) to see that.
I don’t think most nations need a reason to not invest cash in developing nukes. Most nations are content to outsource their defense to the US. The only people who want nukes are belligerants, and democracies actively engaged in regional conflict with belligerants (Israel and India, who I have no problem calling good guys, because they’re both stable democracies).
I have no problem with the US+Israel bombing nuke sites in NKorea and Iran. Skorea and Japan might, because they’ll take the fall from NKorea if we don’t get them all, but that probably doesn’t enter the equation. I don’t care if the Europe complains, and I don’t care if the ME complains. I don’t know why anyone would. Or rather, I don’t know why America should be more afraid of the negative opinion of some sackless peaceniks who can’t pay for their own entitlement programs or a string of retributive despots than letting nuclear technology into the hands of evil men.
But it’s easier to go along to get along than to accomplish lasting change. C’est la vie.
I’m glad you post here.[/quote]
I wish we could just roll right into Tehran or PyongYang and wipe out all the nuclear reactors, but that isn’t as easy as it sounds. Our standing army is about 1.4 million, which gives us an advantage over Iran (945,000), but it would create absolute havoc in the region. Using logic and reason, there should be no reason why the rest of the ME would flip out if we rolled in and wiped out the reactors and took Ahmadijenad out at the same time, but they WILL flip out because they don’t subscribe to the same logic and reason as the rest of the world. And what they will do is far more relevant than what they should do.
North Korea could be far more problematic. For starters, they already have nuclear capabilities, they just don’t have a delivery system that can take a warhead out of the country. But Kim Jong Il is deranged enough to use one in his own country if he could use it one U.S. troops. Plus, whereas we have a standing army of 1.4 million, they have 2.1 million. And unless we pulled every troop out of the Middle East, we would be at a severe disadvantage from a pure manpower standpoint. We could still defeat North Korea, but it would probably get pretty ugly over there.
If we just bombed the sites, assuming we could do so with the aid of surrounding countries in order to launch our jets from their airbases or from aircraft carriers in their waters (can we do so without aid from other countries? I’m not really sure), we would still suffer a fallout regarding any future foreign policy. It would be bullshit if other countries got pissed off at us for preemptively hitting Iran or North Korea, but the reality is that they WILL get pissed and we will be forced to deal with it.
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We don’t know where all nuclear reactors in Iran are. Even if we did, whats to say they won’t take their operations underground if they haven’t already?
I’m not sure about this next point but assuming war broke out in Iran it might piss China off because they have stakes in oil there.
I’m not worried about Kim Jong Il because if he does something as drastic as nuke something it will mean his reign will be over, and that is the last thing he wants. The same goes with the leaders of Iran.
The last I’ve heard is that both are cooperating (right?), it is in NO ONES self-interest to use nuclear weapons. The threat is more serious when it falls into the hands of someone with nothing to lose.
