Making Friends, Making Enemies and Looking Toward the Future

The current war talk against Iran is hopelessly short-sighted. A successful US military action would only delay Iran's getting nuclear weapons by another ten years or so but it would greatly increase the chance that they'd want to use them. A war would justify Tehran's paranoia and legitimize a strike-back against the US or our allies when they finally do perfect the bomb.

It is widely rumored that the top US civilian leadership wants to use "tactical" nuclear weapons to destroy the underground labs where Iranian scientists are refining the uranium. The US military is reportedly very against this, and this is most likely why we're seeing all of these retired US generals calling for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Although a dozen-or-so countries have nuclear weapons, no one has used them since the US bombed Japan fifty years ago. No country wants to be the first to use them again, knowing there would be an incredible international backlash against them. If the US did launch even a limited nuclear attack against Iran, it would make the use of atomic weapontry more acceptable.

Nuclear weapons are a fact of life now. Iran is going to get them, sooner or later. Many of the countries in the region have bombs--Pakistan, India, Israel, China. The US can't put this genie back in the bottle. We need to build an international consensus that their use in unacceptable in any circumstance. Which means we need to stop planning on using them ourselves.

Seymour Hersh's article on US war preparations has a great quote in it from an unnamed "European official":

Iran is no longer living in the Stone Age, and the young people there have access to U.S. movies and books, and they love it. If there was a charm offensive with Iran, the mullahs would be in trouble in the long run.

We have two choices: bomb Iran now, which would possibly hold off the threat another ten years but would certainly turn younger Iranians against us for generations to come. Or we could manage the situation as best we can, using international inspectors to delay atomic weapons if possible but launching not bombs but the "charm offensive." We need to think about what the Iranian-US relationship will look like ten and twenty and fifty years from now. Even a "small" war now would lead to a huge war then.

All wars start decades before the bullets start flying. The seeds of World War II were in the debilitating reparations the victorious allies forced on a defeated German twenty years before at the end of World War I. By 1938 the war was all-but-inevitable. We can only stop wars if we look to the future and build friends of our enemies now. Iran will change. United States actions now will shape the future of Iran. Let's not muck it up.