Neocons: We meant "Attack Iran," not "Attack Iraq"

Are you going to hold us responsible for just getting one single little letter wrong?

It's an easy mistake to make. When my wife was in college, she assumed that Iraq was the capital of Iran. (Not surprisingly, she found the news reports in 1980 of the outbreak of the Iraq-Iran war quite puzzling. I suspect she had a lot of company. I wouldn't be surprised if a third of Bush's voters in 2004 thought we were fighting in the country that took our embassy officials hostage in 1979.)

On Eunomia, Daniel Larison writes about the latest agitation to get America into war with Iran:

The key mistake that doomed opposition to the Iraq war was the concession by opponents that Iraq posed any kind of a threat to the United States at all. This was untrue in every sense of the word. Iraq was about as much of a threat to American security in 2003 as Burma, and probably less.

Iran could make the government's life very difficult in the Near East if it so chose, but even with nuclear weapons it is not even as "direct and immediate" a threat to the United States as Pakistan is today. In Pakistan it is conceivably a much shorter path to al-Qaeda itself acquiring nuclear weapons, as some ties between the ISI, the Taliban and al-Qaeda remain in spite of all official statements to the contrary.

In the less-than-worst-case scenario, Musharraf is toppled and a radical faction from within the military takes over, one that is friendly to the Taliban and keen to resume conflict with India over Kashmir. Iran is the natural enemy of all these forces, and so should be considered (if we were actually making policy in our real national interest) as prospective ally, not a prospective target. [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer