Posted on 02/25/2012 1:09:16 PM PST by WPaCon
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, thinks that Iran is a “rational actor.” He is indisputably correct.
Iran has, quite rationally, concluded that if it spins thousands of centrifuges to enrich enough uranium, it will soon have the bomb. Just as rationally, it believes it can string the West along. Then there is its airtight chain of cause and effect in the alleged plot against the Saudi ambassador to the United States: If it hired a Mexican drug gang, and that gang blew up a Washington, D.C., restaurant, and the Saudi ambassador was dining there at the time, the ambassador would die. Q.E.D.
General Dempsey said too little and too much about the Iranian regime. Tehran couldn’t have made itself into the world’s foremost exporter of terror and extended its tentacles throughout the Middle East without resorting to rational calculation. That’s obvious. What Dempsey is implying, though, is that a regime capable of such calculation can necessarily be deterred if it gets a nuclear weapon. That’s an unsupportable leap.
If there’s one thing we should have established beyond doubt during the past decade, it is that involvement in terror attacks on American soil is extremely costly to the perpetrators. Nonetheless, according to the U.S. government, the Iranians hatched a plot against the Saudi ambassador where the risk bore no relation whatsoever to the possible reward — from our perspective.
More fundamentally from our perspective, there is no point in establishing a theocracy, killing innocents abroad, pursuing sectarian war, crushing protesters, denying the Holocaust, and threatening Israel with annihilation, either. From the point of view of the Western liberal tradition, the Islamic Republic itself makes no sense.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
I wish they were as sensible about their theology. They expect their Allah is going to save the day for them when they go jihading the USA with their terror schemes. Which of course is crazy.
The real problem demonstrated here is that senior American generals and admirals are promoted for their political correctness and not so much for their warrior skills. America cannot afford the military to devolve into just another federal bureaucracy. Unfortunately that is exactly what is happening. A real admiral would have resigned before he took his ships and sailors into the narrow confines of the Persian Gulf.
Yes, political correctness in the military is a huge problem.
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