The situation in the Middle East, specifically with Iraq and Iran, reminds me of a scene from the novel Fail-Safe.
In the anti-nuclear war book, a squadron of U.S. bombers is accidentally sent on a mission to bomb Moscow. At one point, there are just two planes left in the air, and U.S. officials are helping the Russians track them in hopes of correcting a mistake that could trigger World War III. The problem is, only one of the planes has a nuclear payload. The other plane carries electronic countermeasures to clear a path through the enemy defenses for the bombers.
Even though U.S. Air Force officials told the Soviets the plane they were targeting was not the one with the bomb, the Soviet Air Force shot down the unarmed plane. This blunder allowed the nuclear-armed one to continue its deadly mission and force the U.S. president to make a horrific decision to avert a global nuclear holocaust.
We made a similar blunder in the Middle East.
Iraq and Iran were two-thirds of President Bush’s “Axis of Evil,” the rogue states that were supposedly developing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. In case anyone’s forgotten, North Korea was the third member of that troika.
So, which member of that unholy trinity did we decide to blow off the map and attempt to reconstruct in our own image? The one that didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction.
(For you Fox News Network fans, that’s Iraq.)
By concentrating all our attention and effort on the weakest member of that axis, the United States gave Iran and North Korea not just time to develop their nuclear weapons program, but justification to pursue such a course of action. North Korea and Iran’s leaders can argue that they need nuclear weapons to defend themselves against the military might of a belligerent United States that attacks its global neighbors with no provocation.
What we should have done was impose the same sanctions on Iran and North Korea that we did on Iraq: Limited trade and assistance until we are satisfied that the illegal weapons programs are completely dismantled. It worked in Iraq, as we learned after overturning Saddam Hussein’s regime and finding absolutely no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
Bush’s ill-timed war has merely exacerbated the problem of weapons of mass destruction in the world, not solved it. It will be up to Bush’s successor to make the hard decision that will correct this mistake.
