Yesterday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran called for the destruction of Israel while addressing a conference of students. When given an opportunity to influence the next generation in the ways of peace and a better future for Iran, he grotesquely used it to call for genocide.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Ahmadinejad's comment "underscores the concerns we have about Iran's nuclear intentions." Gee, ya think? Of course it does.
The problem is, the Republican-led disaster in Iraq has weakened America's ability to stand strong against Iran's globally dangerous nuclear plans.
The Iraq fiasco has stretched our military to the breaking point already, with recruitment numbers so horrible that military admission standards have been dangerously lowered. So, our Army seems little threat to Iran.
The Iraq quagmire has put our economic house in disarray--staining it red with the largest national debt on the planet (huge amounts of it owed to China)--in large part because Iraq costs us about $195 million each day; it's cost us a total of $205,000,000,000 ($205 billion) so far. So, Iran knows the U.S. is in no position to finance a war against them.
The Iraq war has isolated us from our traditional allies (but support remains among weaker and newer allies in Eastern Europe) whose high-tech and global resources we need to expose, track, capture and kill terrorists worldwide, and it has enraged many Muslims, and helped fuel al-Qaeda recruitment efforts. Iran knows that it will be harder than ever for us to rally other nations to resist Iranian nuclear ambitions.
What is more, Iran recently revealed that it has developed solid fuel technology, so its missiles will be more accurate than ever. It already possesses missiles that can reach Israel (or U.S. troops in the Middle East). Such missiles tipped with nuclear warheads and possessed by scared and angry religious extremists is a recipe for disaster.
Iran's nuclear program is a menace to democracy in the Middle East and beyond. Yet, we're in a far worse position militarily, economically, and diplomatically relative to Iran than if we had not invaded Iraq and let the U.N. inspectors do their job in Iraq way back in 2003, when--we now know--they would have found neither weapons of mass destruction nor evidence of WMD programs.
Sadly, I think we might be approaching a critical juncture relative to Iraq when we may be forced to decide between leaving completely or instituting the draft and assembling a regional force so massive we can try to continue the work in Iraq while also holding Iran and possibly Syria in check.
The first option risks an Iraqi civil war, which would kill many Iraqis, create secure al-Qaeda-friendly areas in its aftermath, and weaken the global standing of democracy for the short term. However, such a civil war would also likely create a pro-U.S. and pro-democracy Kurdish nation to influence the region as a nation of the region, not as a nation of Western invaders. Also, since the U.S. will have pulled out, al-Qaeda would be denied their best recruitment tool to date (i.e. our occupation), perhaps making their new areas in Iraq less effective for them than our occupation currently.
The second option could result in anything from continued failure but on a bigger scale to World War III. However, it might manage to achieve the securing of southern Iraqi regions where an infrastructure and democracy could be established and a truly competent military force created, though it would be under constant terrorist attack. At best, and this seems unlikely, it could at the end of a long reconstruction timeline (and who knows how many more American lives) create a multi-ethnic democratic Iraqi republic able to defend herself from enemies foreign and domestic. But, the second option--no matter what its outcome in Iraq--could also ruin us economically. The costs of scaling up the war by several orders of magnitude would be staggering. As World War I bankrupted the United Kingdom, a full-scale Iraq war could truly ruin us.
To say that at any point in the Iraq saga we will be faced with only the above two options is to, admittedly, offer a false dichotomy. Decisions are seldom either/or. But, the above choices present two relatively realistic extremes. (I consider, albeit inexpertly, nuclear destruction of Iraq--or Iran--utterly unrealistic as an extreme.)
Of the two options, the former seems the least risky by far. It has one huge advantage, which is to remove Americans and American resources from Iraq and reapply them to nation-building elsewhere--that is, in The United States of America, where our national house is not in order, and the state of the Union is not strong:
*wealth inequality is at horrific levels for a modern Western democracy;
*huge swaths of the population lack healthcare;
*religious (Christian) fundamentalism is on the rise, threatening everything from the scientific education of our children to access to birth control;
*government agencies, as Katrina revealed, are rife with cronyism and sleaze fostered by the anti-government governing of George Bush and the Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court;
*frighteningly few of the necessarily investments in anti-terrorist endeavors have been completed or even taken seriously by a President whose first concern seems to be tax cuts for the rich, not securing our ports, creating vaccines, or funding first-responders; and
*no national commitment to the development of alternative sustainable energy consumption--an Apollo program for energy--has been acknowledged by Republican leadership as necessary, let alone begun.
We need to do nation-building right here, right now. And I believe it needs to start with the rejection by voters of the Republican regime of short-sighted anti-government non-governing that leaves the country without a collective vision or hope for a better future for our children and our children's children.
