Letters to the Editor
mattwa33186
Published Letters: 432 Editor's Choice: 45
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Domino Theory
[Read the article: Joe Lieberman, warmongering centrist]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Someone else posted that war with Iran would be the first domino to fall in a chain that would end with the death of American democracy. I have to disagree.
The first domino was war with Iraq. The second was Rumsfeld's idiotic decision to cut the troop deployment by 2/3 when we were already comitted to the field and unable to change our strategy, possibly the worst decision in modern military history.
Those 2 decisions, trying to liberate a country where for 20 years the government killed everyone who showed leadership ability as a matter of policy and reducing the initial troop deployment from 300,000 to 100,000 (which led to the looting and riots, the insurgency, and the Iranian involvement) have brought us here. Iran really is a serious and credible threat. They are helping the "insurgents", who are nothing more than people on the other side of a civil war but they are killing Americans, which is unacceptable. Iran will be a nuclear power soon enough, likely. And from here we have very few options of where to go.
We can abandon Iraq. Leave them with no real government at all and nothing to show for the pain we have caused. Iran will receive the accolades Bush told us to expect when they liberate Iraq a few weeks after we leave, taking over unopposed and finishing the job we started - turning the most secular nation in the Middle East into part of the worlds largest theocracy, one that has hatred of America as one of their guiding principals. And then watch all those Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries join the new Muslim nuclear superpower that we created with Iran at it's heart. No country in the Middle East can stand up to a determined effort by Iran once Iraq falls to them. None of the 'Stans would even want to stand up to them. Without a strong US presence in the Middle East, this will be a cakewalk for the Iranians.
We can attack Iran now. We will not attack them because of Israel. We will attack them because we have become too weak not to, but Lieberman can't say that, no one in government can. We'd have to bring down the Iranian government the same way we brought down the Iraqi government. We might be able to stop there, if we get someone with half a brain in the White House. But we might have to fight our way through Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, all the 'Stans, and possibly even Indonesia (you want an incubator for terrorism where nearly anything could go undetected, that's the place), not to mention dealing with Asia and the EU, who are sure to object militarily if they see us grabbing half the world's oil. Big. Long. Ugly. War.
Either way, Israel is beyond our ability to protect them. We don't have the strength or the allies to drag ourselves out of the hole we have dug, let alone pull them out with us.
Sure, war with Iran is a terrible idea, one reason being that at this point there is a very real chance we would lose. And this administration has already shown that they are willing to toss away every single advantage we have for no apparent reason, so I doubt things would go well.
The alternative is to stay in Iraq, increase our strength in the region rather than decrease it, call it what it is (an occupation), and provide the stability we destroyed when we botched the invasion, for a very long time - possibly forever. Strengthen the borders. Keep the Iranians out of Iraq and inside their own borders. Stop trying to give control of the country to the natives and just take control ourselves. Maybe in 15 or 20 years they will have what they need to run the place, but you don't recover from a military dictatorship in a couple of years.
No one seems to like that idea, either. But we'd better get used to the idea that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld idiocracy used up or destroyed all of the good options, so we'd better start picking through the bad ones.
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Is Iran aiding insurgents?
[Read the article: Joe Lieberman, warmongering centrist]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The logical answer is of course they are, it would make no sense for them not to.
This is a completely different situation than we had with Iraq. That was a heavily scrutinized, closely watched nation with no strategic reason to start a fight with us. Building WMD would have made no sense for them, and lo and behold they weren't doing that. Same with sponsoring terrorism. They provided minimal support, but nothing like Lebanon, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. In the case of Iraq, we not only manufactured evidence, we contradicted the real evidence that existed as well as common sense.
Iran is a different matter. They do have a strategic interest in supporting the insurgency, they have been trying to annex Iraq for 2 generations. And they feel they have a moral and religious imperative to help their Muslim brothers, or at least they have that as a lever to persuade people with if they don't actually believe it. And the longer the war goes on, the weaker we get militarily, financially, and politically. The weaker we are, the stronger they will be able to become.
Iraq would have been stupid to do the things our government said it did. Iran would be stupid not to. I never believed that we would find evidence of Iraqi wrongdoing no matter how hard we looked. I believe if we don't find evidence of Iranian involvement in this war it will be because we didn't want to.
We have created a terrible situation for ourselves, but denying the reality of it and failing to at least try to do what's needed won't make it any better.