Our credibility problem
"Santorum tells NBC's "Meet the Press" that he would tell Iranian leaders that either they open up those facilities, begin to dismantle them and make them available to inspectors – or the U.S. would attack them."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/01/rick-santorum-iran-iowa-caucuses-2012-_n_1178483.html
Other nations are right to think of the US an institutional entity and observe what the US does.
What Santorum should have said was that he would tell Iranian leaders that either they open up those facilities, begin to dismantle them and make them available to inspectors – or the U.S. would attack them. And then, no matter what the inspectors did or said, we would attack them anyway.
That is our established modus operandi -- make demands and then attack anyway whether the demands are met or not. That is our recent practice in a country neighboring Iran. Iran has reason to see very little practical incentive to cooperate.
Of course Iran is developing a nuclear weapons capability. That is beside the point. The logic of the situation would be the same whether Iran was developing nukes or cotton candy... if you look at how this nation conducts itself, if we say we might attack we will attack.
The war in Afghanistan is not, or at least was not unjustified in my view. But even there we did the same thing... we made demands only in hopes that they would be refused (making us look better) knowing that we were going to attack either way. Immagine if the taliban had hand-cuffed Bin Laden on 9/12 and turned him over the the US embassy in Pakistan. Would that stop us from invading? No, and in that instance should not have. We had a legitimate short-term security interest to overturn the Taliban and round up Al Queada members in Afghanistan. (That does not argue for the next ten years of that war one way or another.)
So if we were going to invade anyway, why demand terms? Because that is just how we roll.
= new reply since forum marked as read
