But what about those nukes in Pakistan, and maybe someday in Iran? The west has to get this one right -- and the first time. The west should be ready to use its military assets, but with a kind of care and precision that's been woefully lacking of late. The only national interest the US has in that region should be defined as containment and doing whatever needs doing to insure that those nukes in Pakistan can never be used, by anyone, against anyone.
No one can say exactly what that means in what the military likes to refer to as "kinetic action." But blunt force bombing -- the first choice among Bush administration hawks -- must be reserved should the day ever arrive when everything else has failed. Instead the Pentagon and CIA should use some to the $60 billion a year we give them for intelligence activities to get their hands on those nukes and get their hands on the key individuals in those countries who produced and/or proliferated them. And frankly I don't give fig how they go about getting that done - just that it gets done. Because when it comes to nuclear weapons it only takes one to ruin your day, and the day of a few hundred thousand close friends and relatives.
Finally, what about oil? If we contain the nations of the Muslim Middle East we can kiss our oil supply from there goodbye. What about that? Well the day was coming when the US would have to get off Middle East oil one way or another. We could have -- should have -- done so slowly, methodically and in ways that did not cause widespread hardship. But we didn't, so now we will just have to bite the bullet, declare a national energy emergency and do what we have to do to get by for a while. Sorry. But sometimes there are no sacrifice-free options in the world of realpoliks.
If we haven't learned these lessons yet we surely will. The only question is how many more US troops and treasure will have to be wasted beating our heads against that Islamic wall before we figure it out. They don't want democracy, at least not yet. And they won't want it until they get an industrial dose of what they keep telling us they want, Sharia (Islamic) law.
Which is why I say to them, "bon appetite." Give us a ring when you've had a belly full.
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