Why Not Iran?
That’s the question some ask, particularly opponents of U.S. foreign policy, with the object of pointing out the hypocrisy of the U.S.’s stance on nuclear weapons in the Middle East (after all, everyone knows Israel has them). Victor Davis Hanson has a lot of answers, but this one in particular strikes me:
Iran is a uniquely fivefold danger. It has enough cash to buy influence and exemption; nuclear weapons to threaten civilization [sic? - I hope so]; oil reserves to blackmail a petroleum hungry world; terrorists to either find sanctuary under a nuclear umbrella or to be armed with dirty bombs; and it has a leader who wishes either to take his entire country into paradise, or at least back to the eighth century amid the ashes of the Middle East.
In another two or three weeks, the matter of Iran will come up before the UN Security Council…there can be no dithering; the strongest possible statement must be made short of military force – and if that doesn’t bring progress, well…we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
We cannot allow our obligations in Iraq to tie us down, however; it is no mistake that Iran has become belligerent at this time. To show weakness now sends many messages, none of them good: it says to our enemies that we can’t fight on two major fronts at once; that the insurgency in Iraq is crippling our ability to act on the world stage; that the intelligence failures leading to the Iraq invasion of 2003 have made us too cautious to act in the absence of 100% concrete evidence of WMDs; that our standing the Arab world is at such a low ebb that we won’t risk lowering it further no matter the provacation; and that we will abandon Israel in the time of its worst crisis in this young century.
To put it differently; if the invasion of Iraq allows a nuclear-armed Iran, then even die-hard supporters such as myself may look on it as a mistake…a horribly costly one, at that…
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