Short Stories, Long Odds

Oh boy. Things haven’t been slow on the newsfront lately, they’ve been hard to put together and make sense of. In a summer of big happenings, suddenly everything stopped poking its head up and tight geopolitical weaves began to form instead. You’re lucky you have me to break it all down for you.

The big story for today is Iran. In a move that should make buttholes clench worldwide, Iran started thinking like the United States and threatened pre-emptive strikes against US forces in the Middle East if Iran’s nuclear facilities / programs are threatened. I first saw this in the Straits Times, and I wondered if the American media was covering it. Al Jazeera was, obviously, but this didn’t lend an entirely impenetrable sheen of veracity to the story. Then ABC Australia picked it up. It was starting to look real, so I dug a little deeper.

Guess what else happened this week? Oh yeah, Iran and South Africa signed an accord which will most likely lead to South Africa selling uranium to Tehran. Add that in with the new missiles China, North Korea, and Iran have all been developing and implementing for the last couple of years or so and you’ve got yourself one hell of a potential Indian Summer. I don’t normally like to link to Newsmax but it was that or a conflagration of technical documents on terrible webpages. So just look beyond the silliness to the raw technical information because they aren’t objective, like me.

So! We’re working on a missile defense system, China has nukes that can hit us, and Iran has nukes that can easily get to Israel. Our missile defense system paired with a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act that seeks to prevent everyone but people we like from having a nuclear weapons program is a step towards an assured destruction singularity on our part. Mutually Assured Destruction worked during the Cold War because no one would win no matter what, and no one was crazy enough to take one for the team, so to speak. Now the United States is trying to stack the deck and make the nuclear arms race into something we can win as opposed to a zero sum game.

We’ve been told that a missile defense system will discourage other countries from trying to nuke us, and obviously the point of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty was to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of countries with little or nothing to lose. Neither of these seem to be working so well, even though they are not bad ideas at their base, and certainly limiting the amount of total nuclear weapons is a good choice. However, there are some aspects of our foreign policy and particularly the Iraq War which may cause us to end up with our asses in a sling.

For instance, take Iran. They are not generally regarded as a nice country, and they have known factors in their government at every level that are pro-terrorist. So, okay, Iran is a dangerous barrel of generally unfun ideas and ethos.

Does this automatically prevent them from engaging in an idea like the pre-emptive strike? No. Iran is a sovereign nation with presumably the same right to defend itself as England, or the United States. The idea that we as a country own the patent on “the right to the pre-emptive strike” is ludicrous. It was a bad idea from the start and as a logistical concept it is a poor impetus for any kind of military action; however, we have enabled it as a reason to go to war. Iran and Israel hate each other, and know pretty much everything two countries can know about each other including the locations of their nuke plants. Insert one dollar to continue.

World politics, contrary to popular belief, is not actually an environment in which you can do something unacceptable, justify it, and then expect no one else to follow in your footsteps. The end result is that it will all deteriorate into diplomats and world leaders yelling at each other recess-style: “I SHOT YOU YOU’RE DEAD” “NUH-UH I’M SUPERMAN YOU CAN’T SHOOT ME AND I FRY YOU WITH MY EYE BEAMS” “NUH-UH!” “YUH-HUH!” and then everyone will cry. Or, in this version, bomb each other.

So, uh, have a good weekend. Try not to think about our impending wars with Iran, China, North Korea, etc. Try to turn 25 as soon as possible.