President Obama was handed a very tough mission by his predecessor. George What-Me-Worry Bush had managed, in eight years, to wreck the American economy and destroy the Middle East as we knew it.
He wasn’t alone, he had a lot of help, but in the end he left smoldering detritus in his wake, as he settled back in his ranch and turned to painting.
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Exploding housing bubble aside, on the foreign policy front, President Dubia managed to complete his daddy’s fool’s errand in the service of the Saudi crown, and remove the only bulwark the West could count on to stop Iran’s Shiite revolution from boiling over its own borders, the late Saddam Hussein.
It cost $10 trillion, but in the end, the mission was accomplished: Sunni Iraq is a forgotten anecdote, Muslim insurrection is everywhere, from Afghanistan to London, and the whole world knows, eventually someone is going to have to drop something big and painful, possibly mushroom-shaped, on these people, to stop civilization’s nightmare.
At least the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, supreme leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran believes this. And he is determined to reach the stage where anyone looking to drop the big one on his side better consider what his side can drop in return.
Here’s the really big news from these past few weeks’ craziness about Bibi and the speech and the back and forth:
President Obama has decided to allow Iran to develop nuclear arms and so to reintroduce the cold war to the region.
Remember MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction? It was the operating principle of international politics from 1945 to 1989, give or take a year. It set the rules so that the two major warring sides, the West and the USSR, could express their hostilities through local wars between their proxies, as they competed for world domination.
It was good for both sides, in general terms. It created jobs for both economies, it gave politicians something to talk about, and it kept the world moderately safe from a nuclear holocaust.
Playing the cards he was dealt by his predecessor, Obama is about to score a huge victory for stability.
Not peace, not even close. Just stability.
Because there’s no way, short of a military invasion, of stopping Iran from continuing to develop their nuclear bomb. It didn’t work with North Korea, or India, or Pakistan, and, back in the day, it didn’t work with Israel.
The deal with Iran—even if it actually says Iran will destroy all its centrifuges and blow up its own nuclear facilities in all the caves across its many deserts—will still be worthless. Because there will remain this one cave no one knows about, and there will always be Iranian agents somewhere in Africa, buying yellowcake, and Iran will have a nuclear device, if it doesn’t already have it.
Obama’s goal is not to stop an unstoppable Iranian nuclear program, but to create a Middle East in which the United States is calling the shots, Israel is more dependant on American support and thus more docile, and nothing truly horrible happens, such as the fall of more regimes, or the decisive victory of any of the sides in this multi-player, crazy region.
In the New Middle East being fashioned by Obama, MAD will be the only universally accepted concept. Violence will be reduced to minor skirmishes, because the big violence, such as a new Lebanon war utilizing Hezbollah’s 100, 000 rockets pointed at Israel vs. an Israeli air capability that can bring Lebanon back to the 12th century—could also lead to the really big violence, the mushroom-shaped kind.
Can anyone count on the Ayatollahs, once they possess their coveted nukes, not to use them?
That’s the same as asking if the Pakistanis would use their nukes, or the North Koreans, or anybody else with a nice, red trigger sitting on their desks. The answer is: who knows?
Another possible answer: well, they haven’t used it so far, have they?
Of all the hard choices President Obama has had to make since he walked into the Oval Office and realized just how many broken bottles and big puddles of urine the previous owner had left him there, this one might be the hardest. It might mean turning away some of the Democratic party’s traditional supporters, it might also mean that Netanyahu and the Republicans would block his path by demanding an all or nothing deal, or else.
But if he manages to pull it off, we will have stability. At least for American interests. For Israel, this could mean a future of slow hemorrhaging through many more decades of loss and pain, without the ability to ever put a decisive stop to it.
