I’ve been reading a lot lately over the problem with Iran. Of course, my first thoughts are that Iran’s president is a cook (anyone that says the Holocaust didn’t exist is a fool). And too mention that Europe should take the Jews back and make Israel out of a part of Germany is equally dumb.
So it concerns me a bit that they will soon have nuclear weapons. You don’t give a mentally unstable person a gun. It just doesn’t make any sense.
But of course, we talk a lot about the “rights” of countries. What exactly is a coutnry’s right? I’m not sure there are rights in the “national” sense. Every nation has the “right” to do whatever it wants on its land. I mean, seriously, it owns the land. Who says they can’t use their land for something they want to do.
The concept of rights on a international level mean almost nothing. Iran has the “right” to enrich Uranium. All they have to do is pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and they can “legally” enrich Uranium and make weapons. That’s what the “international laws” say.
But we don’t want them to have weapons. It makes us (the United States) nervous. And as a result, we have the “right” to do something about it. We feel threatened and so we have reason to add embargoes and trade restrictions. Of course, these are small items of international diplomacy. If we really are concerned, we can bomb the heck out of them. That’s our right–we feel like they’re going to endanger us or hold us hostage…so why not preemptively act?
People clamor about the benefits of peace, and I have to agree that peace is better than war. But that assumes that peace is the natural condition of the world–that the “peace” we currently have will continually exist. That concept is foolhardy, at best, because it fails to account the ever changing dynamics in the world. So pacifism seems a poor choice.
Some people may say on a personal level, you cannot preemptively attack someone else. I agree–that’s bad and is not condusive for society. Our society has laws which protect you and a definite mechanism in place to deal with people who threaten you. No such mechanism exists on the international level–the only mechanism close to that is brute force. The “I’m gonna pound you if you touch me” response. It’s been fairly effective.
So what’s the point to all of this? I’m not sure… I suppose I despise all this talk of the “international community” not accepting Iranian nuclear weapons, yet they do nothing. They talk and talk about very interesting international platitudes but fail to act. And to a certain extent, I agree with Iran that they have the “right” to nuclear weapons. I just think that we have the right and the obligation to make sure that doesn’t happen.