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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Suma who wrote (69051)	5/28/2008 6:14:14 PM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542139

Do we not realize we carry the big stick THE BIGGEST of all sticks and have more bombs in our arsenal than any other country on the face of the earth. Save Russia and that is going to be debatable. We seem to make such a big deal of being threatened when we are so superior in military and retaliatory might than any nation on the earth. There are a couple of different points here. 1) Some people subscribe to the theory that since Islamofascism uses suicide bombers and justifies such acts through religiios rewards that a nuclear armed Iran might be willing to commit national suicide in exchange for the destruction of Israel. Personally, I dont place much weight in this. After all, I have yet to hear of a terrorist leader actually going on a suicide mission. For some reason, they all seem to end up dying of old age or an Israeli missile through their front window. 2) OTOH, a nuclear armed Iran (or any other hostile Muslim country) is going to have a profound impact on the balance of power. Yes, we will still be militarily superior and have the ability to obliterate them, but that doesnt matter in many situations. For example, if Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait after obtaining nuclear weapons, what would have been the US response? Would we have risked a nuclear attack to remove Iraqi troops from Kuwait? The risk might be small but it changes the calculus completely. 3) A nuclear armed Iran might not attack Israel directly....but what happens if the entire region goes nuclear (as is likely) and then Hamas or Al-Qaeda gets its hands on a bomb (either with the blessings of a regime or without) and explodes a bomb in Israel? It is entirely possible that we wont have a return address for an attack. Without that, deterrence becomes an order of magnitude more complex than in the Cold War. The fundamental fact is that these countries are eventually going to go nuclear. We might be able to delay it for a decade but any long-term strategic analysis is going to have to take into account multiple nuclear armed countries in the Middle East. A democratic Iraq might have been an influence on the rest of the region to follow a similar path but that looks like a pipedream right now. Unfortunately, withdrawing entirely from the region might be the best solution, but that carries different risks which might be just as large. Slacker