Hewitt -
James Fallows contributes "Will Iran Be Next?" in the new Atlantic Monthly (subscription required.) This ought to have been an interesting article as it involves a three hour war game featuring David Kay, Kenneth Pollack and Reuel Marc Gerecht, as well as former Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon and Professors Michael Mazaar from the National War College, and war game simulator Sam Gardiner, who orchestrated the event. It became clear quickly, however, that the "game" was actually so circumscribed as to assure the result --which was a general recognition among the participants that stopping Iran from going nuclear was a very difficult prospect. "Compared with Iraq," Pollack said in a representative quote, "Iran has three times the population, four times the land area, and five times the problems."
Fallows uses every opportunity to assert his conclusions that the Iraq war plan was a disaster and that the occupation has been a complete catastrophe. While these assumptions are certainly deeply entrenched on the left, I believe they are the almost laughably politicized wish-fulfillments of professional Bush critics, and that military historians will always look back at the Iraq campaign as a wonder and the occupation as the inevitable difficult transition from a mindlessly cruel despotism through a fanatical theocratic resistance to a new order. Fallows and everyone else now jeering from the sidelines and worrying about Iran's nukes ought to at least ask themselves if the United States is better positioned today to do something militarily about Iran than it was two years ago, or to threaten such action convincingly.
The war game set up by Gardiner did not even present to the participants the crucial question: Can the United States allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons? If the answer is absolutely not, then there really is no sense fretting about how difficult the task ahead is --the least difficult path must be determined and followed. If the answer is "yes," then why bother.
Iran's mullahs with nukes seems to me as wildly unacceptable, far more dangerous than North Korea with the same, and certainly a real threat to Israel because the people of Iran will one day rise up --as they have tried in the past to do-- and threaten the existence of the regime. Before going into eclipse, is it not at least possible that the mullahs will decide to take Israel with them? A war game that begins with an option to do nothing is no war game at all --but another exercise of appeasement dressed up in cammies.
The magazine has fallen on some hard times since the death of Michael Kelly --all of journalism misses Kelly-- but is still worth reading with monthly doses of Mark Steyn, Robert Kaplan and P.J. O'Rourke. At least this article focuses on the right subject, even with all the wrong asides and useless conclusions. |
