broken prisms

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/195844.php

Josh Marshall posts a reply to his early post on McCain's speech today where he talked about how Iran isn't a super power that should be taken seriously but is a threat on the scale of the Soviets.

The reader makes a weird math argument that danger - defense = theat and since we don't know where all those Brown people live we can't threaten them with nukes and so defense = 0 and this theat Iran = theat Soviets.

Ah where to start. Let's put aside that we are supposed to be ok with McCain being a simple minded racist - I am pretty sure a big piece of our current predicament is decision makers not bothering to learn that all Brown people aren't the same. We do know where the president of Iran lives. Same goes for Iraq and Syria and to a lesser extent North Korea. Like the Soviet premier these people all have public schedules and live in official residences and presumably would like to continue living their relatively comfortable lives as Heads of State rather than watch a significant chunk and their country go up in smoke and move into a bunker in a mountain.

The only person without a return address is UBL, who isn't building Iranian nukes - though it does make a nice parallel with the Iraq/Al qaeda crap from 2004. Hmmm wonder who made him those talking points.

There is also the important point that MAD isn't defensive, it is about a balanced counter strike capacity. Since Iranian missiles can't even reach the UK, let alone the US, I don't really are how it is operative. But this get to the crux of the Iranian security dilemma driving their program. The US has begun to develop a doctrine for the tactical usage of nukes. That means that unlike the old days where we would only go nuclear in response or to prevent a complete Soviet overrun of westen Europe, today we are moving closer to utilizing them for things like sinking carriers or bunker busting exactly because others lack a strategic counter strike capacity.

Thus, if the US is running around talking about regime change and has their eye on you the only way to guarantee your defense is to build a nuclear force. It is the same strategic choice that led us to introduce nukes in Turkey as a bulwark against Soviet tanks in the 1960's.

One final piece of the puzzle is the oft mocked proposition that Iran is building a civilian program. I mean they have so much oil right? They do have a lot under ground. But years of sanctions have left it short of capital and expertise to effectively develop the fields. And even if they did it would make more sense to sell their hydrocarbons to us than burn them for domestic energy.

If we aren't willing to talk about their emerging energy crisis - be it allowing investment or nuclear civilliab technology - they have no reason not to prepare for the coming storm.