It's thoughtful of you to ask "What then?" but no one seemed to be interested in the answer to that before we invaded Iraq. Unfortunately, it doesn't look to different this time. Still, it took about a year for them to hype the Iraq war, so maybe with enough counter-pressure this bad idea can be delayed long enough to throw the bums out.
8:26 AM, August 29, 2006
Weigel (on Sullivan's site) continues to track the gung-ho "let's invade Iran now" rhetoric coming from the right. I just want to ask the following question: once we invade or bomb Iran, what then? If we invade, we'll probably end up with an intolerable occupation much worse than Iraq's. Iran has a population of over 68 million, which is more than double Iraq's 27 million. It's also over three times as large: 1.65 million sq km to Iraq's 437 thousand sq km. And when we left, they'd just have even more reason to hate us.
The air strike scenario goes something like this: we set back their nuclear program X number of years, but we're not really sure how many. Iran hates our guts, and uses the footage of inevitable dead civilians for propaganda purposes. The Iranian population is driven further into the arms of anti-US mullahs. Lots of unsavory regimes use the US attack as an excuse to build up their arsenals and take various anti-US actions.
So what can we do to Iran? Well, for one thing we could launch a major alternative energy initiative and a major fuel economy initiative so our consumption doesn't fund their regime. While it is unlikely we could completely halt their nuclear program this way, we could slow it down, and certainly lessen Iran's influence and its ability to pour money into Hezbollah. If Iran wasn't so flush with oil money, they might have a greater incentive to negotiate seriously. We could also get out of Iraq so that our military could be more in a position to pose a credible threat to Iran.
If we weren't so dependent on oil, we'd have a lot more economic weapons at our disposal. If we hadn't pissed off the world community so much, we'd have more diplomatic tools in our kit. And if we hadn't bungled Iraq so badly, our conventional military threat would be much greater. To say nothing of the fact that our invasion of Iraq basically won the 1980-89 Iran-Iraq war for Iran at great cost to us and no cost to them. In short, George W. Bush has done everything possible to cripple the US in dealing with Iran. The man and his administration are strategic nitwits of the highest order.
posted by Zachary Drake at 3:01 AM on Aug 29, 2006
"Right wing Iran insanity watch"
1 Comment -
It's thoughtful of you to ask "What then?" but no one seemed to be interested in the answer to that before we invaded Iraq. Unfortunately, it doesn't look to different this time. Still, it took about a year for them to hype the Iraq war, so maybe with enough counter-pressure this bad idea can be delayed long enough to throw the bums out.
8:26 AM, August 29, 2006