A non-policy policy

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen is quoted today as saying that a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities would be "incredibly destabilizing". He also says that the CIA's evaluation that Iran has enough nuclear material for two bombs seems accurate. He also says that there is no reason to think that Iran is telling the truth when it says that it is not building nuclear weapons or to believe that sanctions will deter Iran from doing so. Finally, he says that Israel and the USA are "in sync" with regard to their policies.

This leads to a fair question: What policy? The US thinks that Iran is building nukes and lying about it, and it futher concludes that the sanctions imposed on Iran will not work. That is a policy? An attack would be destablizing? That is a policy? NO! It seems that we are paying now for Obama's belief that what he says is somehow more important than what Iran does. Can't we get to the point where someone says that an attack is destablizing but it is less (or more) destabilizing than an Iranian nuke? Is that too hard of an assessment to make? Is there a reason that Obama cannot make a decision and then tell us about it? Must we have massive hemming and hawing as a plan of action?

Let's be clear. A nuclear armed Iran is about the most destabilizing thing that could happen to the Middle East. The Saudis would be sufficiently scared of the mullahs power that they would necessarily want nukes of their own. Turkey would never let the Persians and the Arabs have nukes without getting them too. Syria is already trying for nukes and would continue. So we would see a bunch of unstable, half crazy regimes with nukes in short order. One of them would either lose control of its nukes or would give some to the terrorists. After Tel Aviv gets nuked and the Israelis retaliate with their own nukes, what will stop the world from having a full scale nuclear war? Even with a country as small as Israel, it has managed to disperse sufficient numbers of nukes to carry out a retaliatory strike of major magnitude. If ten or twenty cities in the area are incinerated, the world wide chaos that would result would be a whole lot worse than any riots or other events following a strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities. It is a terrible thing for the US that we have such a naive and incompetent president at such a critical juncture.