Fair enough, it is something that reasonable people can disagree about. Foreign policy is conducted with the future in mind. We have only one sample of history, we don't know how the past would have unfolded if our leaders had taken a different path. Ronald Reagan is credited by some with winning the cold war by standing up to the Soviet Union, deploying missiles in Western Europe, Missile defense, etc. Others disagree and say that it was reckless and the Soviets were on a path to bankruptcy in any case. The Israelis were widely criticized at the time for bombing the Iraqi reactor. How would we have responded to the Kuwaiti invasion if Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons? If Great Britain and France had squashed Hitler in the 30s they would have been resoundingly condemned as aggressors, and the world would never know the horrors that were avoided. That is the problem with preemption, you don't know how things would have transpired otherwise.
Taking the opposite argument, toppling the regime in Iran in the 50s and installing the Shah has led to a huge amount of antiAmerican sentiment in the region and Iran in particular.
We may rue the day that we didn't act to prevent Iran from acquiring nukes.
Fair enough. Hindsight is indeed 20/20.
My feelings are that Iran wants nuclear weapons because THEY feel threatened. They are isolated, and surrounded by "enemies". It seems that attempts to incentivize non-proliferation have been 1/2 hearted at best.
I don't buy into the propaganda that they are a suicidal culture or religion, and that they would somehow be excluded from the ideology of mutual self-destruction which many have attributed as the reason that the US and Soviets never went too far with it all. They haven't invaded another nation in centuries and aside from an often cited, out of context, comment made by a marginalized politician (we can quote marginalized politicians and religious leaders all day long, but that's not "proof" of anything), they haven't threatened to either. Granted they have threatened that they will respond to any major threats or attacks against them (even then, they've showed a high level of restraint given some recent events which are attributed to CIA/Mossad operations within their borders).
The U.S. can't afford yet another war. We're not even going to be able to pay for our healthcare system in the very near future, without significantly mortgaging our kids' futures even further (as Eisenhower, even then, recognized as a future problem). We really do need cooler heads to prevail here. Every nation deserves the right to security, including the Iranians. But, threatening war is serious business and it MUST be last resort, and ONLY if the US is directly threatened, which we are not.
And there is a propaganda machine gearing up to prepare Americans for yet another war. Again..... When will we learn to think for ourselves and use the same level of scrutiny and analysis of the evidence (as best we can given how messy some of this can get, including mis/disinformation "leaked" by any number of intelligence communities) which we regularly expect to apply to medicine??
Why do we allow ourselves to let a handful of US media organizations provide the "data" by which we, as individuals, make our own "decisions" and assessments of world affairs? If I came on here quoting sh.t I saw on CNN or read in the NYT, and treated it as gospel as relates to anesthesiology, I would be laughed off the forum, and rightfully so. Yet somehow, when lives are at stake as concerns foreign policy, many of us allow just that to happen.
When we read studies, we read (and authors should disclose) about potential conflicts of interest. This leads to bias as we all know. We know to look for these things and factor that into our assessment of the scientific literature. We've also become aware of all out scientific fraud which seems to be on the rise.
Yet, why don't we look at the biases of the people that provide us with other types of information? Why don't we look at, in a serious way, the people and funding which support certain foreign policy objectives? Isn't this level of scrutiny warranted when hundreds of billions of dollars and who knows how many lives might be at stake? I think so.
