Sen. Obama: Iran is not a serious threat.
His mistake here: failing to understand that the Soviet Union, though a greater conventional military threat than Iran, was also a more predictable threat, and one with which we could negotiate on the basis of shared Western assumptions. Trying to deal with Iran on that basis would be like trying to keep vipers off your property by building a split-rail fence—just because it kept the neighbor’s bull where he belongs doesn’t mean it’s going to stop a snake.Here’s the McCain campaign’s take on that:
And here’s part of the reason why:
This man is not by any means representative of all Muslims—indeed, I would be surprised to find that his understanding of the world is even all that common among Muslims in most places—but he is representative of the sort of attitudes the ayatollahs of Iran are trying to foster and foment among Muslims around the world. Islam as such is not the enemy, but Islamic governments and movements which consider us to be the enemy (such as the government of Iran and its wholly-owned subsidiary, Hamas) most definitely are—and they’re enemies which cannot be dismissed as “not serious” simply because they don’t have large conventional forces. They have other ways of attacking us, they are perfectly capable of developing WMDs, and they are far, far harder to deter than the Soviet Union was because they don’t share a Western value system; telling them, “don’t do that or we’ll kill you” isn’t much of a threat if they’re convinced that doing that will please Allah and earn them a special place in paradise. As such, they’re perfectly capable of doing something perfectly crazy if we don’t take them very seriously as a threat.Sen. Obama doesn’t appear to understand this. Unfortunately, given that Joe Biden told the Israelis, “Iran is going to be nuclear—deal with it,” it appears his running mate doesn’t either. This doesn’t bode well if they win in November.