Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, admitted that the problem of Iran’s growing nuclear weapons capability has to be “dealt with.” She didn’t say exactly how or when, but later on in the interview she did comment, “there has to be a strong, united international front that says to the Iranians you cannot seek a nuclear weapon and be a member of the international community.”
Why don’t we just bomb the military facilities we know to exist in Iran? This beats sending in more troops at some point to take over Iran as we are currently and unsuccessfully doing in Iraq.
Israel knows how to deal with terrorism better than the United States. Back in the early 1980’s, Israel bombed one of Saddam Hussein’s facilities known to be producing weapons of mass destruction; perhaps this is one reason the U.S. never found such weapons when invading the country 25 years later. It weakened Hussein beyond repair–not just the bombing, but the threat of another one down the road.
Our Secretary of State has to know that no international “front” will ever exist to back up the United States in the Middle East, beyond some help from Great Britain and possibly Poland. The notion that we can sit around and wait until all of Europe is convinced we need to “do something” to “deal with” Iran implies that something nuclear is going to have to happen in one of our cities — including quite possibly an American city — before we can take any action. If 9/11 wasn’t justification enough for going after Iraq and Afghanistan, in the eyes of Europe and the U.N., then I don’t think an equivalent or worse terrorist attack on our nation will do it either. Again, Rice knows this.
I reluctantly voted for the Bush Administration to return to office last year because I was worried about terrorism. I don’t like that the Bush Administration weakens the separation between church and state, and I don’t like that their domestic spending exceeds that of the Clinton Administration and rivals LBJ. I voted for Bush anyway, because of terrorism. What am I getting for my vote? The same kind of foreign policy I could have expected from a Democratic administration, with the added problem of being unable to do anything about Iraq. I don’t regret my vote, because I did want to send a message to terrorists that I supported my government using military responses to known terrorist threats. But it doesn’t look like this government, nor any to follow in the coming years, is going to really do anything about Iran or North Korea or any other dangerous terrorist training camp that the U.N. refers to as a “nation.” At least, not until something really, really big happens.
