War with Iran on the Worst Terms

Asia Times Online ^ | 14 February 2006 | Spengler

[Billthedrill]

Many thanks - now, for India the prospects are stellar but I think they depend on not falling back into the old Great Powers model under which that country was reduced to dependence and impotency. The British gave it a representative government and it took 90 years from the expulsion of the Mughal Emperor to Ghandi, but in the end it proved the magnificent structure it has become - in a country, by the way, so scarred with sectarianism that it supposedly could never become a nation. If that sounds a little like what they're saying about Iraq these days it isn't coincidental.

In doing so, however, India helped form its own principal challenge in grand strategy - Pakistan. That's been a low-intensity war for even longer than the U.S. and Iran have been having at it, and a bloodier one. And Pakistan has its own geostrategic challenges over and above the Hindu Kush - it has Afghanistan to the north and Iran to the west. Some neighbors.

It may well be that all these nations will find it inconvenient to have Iran go nuclear - it happens that current members of the nuclear club frown on new ones, which is probably the only real reason Russia and China might, in the end, feel compelled to help with Iran. But no Indian troops will cross Pakistan to help in Iran without the real hazard of nuclear war, which is what we're trying to avoid with respect to Iran.

China might be the determining factor here should it decide that its own strategic interests coincide with a non-nuclear Iran, but the oil dynamic is a competing interest that I suspect will be prohibitive. China's price for participation might be a guarantee of oil on a par with that offered by the Iranians. I do not really know.

All of the countries I've mentioned surround Iran, and several are already armed with nuclear weapons. I understand the Iranians' anxiety and I'd be more sympathetic were their government other than it is and has been for a quarter of a century. If something has to give in all of this my hope would be a regime change in Iran - that offers the best hope for the longest period of no one popping mushroom clouds at his neighbor. And after a regime change Iranian possession of such weapons might not be quite so much a threat to the region should it eventually happen, and with these neighbors, it just might.

Or, I could be completely full of it about the whole thing. You never know. ;-)

[canuck_conservative]

"If we can take Syria down quickly....

I'll bet words similar to that were used 3 years ago when the Iraq invasion was proposed.

[chilepepper]

we *did* take iraq down quickly. the problem is that iran and syria were still in place.

where, please tell us, do the insurgents in iraq come from anyway? iraq is just one piece of a four part problem...