It is reported by Eric Trager on Contentions that Defense Secretary Gates, obviously speaking at the president’s direction, has announced that the US has no military ability to destroy the fast-developing Iranian nuclear program. All we would do would be “send it further underground.”
So, the penultimate obstacle to Iran’s holocaust plan has been removed. The world’s powers have now informed Israel that she is on her own. The 6 million Jews living in the Iranian crosshairs must now decide if they have any alternative to “learning to live with an Iranian bomb” as one realist advises (See the “Conversation on Iran with Frankie Sturm” below). They may decide that “sending Iran’s nuclear program further underground” is not a bad idea, if you keep doing it.
This may turn out to represent as dark a day for freedom as the Munich pact, when “silent, mournful, abandoned, broken Czechoslovakia receded into the darkness” as Churchill put it. But Israel is unlikely to recede quite so quietly. A people whose cherished shrines include Masada will not go down without a fight.
America has suffered a humiliating defeat without a shot fired. As commenter Lester puts it, “America can’t afford to have a foreign policy anymore.” But money isn’t the problem; the will to defend freedom is our real deficit. Recently, Obama spoke the all-too-easy words: “Never Again.” Now he has retracted the words.
This is a tragic day for free peoples everywhere.
I’ve been a hawk for a long time; but the Iran problem appears more than merely hard. They seem very determined; which means it would take a very long and periodically renewed bombing program or else an actual occupation to push their program back very far. Meanwhile the start of such a program might push Pakistan over the edge and result in a major needed campaign there.
I wonder if we have the forces to do both of those plus handle the likely reactions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
for what it’s worth I think George Bush’s biggest mistake was in failing to oversee a significant buildup after 9/11. The couple of hundred thousand special forces he could have easily recruited and trained and the air wings and or carrier groups he could have easily built would be a big help around about now.
Your concerns are entirely appropriate, The question is, what does one do when faced with a job that needs doing and inadequate ability to do it?
If we are pleased to be impotent and to have few options, we will embrace the situation and “learn to live with the Iranian bomb”. This is the appeaser’s answer and apparently Obama’s.
The other alternative is to do what you can while increasing your ability to do more. This might mean a military build-up, including an acccelerated missile defense system, while simultaneously acting to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities and therefore at least delaying their progress until more might be done.