Picking your battles

The Guardian has an editorial on Western relations with Iran which really impressed me. I've had uneasy feelings about the Iranian situation for a long time now, but found it hard to express in words exactly how I feel or what should be done. While not entirely in line with me, this piece, titled "The West has picked a fight with Iran that it cannot win" really sums up some of the high points.

Never pick a fight you know you cannot win. Or so I was told. Pick an argument if you must, but not a fight. Nothing I have read or heard in recent weeks suggests that fighting Iran over its nuclear enrichment programme makes any sense at all. The very talk of it - macho phrases about "all options open" - suggests an international community so crazed with video game enforcement as to have lost the power of coherent thought.

Nobody in their right mind (here in the United States) really wants to see the "nuclear club" expanded any further, and I'm sure most of us would like to see it shrink significantly or even go away. Sadly, that's not going to happen. As this article points out, though, that's a fairly hypocritical attitude when viewed by the rest of the world's nations who want to achieve the same kind of power held by America and her allies.

I would sleep happier if there were no Iranian bomb but a swamp of hypocrisy separates me from overly protesting it. Iran is a proud country that sits between nuclear Pakistan and India to its east, a nuclear Russia to its north and a nuclear Israel to its west. Adjacent Afghanistan and Iraq are occupied at will by a nuclear America, which backed Saddam Hussein in his 1980 invasion of Iran. How can we say such a country has "no right" to nuclear defence?

Iran is not just another Iraq, ready to fall down at the first sign of trouble. The author points this out in great detail. The country has a historic tradition spanning back to the dawn of time. Tehran is on par with London. They have a standing army of roughly 1/4 million soldiers, modern warplanes, missile capability, and technology to make the Iraq military look like a kid's scuffle on the playground. And since we now have more than 100,00 of our troops living next door, any type of military attack on them could come at an awful price. And what would it achieve? We can set them back a few years, but any determined nation (as India, Pakistan and North Korea have shown us) who wishes entry to the nuclear club will eventually get it.

It's not a pretty picture, but this is once again a time for diplomacy... not saber rattling. Sadly, our currently leadership seems to be a bit on the diplomacy challenged side.