Iran is a legitimate problem, it controls oil, it has sponsored terror, it has an eschatalogical vision of the end times based on the idea of the hidden Imam and the return of the Mahdi which in my mind could cause it to be more free in provoking a final clash between darkness and light. So its’ drive to acquire nukes is worrying. All of this is one more reason why the Bush decision to invade Iraq was theologically wrong (just war), inept, and is hurting us and the world. We now have zero credibility with the world in trying to portray “gathering storms” and WMDs as a threat. The cherry picking of intelligence that we did as a fig leaf to cover our real desire to implant Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq now comes back to haunt us.
Bush had most of America and the world on his side after 9/11 and Afghanistan. It was a just war – we responded to an attack on us by a Muslim state. After 9/11 there was a lot of talk about who was next in the ’50 year war’? Somalia? Iran? Yemen? No, the neocons wanted Iraq as they had since 1991. Bush jawed about war being a last resort, blah blah blah and took us in there, probably expecting to be out by the end of the year and on to the next regime change. Here we are 3 years later with a real threat on our hands and no capability of defusing it. Iran doesn’t care about our diplomacy, they are just running out the clock until they detonate a test bomb in the desert someday and start threatening everyone with it. Our military can’t occupy a country, that much is now obvious. If we did attack Iran the Shiites in Iraq would probably go ballistic and we would have some sort of WW III on our hands. Due to Bush taking his eye of the ball and following the pipe dreams of Wolfowitz, Rummy, et al we now have a real problem brewing.
At the end of Bush’s 8 years (assuming no impeachment) abortion will still be legal and babies will get slaughtered, government will be vastly larger, we will be in more debt, gay marriage will be closer to reality, the GOP will probably have lost one house of the Congress, and we will be embroiled in massive Middle Eastern problems like we never have been before. At least we will have Alito and Roberts (I hope).
