This is how a nation thoughtlessly slides into stupid wars

Summary: Week after week. Month after month. Year after year our national security hawks warn that Iran will have the bomb soon. advocate war with Iran. Eventually real experts tire of rebuttals, and the public becomes acclimated to the pending war. Then, without debate or rational thought, we start a war. This was how Europe slid into WWI. This was how we slid into Vietnam. Perhaps this is how we’ll slide into war with Iran.

Today’s soothing warnings that we’ll attack Iran. How odd that America has found it necessary to attack so many nations during the past century or so.

From the transcript of CNN’s State of the Union, 25 July 2010:

CANDY CROWLEY: Joining me now is Michael Hayden, a retired four-star general in the United States Air Force, former director of the CIA and currently a principal with the Chertoff Group, a security firm in Washington, D.C. … When you left the CIA about two years ago, you said the two biggest problems facing your successor would be the Iranian nuke program and the drug smuggling and the violence from Mexico. Would you change either one of those?

HAYDEN: No, no. To be accurate, counterterrorism was job one. Beyond counterterrorism, I would put counterproliferation as job two. And within counterproliferation, it is inarguably Iran. …

CROWLEY: Do you think, though, there is any answer? Iran doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to the sanctions. As far as we know, they are still trying to get nuclear capability. If it should, is there any alternative to taking out their facilities?

HAYDEN: It seems inexorable, doesn’t it? We engage. They continue to move forward. We vote for sanctions. They continue to move forward. We try to deter, to dissuade. They continue to move forward.

My personal view is that Iran, left to its own devices, will get itself to that step right below a nuclear weapon, that permanent breakout stage, so the needle isn’t quite in the red for the international community. And, frankly, that will be as destabilizing as their actually having a weapon.

When I was in government, what we would used to mystically call “the kinetic option” was way down on our list. In my personal thinking — in my personal thinking; I need to emphasize that — I have begun to consider that that may not be the worst of all possible outcomes.

Other posts about Iran’s efforts to build an atomic bomb