Political thoughts for the day

Michael Barone, columnist for US News and World Report, had this to say in a recent article about the Iranian nuclear threat:

I don't know if the threat of using force [against Iran] is credible, given the current problems in Iraq. I quail at the possible effect of military action to take out Iran's nuclear program: It certainly threatens to reverse the apparent current pro-American views of the vast majority of the Iranian people, and it holds open the possibility of an open-ended war in a country with three times the square miles and three times the population of Iraq. I have read a lot about how Iran has hidden and dispersed its nuclear program to the point it's not clear that it could be destroyed by airstrikes, as Iraq's nuclear program was when Israel took out its Osirak installation in 1981.

I remember how Israel's strike at Osirak was criticized in virtually all quarters around the world, including the Reagan administration. My attitude at the time, though I was considerably more liberal on issues then than I am now, was that it was almost certainly a good thing to deprive a tyrannical regime of nuclear weapons. Today that seems to be a widespread reaction, at least when anyone gives the Osirak strike a thought: Would we have been able to get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991 if he had had nuclear weapons? He might have ended up in control of most of the world's oil supply. And that was before we were concerned about tyrannical states providing nonstate terrorists with weapons of mass destruction.

History is often not on the side of current, prevailing public opinion. Clear understanding of potentialities, threats, and historic tendencies can go a long way toward providing the clarity of vision necessary for shaping policy.

It's considered cliche now to say that 'those who fail to study History are condemned to repeat it'. Well what about Current Events? You barely need to go back in time 6 years to learn some extremely valuable lessons about the Middle East problem - when Israel first pulled its troops out of southern Lebanon, entrusting it to UN Peacekeepers. The international force certainly did a bang-up job then, with Hezbollah bases located even as close as 15 yards away from UN outposts. But now, suddenly, UN forces are trustworthy again? Well, of course - especially given how eager the Hezbollah politicians (who were tellingly elected by democratic election to a signficant minority of the Lebanese parliament) were to bulldoze roads after IDF forces ceased their operations.

Did it occur to anyone that one fatal flaw of the UN Resolution, which effectively ended Israeli operations in Lebanon, called for IDF forces to withdraw before a UN force could be mobilized, meant that it was a footrace for Hezbollah to re-entrench themselves along the Israel-Lebanon border? Might the one reason that the terrorist organization was so gung-ho about providing municipal services such as road-clearing be that road travel is the only way to re-arm their military posts, especially given the shambles in which IDF missile strikes left the Beirut airport? Come on. If I can see the glaring problem with such a worldview, any reasonable thinker should be able to recognize it, too. And to anyone who thinks that pulling out of Iraq immediately is a good idea, perhaps you should read up on Israel's unilateral pull-outs from Gaza and/or Southern Lebanon. Either one should tell you all you need to know.