Saturday, March 17, 2007

"You gotta nuke somethin'."

I used to think that folks like N. Korea, Iran, et al. were only developing nuclear weapons to join the big boys on the world stage (or at least extort them). Because they weren’t really interested in blowing us up, we didn’t have as much to worry about. I still think we shouldn’t let them go nuclear, but that doesn’t mean we have to invade. Before 2002, an airstrike against their nuclear facilities would have seemed appropriate and probably been enough because of the threat of invasion as a last resort.

Now, I think that the Iraq war has changed everything. Since we can’t seem to win in Iraq, we either face:

a) a country that builds a nuclear weapon and thinks that we won’t do anything about it because we don’t have the guts or the strength to get involved in another Iraq

b) a country that uses a nuclear weapon because they think that America won’t have the guts or the strength to get involved in another Iraq

In the second situation, we could probably rally enough world involvement to win the war. (Provided we don’t invade Cuba because N. Korea nuked us.) But the question is, have we created a world where other countries might bet on our unwillingness to invade?

1 comment:

Rob said...

This is what happens when we're more worried about making political parties other than our own look bad than what's right for the country. The problem we have with Iraq is not disarming them. It wouldn't be too hard to move into N. Korea or Iran and smash their militaries. The problem with Iraq is they can't get along with themselves, and rather than debate like we do here, they suicide bomb. If all we wanted to do was disarm Iraq then "Mission Acomplished" like the president said. Unfortunately we are trying to do something that has never been done before in creating a free and democratic society in a place that hates us and only had any sort of peace because the military leader was part of the minority and willing to completely crush his enemies. We don't want to be there forever, we want to let them rule themselves, but they obviously aren't ready, and pulling out now in my opinion will not help.