Saw this story in Yahoo news today. As I've told you before, I'm not a hard core liberal and anti-war person. I am an anti-stupidity person. When we were leading up to Iraq I told anyone who would listen that it was amazing to me that we were concerning ourselves with a country that only had a slight chance of having nukes while there was one country (Korea) with an insane leader who was not only telling us he had nukes, but was firing them into the ocean to prove it, and on the other hand we had another country (Iran) that we all agreed probably did have nukes. I was amazed that we weren't concentrating on one of those two. But, like most Americans I figured I didn't know what I was talking about and left my government to do the right thing.
Now I'm sure I was right and so was Europe and Russia. Iraq was no threat.
But governments make mistakes. Look at Europe and Britain now.. We let them handle Iran their way and look where that is getting us? Now, everything we as a nation (democrat and republican) feared is happening in Iran. They have WMD's and they are going to share them with terrorists!!!!
I don't care that we (and Europe) fucked this up. No use crying over spilled milk and all that crap. What I care about is that we should do something right quick to straighten this shit out! I say if we are ok with our troops being killed overseas (and I have to say that I am since they are indeed voluntary soldiers), we should at least have them doing something useful. Move them over to Iran and kick some ass where they should have been in the first place.
note: I am fully against our soldiers dieing in Iraq. I want to make that clear. The reason is that they don't belong there and are being killed because of a supreme political fuckup or insane personal vendetta. But I'm against them being killed for reasons other than the fact that they are soldiers. Sadly, that is their job. They signed up for it and I'm sorry, that's the risk they took when they signed up. If they did it for free college, that's our fault for not providing other ways for underprivileged children the chance to go to college, not the military’s.
4 comments:
Not that I'm pro-Bush at all, but the current administration's policy is not to put the smack-down on nations it already knows has nukes, but to slap any nation upside the head that MAY be working towards getting the nuke (hence, to some degree, Iraq). Of all the nuke nations, Korea is the only one that we haven't been able to prove has one, but nobody's taking a chance on them NOT having one, so there you go.
And we can't invade the nuke nations with crazy leaders or crazy terrorists. Its called MAD. Crazy people can do crazy things sometimes, and what's scarier than an insane person with an atomic bomb? We don't invade Pakistan or Iran or Korea, not because we think they should have nukes, but precisely because it is so difficult to ensure that they will not use their nukes against us. Or sell them to terrorists who, in light of current sentiments toward the US, may not be so kind to us either.
It sucks, but it's true. So right now, we have our Deputy Secretary of State engaged in six-party talks with North Korea, South Korea, Russia, China and Japan, in an effort to denuclearize the Korean peninsula. Nobody's sitting on their ass, but it's difficult to move forward with Pyongyang insisting upon a light-water reactor for energy production, and the U.S. being all sorts of pissed off since the DPRK broke away from the NPT and the Agreed Framework, and kicked the IAEA out of their country.
But since it's not all bombs and death and destruction, it's not making the boldest headlines in the news lately.
Unfortunately, it's one of those wait-and-see-if-diplomacy-really-does-it situations. If not, then we may one day have to bomb the hell out of Kim Jong-il and his anti-American Juche politics.
Well, Mutually Assured Destruction works when a county can do as much (or close to as much) damage to you with nukes as you can do to them. So, in a way, you are wrong on that point. However, one sided MAD can work and that's why Korea isn't launching anything at the moment.
I guess the point I was trying to make is that the BWH is either a) clueless in focusing it's resources on Iraq or b) lying to us in saying that they were the biggest threat to us.
In either case, I was mostly trying to raise awareness that Iran is now saying that they will sell nukes to whoever wants them. That, to me, is the most troubleing international news I've heard since before the millenium.
FYI, it was Pakistan who helped North Korea boost its nuclear program... And we're not invading Pakistan either.
However, I don't understand your point about MAD.
Well, the term came out of the cold war and was primiarily conceived to explain that we would never have a nuclear war with Russia becasue each of us had the capacity (number of missles and range) to fully destroy each oter entirely in the even the other country launched. That worked well.
However, take the case of Iran or Korea who each at best has half a dozen warheads and neither has the capacity to launch them via missles in any way that can come close to hitting American soil. So MAD doesn't apply to them at all. They provide no deterrant for us to strike them and they know they don't . See what I mean now?
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