WarSclerotic

For all of us who believe that President Obama’s approach to Iran’s nuclear development is dead wrong, don’t worry – some of his top advisors disagree with it almost as much as you probably do.

In a recently disclosed memo from January, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates warned  Obama that the United States lacks an effective strategy for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program. He slammed Obama for not having a policy in place to deal with Iran as it ignores international sanctions and continues to develop nuclear technologies. So far it looks like not much has changed since January; Iran is still developing its nuclear program and the United States still lacks a solution except to pass more useless sanctions.

The prospect of a nuclear Iran is scary, to say the least. A country whose leaders hate the western world because of perceived corruption and vice with nuclear warheads and missiles that can reach our allies in Europe is not only a threat to the United States, but a threat to the world. Another problem is that Iran is not a politically stable country, and is not in a stable region of the world. If it were politically stable we probably would not be making such a fuss over this. We essentially had a 50-year standoff with the Soviet Union with both countries having nuclear weapons pointed at each other, but we never fired because our leaders were sane enough to notice the repercussions a nuclear attack would have.

However, in countries like Iran such stability cannot be counted on to avert nuclear disaster. Iran’s President Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei both hate the western world and have several times stated their distaste of the United States and its allies. Iran also has strong connections to paramilitary and terrorist groups that operate in the Middle East and throughout the world, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Recently, several shipments of arms intended for the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan were intercepted by NATO forces. The arms captured bore the seal of Iran’s government stamped into the metal,  almost matching other weapons captured from militants in Iraq.

A question that arises is whether Iran may only want to become a “threshold power.” A “threshold power” is a country like Germany or Japan, which does not have nuclear weapons but has the ability to create nuclear warheads at a moment’s notice if needed. However, having the ability to create nuclear armaments is just as dangerous as having them in a country like Iran, which has been facing numerous instances of civil unrest in the

past year and is considered one of the most unstable regions in the world.
Is it really too hard for the Obama administration to see that Iran cannot be trusted to fold from the imposition of mere sanctions? If we really want a non-nuclear Iran we will unfortunately have to impose a stricter policy against Iran that includes more punitive and effective measures rather than sanctions. The point is that Obama needs to listen to his advisers on this one. A nuclear Iran, at least at this moment in time, is not a feasible option if we want to keep the United States secure. If we still believe in our Democratic ideals, then stricter action against Iran is the only way, to borrow a few words from former President Woodrow Wilson, that world can be “made safe for democracy.”