Brian,
You feel that we are trying to gain the best long term payoffs by invading two sovereign nations and pissing off the rest of the world? I’m sorry but I don’t get the logic there. If we piss off the world, it seems to be reasonable that those whom we invades’ allies will be much more inclined to be anti-U.S., and quite possibly be a “threat” to us later when they decide to protect themselves by building a nuke as well.
The logic is of the “Let them hate me, so long as they fear me” variety.
As far as other nations wanting to build nukes in response to us pounding Iran into the ground a la Germany, it seems to me that the two variables driving Iran (or any subsequent nation attempting to acquire nukes against the will of the US) are ideological fervor and a belief that the US will acquiesce in Iran’s acquisition of nukes. No other nation is as ideologically-driven as Iran and other nations will see what we did to Iran and will no longer hold the belief that the US will do nothing as they attempt to acquire nuclear technology. That’s how deterrent shows of force work. Your contention that there’s no strategic logic to my position says more about your capabilities as a strategic thinker than anything else.
If we leave Iraq, stop giving a blank check to Israel, and force them to be reasonable for a change, and then stop interfering in all sorts of sovereign nations’ affairs that we would be much less likely to even have such “enemies”.
While having no “enemies” is a lofty goal, I don’t think it’s worth compromising Israel to achieve it. Besides, I am happy to have Iran as an enemy in the same was I would have happily had Hitler as an enemy in the 1930′s and 1940′s.
To go along with that, securing our borders at home would probably do us a much greater good in the long run using microeconomics to show that securing now equals less damage later.
I don’t disagree, but I don’t see how securing our borders equals stopping Iran from making war on our interests. Iran went all the way to Argentina to blow up a Jewish center at one point.
I think your main limitation is that you can’t get yourself into the shoes of the Iranians and see the world with their eyes and calculating payoffs using their scale of values. You have a failure of intellectual imagination. This is very common among Americans because most of us are nice people who just don’t understand power politics.
