Iran: America's Next Foreign Policy Debacle!

by dj moonbat by CA Pol Junkie

America's little adventure in Iraq isn't so fun anymore, as Americans keep getting killed over there, with the death toll set to pass 200 in a week or so. Even George Will laments how the reality of Iraq is ruining it for imperialists:

And overshadowing the military achievement is the failure -- so far -- to find, or explain the absence of, weapons of mass destruction that were the necessary and sufficient justification for preemptive war. The doctrine of preemption -- the core of the president's foreign policy -- is in jeopardy.

To govern is to choose, almost always on the basis of very imperfect information. But preemption presupposes the ability to know things -- to know about threats with a degree of certainty not requisite for decisions less momentous than those for waging war.

The Bush administration, lacking the introspection and moral encumbrance genes present in more thoughtful conservatives, is now threatening Iran in much the same way as it did Iraq:

President Bush last week said the rest of the world should join the United States in declaring that it "will not tolerate" nuclear weapons in Iran

Naturally, Iran having nukes is a bad thing. Of course, a nuclear North Korea is worse, but that's too complicated to deal with, so let's just ignore it and worry about Iran. With Iraq, Bush has demonstrated that his threats of force are credible even under weak or false pretenses. That makes Bush threatening Iran on nuclear weapons a self-fulfilling prophecy. From the point of view of Iran, there is nothing to gain by not building nuclear weapons, since they might get attacked anyway. Iran knows from the North Korean example that actually building a nuclear weapon will redirect Bush's imperialist tendencies toward an easier target like Syria.

Iran is not the place it was in 1979. Half of Iranians were born after the Islamic Revolution. Young Iranians aren't fond of the repression and have organized as the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran. They're not about to suddenly overthrow Supreme Leader Khamenei, but pressure has caused slow reforms under President Khatami, not unlike the gradual changes in Poland before the eventual fall of its communist government in 1989. The last thing the democracy movement needs is the unification of Iran behind its ayatollahs in defiance of the United States. The last thing the world needs is a nuclear Iran before the democracy movement succeeds.