Fighting the Rising Tide

I was going to write this about something else but then I realized almost immeadiatly that I didn't really wanna. So here we are with a NEW topic. My month is rumbling to an end and my writing goal will more than likely go uncompleted unless I make a Herculean effort on Friday. I might be able to swing it, we will see though. In other news this issue of Foreign Affairs is hella interesting and it I think I will adress the NATO thing I mentioned earlier on my facebook wall. This will, in all likelyhood, be broken up into two parts.

Okay so here is the deal. More and more the smoke and mirrors effect that has been in use for the past 40 years or so to mask our stagnated incomes is failing. Now that we have to pay the piper and stuff like that we aren't really able to get the same popular support to go stomping all over the world like we used to.

In 2007 the US Government published a document that I am sure had a boring name. I recieved it along with my copy of McSweenies and it is called "Where to Invade Next" it is document that lists 7 problem countries, why they are problem countries, and how we as a unified nation can deal with them. Top of the list in that book is Iran. In this issue of Foreign Affairs there is an article about how now is the time to attack Iran. Iran has appeared all over the place in publications on Foreign Policy and what we as America need to do about it.

One of the more interesting articles I read on the Iran problem came out either last year or the year before and it was dicussing the idea that if we do not step up and stop Iran from making the bomb then we are essentially stepping down from the unilateral leader of the world stage. I personally think it is time we did this and there are other smart people who agree with me. I think that Iran isn't just a US problem, it is a world problem. There are specific issues with Iran that make diplomacy difficult and time is now running short.

So we should let NATO take the lead with us in a supporting role and let things happen. We won't get an Iran that we will be 100% happy with, but then again that wouldn't happen anyway so I don't know why we are so upset about that. There is also the very valid point that we need time for our military to heal, replenish its troops and for the military leadership to digest what it has learned in both Iraq and Afganistan. The conflicts we have been getting into since Vietnam are totally new and we are slowly getting better at them. That said our armed forces still function more like a board sword and less like some focused pressure combined with long term support and assistance to nation building. There might also need to be some revisions to how we train people so that they are better able to withstand long term deployments but I haven't been able to find any reading on veteren suicides since WW2 so it is hard to know how out of the ordinary the current suicide rate is.

The point is that we have been carrying the world for to long, the middle east is to big, and due to the current rules on how the world works we mostly have to play wack-a-mole with our various problems instead of going in and claiming decicive victories. Let me be clear I much prefer us playing wack-a-mole to us gobbling countries up and turning them into vassals. However, the way we are doing it now is much harder.

So lets bring in NATO. There are lots of reasons why I think this would be a good time to do it. (The next post will be about my concerns).

1) Unlike many of the other countries in the region which are both oil filled and annoying Iran represents a plausible threat in the form of both nuclear warfare and becoming a haven for anti western terrorism.

2) my lunch is over TA!