Via Jenifer
Rubin, I see this video of
Barack Obama making the argument -- popular in liberal foreign
policy circles -- that Iran does not pose a serious threat because
it is much smaller and spends a tiny amount on defense relative to
the United States. What Obama does not seem able to grasp, or at
least doesn't want to engage, is that in an era of asymmetric
warfare, dramatic differences in size do not matter as much as they
do when fighting a conventional enemy. On 9/11, 19 men armed with
box cutters killed more civilians on American soil than the Soviets
or Nazis did, with all of their weaponry.
Asymmetric warfare is especially effective at neutralizing size
advantages when the more powerful country is civilized and seeks to
protect innocent life. In a conventional war, Israel would
obliterate Hamas and Hezbollah because it has a more advanced
military, but when both groups are willing to launch rockets at
Israel, hide behind women and children, and store weapons
underneath hospitals, those groups remain formidable because
Israel isn't willing to indiscriminantely bomb those areas. And
what better example than Iraq -- where U.S. forces have been
battling insurgents for five years -- to demonstrate why size isn't
everything?
"If Iran ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they
wouldn't stand a chance," Obama said. That would be absolutely true
in a conventional war, and it would be true if America were willing
to use its nuclear arsenal to level Iran, or at least use
non-nuclear devices to carpet bomb its cities. But in reality, if
Iran posed a serious threat and America tried to act, it would have
to avoid using its most powerful weapons and be careful to prevent
civilian casualties.
Iran is the leading sponsor of terrorism in the world. Right
now, Iranian weapons are killing Americans in Iraq via insurgents
and overrunning a U.S.-supported government in Lebanon via
Hezbollah. They are financing Hamas, which threatens Israel, a
nation that Obama has recently taken to calling an American ally.
And all of this is without them having
nuclear weapons.
Sure, Iran is unlikely to create a world without America or
Israel. It's not likely to be able to restore the Caliphate and
turn the U.S. into an Islamist state. But it sure as heck has the
potential to do a lot of damage in the process of pursuing its
insane goals, even if its military is puny compared to the Soviet
Union.
topics:
Barack Obama, Islam, Military, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Nuclear Weapons, Oil
