One of Rudy Giuliani’s advisers, Norman Podhoretz, is advising President Bush to bomb Iran. Podhoretz is one of the founding fathers of the neoconservative foreign policy thinking that has proven so successful in Iraq.
I suspect the Bush administration’s disparate treatment of Iraq versus North Korea made Iran very anxious to acquire nuclear weapons. Who knows whether you’re going to be the next country to be on the receiving end of trumped up charges about having weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for invasion. The prospect of nuclear war is a horror to be avoided (give the Cold War movie, “The Day After” a watch for a vision of just how unbearable the aftermath might be), but acquisition of nuclear weapons is a rational response to the Bush administration’s foreign policy.
We need to get these maniacs away from the levers of power and begin the long hard work of restoring the United States’ credibility. We want to be militarily fearsome but also viewed as not using our military power except in the most compelling of circumstances.
A couple of weeks ago, I was vacationing in Japan and visited Hiroshima. I think that every politician who even jokes about using a nuclear weapon should take a tour there and see what such weapons actually do.
Even though the city has been re-built, there are still reminders and a museum to fully inform people about the results.