The Political Inquirer

With the U.S. military thinly by a host of deployments - Iraq, Afghanistan, Japan, and Korea to name a few - will the waning Bush administration risk another costly military conflict? Months ago, I would have said no way. The administration has been bogged down trying to defend the cost of our continued presence in Iraq for the past four years, both in lives and national debt. Unrest over the war may have even contributed to the lost House and Senate seats in the midterm elections and to a regression of the President’s popularity ratings.

Yet nowadays the tide seems to be turning, not for our struggle in Iraq, but for a decision to attack in Iran. During a speech in Israel yesterday, President Bush condemned the Middle Eastern nation and associated them with the Nazi regime of World War 2.

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” Bush said. “We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.

The remarks, seen by some as a thinly veiled strike at Presidential hopeful Barack Obama, follow others by Senator Joseph Lieberman in a recent interview.

I think we’ve got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq… and to me, that would include a strike into… over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers.

On some level, the comments almost sound reasonable. Iran is training insurgents to attack our troops, so why shouldn’t we strike back? Yet we wouldn’t be having these problems if we hadn’t applied an interventionist strategy to Iraq to begin with and, if we attack Iran, others are sure to jump into the fray.

When insurgents start pouring into Iran’s borders to kill our troops there, who will we invade next? Turkmenistan, Pakistan, Russia? Russia may not jump into war with the U.S. without extreme hesitation, but they have a long relationship with the Iranians and are sure to get involved if hostilities occur. At the very least, it would cause a further chilling of relations between the East and the West.

The underlying problem here is not just the cost, but the disregard for the diplomacy and international relations. Though switching troops for bombing raids might solve some of the problems I described, it won’t help save our international reputation. As the country with the highest military budget in the world, we can invade anyone we want and do a decent job of it, but there will always be consequences, today and down the road. Our unpopularity in the middle east has already led to a destabilized political situation in Pakistan. What will follow if we take things even further?