October 28, 2008

Belaboring further

By: Sonny Bunch

Far be it from me to criticize a “foreign policy that works”–I must have missed that portion of history where Iran, North Korea, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories were filled with rainbows and sunshine and unicorns, please, excuse my ignorance. I mean, after all, if it wasn’t for Bush’s foreign policy fumbling, Iran would never ever EVER go after nukes, right? Oh, wait:

The Iranian nuclear program is not unique to the current Islamist regime. Iran’s nuclear program predates the Islamic Republic. It commenced under Shah Mohamed Reza Shah Pahlavi, the ruler overthrown in the revolution of 1978-79 that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power. There is a strong nationalist strain on both the left and right of Iranian politics that sees membership of the nuclear club as proper to Iran’s place in the world. In short, Iranian nuclear ambitions are not regime-dependent.

And North Korea isn’t a duplicitous regime run by a self-aggrandizing madman that has been seeking nuclear weapons for decades, or anything like that, is it? Wait, it is? What? Since when?

Well, certainly we can blame Bush for sweeping Hamas into power. After all, it’s the elections that pushed the Palestinian people over the edge and caused them to support terrorism in the pursuit of wiping Israel off the map. Damn those elections! Oh, what, the Intifada occurred under the dictatorship of the Yasser Arafat? So did the second intifada, which kicked off before Bush was even in office? You’ve got to be shitting me. Man, I could have sworn we were getting somewhere in the pursuit of peace by dealing exclusively with thuggish strongmen.

And allowing the Taliban to shield Osama bin Laden and his cronies as they launched attack after attack on the United States and its people was certainly a successful strategy, wasn’t it? I sure am glad we didn’t violate Afghanistan’s sovereign territory and take out al Qaeda. Who knows what sort of horrific conflagration that could have sparked!

For the record, that’s what we’re faced with again in Syria: a nation hosting an al Qaeda cell that is instigating terrorist attacks with the aim of killing American citizens. If it’s not directly analogous to Afghanistan, it’s pretty damn close. Now, I’m not in favor of invading Syria and occupying it, a la Afghanistan. But the Syrians have lost the right to complain about American incursions into their territory by allowing that territory to be used as a base of terrorist operations. I won’t apologize for “taking a hard line” against killing American soldiers.