The War on Iran

Much of my insight comes from personal and professional relationships with the former white house adviser on middle eastern foreign policy, my former boss, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and several other high profile tutors. I will start by responding to your arguments. 1. Iran is dangerous to the United States. No, they're not. Iran has attempted no offensive actions against the territory or interests of the United States of America. On September 12th, 2001 Iran offered us their full cooperation in hunting down and eliminating those responsible for the attacks which befell our nation, and left no nation on this globe unaffected, including Iran. At the time, the democratic and social trends of Iran were leading towards a more open relationship with the west, and then the voice of our nation called them the "Axis of Evil", a move completely uncalled for when the nation had been nothing other than a willing ally just weeks before. They intelligence behind their efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction is sparse at best. To destroy their capacity for constructing "weapons of mass destruction", we'd have to target more than a thousand locations. They are sincerely interested in investing in nuclear power as a means to avoid spending their most precious resource, and only export on domestic means. Their interest in developing an atomic weapon is likely only due to the fear that Israel is the only nation in the region which has nuclear weapons, and they've continually threatened to use them against Iran, and there is apparently this global tyrant that keeps threatening to invade Iran. Meanwhile, nations that have nuclear weapons with much graver human rights violations, like Korea, are left alone. Pakistan, left alone. India, left alone. We're sending the subtle signals that we only dick around with non-nuclear powers, whether or not we mean to. The Term pre-emptive refers to a combat that takes place to stop an immediate threat, like shooting down a bomber that is on its way to bomb your city. Invading a country to stop them from ever building bombers is a preventative war, and considered a war crime by our own standards established at the Nuremburg trials. 2. For the greater global civil rights What about our civil rights violations? Wouldn't it be easier to use ourselves as a shining example of civil rights if we maintained a standard of civil rights? Isn't it just a little hypocritical to intervene because of civil rights, when we ignore them in our own nation? We can't even seem to enforce the standards of our own constitution on our federal government. Consistently, the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th amendments. We're torturing individuals to provide intelligence and testimony, as well as ignoring that the Constitution restricts or government from doing things to anyone, not just citizens in order to justify what we're doing in Guantanamo Bay. What about what happened at our military prisons in Iraq? None of the brass responsible were brought up on crimes against humanity. We invaded a sovereign nation in a preventative war on based on false information that members of our own government knew was false. We also deny people rights based off of sexuality. When we fix our own civil rights problems, maybe we could then focus a lens on the Iranians? Why are we obliged? That's what I don't understand. Let our own nation torture, while demanding that we invade another nation for torturing? Makes a lot of sense. Hypocrisy is frowned on in the international community. 3. For our duty to the people of Iran Maybe we should start by apologizing? The United States still hasn't really apologized for the fact that we deposed their democratic government and installed a dictator to ensure that the British could still have their oil rights? Apologizing can actually go a long way, even if it was more than sixty years ago. We don't have a duty to the Iranian people, we have a duty to our own nation. I'll expand in my own arguments. Now for my arguments as to why the war is a terrible idea. A.)It's a bad idea. We don't have the standing military to make a successful offensive on the ground, we lack a stable rout of supply into Iran, and sorties are a limited means of making war on another nation, and can only work effectively on easily identifiable targets. There is no means with which to win the war conventionally, and nothing to be gained from it. Admiral Fallon, the commander of the theater, himself has stated that a war with Iran will not happen on his watch. Historically, no army has had success invading the region since Alexander the Great. Iran benefits from mountains to the west, and extreme deserts to the south and east. Any attack would be a logistical nightmare, and whe insurgents, independently or not, disrupted our supply in Afghanistan or Iraq, it would spell failure for our nations army. B.)The diplomatic consequences are severe. Your making your arguments for war in a vacuum. Foreign policy should never be considered in a vacuum. When we invaded Iraq, it was done so without consideration of the balance of power between Iran and Iraq. With Iraq's influence in the region gone, it basically created a situation in which Iran may be able to form a Shiite hegemony. Aside from that, Iraq is now a training ground for terrorists. These Islamic fundamentalists, however, are not interested in attacking the United States. They're interested in Uniting the Muslim world under one Caliph, which means that they will return to their countries of origins and carry out an insurrection against their largely secular governments. You can call Iran a religious theocracy, but in truth, Islamic fundamentalists are their enemy too which is part of why they're more than happy to aid those fundamentalists to get out of the country. To say they're supporting troops that are attacking America might be a stretch, they're most likely attempting to find a pragmatic solution to their domestic problems. Besides, it's not like we never funded or supported terrorism when it suited us? When religious fanatics were killing Russians with our weapons and training in the 1980s, we seemed pretty enthusiastic about it. Diplomatically, with Turkey will likely lose any position we have with them. It is more than likely that if we invade Iran, they will decided fully that we have lost control of the situation in the Middle East, and do what is in the best interest of their nation, which would be a full invasion of Kurdish territories to the south. We've created a failed state on their border, and there's no reason that they should continue to tolerate that other than on the hopes that we won't mess it up. Russia still receives a large portion of their heating oil from Iran. China has invested more than a hundred billion dollars into developing Iran's oil industry in the last decade to ensure that they have access to stable oil for the immediate and short term future. To invade Iran is to threaten the national economies and livelihood of Russia and China, and I cannot imagine that they would take that lightly. Given the tremendous amount of our debt that China holds, and their importance to our economy, and the role they have been playing in Asia as the old habit of "Empire Without Borders" rears its head again, they might not be the wisest course of pissing them off. The governments of the Islamic World will be left with little choice but to turn against the United States diplomatically at the very least, if not directly with their policies and intents. Our invasion would see riots and protests in every Islamic nation. Their governments could not side, could not defend, and could not su