Does anyone remember the arguments leading up to the war in Iraq?
Everyone talks about the weapons of mass destruction and the lies, but think back to exactly what the reasoning was. The Bush administration told us- told everyone that if President Hussein would just let the inspectors do their job, and if Hussein would suspend his weapons programs, we could leave him be. But, because he wouldn't do those two things, we were forced to take action.
We have some really good perspectives on this now. First of all, we know that there weren't any active weapons programs in 2002-2003. We also know that the Bush administration knew this through officials within the administration that have since quit. Now stay with me because my point isn't that we were lied to. That point has been beaten to death. My point is the way an argument was and is being presented.
So presently, we are presented with the fact that Iran suspended its nuclear weapons programs in 2003. When Bush was trying to build support for the war in Iraq, suspending the weapons programs was all that he required, but now that he has proof of Iran suspending its programs, he says that's not enough. He says that they could start it up again.
Is this real? Are we going to act with hostility toward nations that might start a weapons program... and after that might develop nuclear weapons... and after that might attack someone? There are roughly nine nations worldwide that have nuclear weapons, and so far the only people that have ever attacked someone with them is the United States.
Why does the Bush administration think they can get away with this?
They know that you'll let them get away with it. Consistency is irrelevant. Their arguments don't even have to make sense anymore. You've proven you won't stand up and say anything.
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This is kind of lengthy because I need to lay out the background for my response, but bear with me. Also, for convenience's sake, I've substituted "we" for "our government" in a lot of cases, mostly because I'm intellectually lazy. Feel free to mock me for it later ;)
One of the key issues I've been struggling with in my criminal law class is the idea of attempted crimes. The Anglo-American legal tradition has placed a heavy emphasis on not punishing people until they've committed a culpable act with the appropriate mental state, but in cases of attempt, the act requirement is often relaxed in favor of being able to stop a bad thing before it happens. The problem is, we don't seem to have a good system for just how far to reduce the act requirement. Does it have to be a completed attempt, such as shooting but missing the target, before we can get them? Will any small act toward the completion of the crime count, such as going out and buying a box of bullets, or looking up the address/class schedule of the intended victim? Should it be somewhere in the middle? What about ambiguous actions, actions that could be either wholly innocent or geared toward committing a crime, where we just have no way of knowing what the real reason is?
So in order to partially compensate for that uncertainty, we elevate the mental state requirement. We require that whatever a person is accused of doing, they had to have acted with the purpose or intent of committing that crime. Acting with recklessness or knowledge that something bad will happen is not enough. You have to intend to cause the crime to happen. For example, in the case of attempted murder, you would have to intend to kill the person that dies; if you just recklessly swung a machete around and wound up hitting someone in the head, but had no intention of doing so, you can't be found guilty of attempted murder.
My point with all this is that it seems the Iran situation falls squarely into this concept of attempt. Our government appears to be trying to get Iran for attempted possession of a nuclear weapon, or something similar to that, although it's not a crime as far as I know (get back to me when I take international law next semester). The problem is that Iran hasn't actually done much. They did, at one time, have a weapons development program, but it's been shut down. That's like saying I did, at one time, have poison in my kitchen and I was gonna put it in your cake and kill you, but I threw it out instead.
Iran's current actions are so far back down the chain of events that could lead to anything dangerous that I feel we have no real reason for getting all military on them yet. Even if they were closer to the possibility of having and/or using a nuclear weapon, everything is still so ambiguous that they could just as easily be attempting to create a nuclear power plant, as they've been claiming all along. Without either a more definite step toward the attempted criminal act, or a less ambiguous move, I don't think we can ethically go in and start blowing stuff up.
Furthermore, we don't exactly have a way of proving the intentions of the government at the moment, which gets our mental state requirement all muddled up. If we aren't able to prove that they intend to create a nuclear weapon, we shouldn't assume the worst.
Based on all that, it appears we've got a pretty weak case for starting a military confrontation. We have ambiguous actions that could or could not be geared toward creating a weapons program (and probably aren't), and we have no proof of mental state. Not even a county DA in nowheresville could convict on such a shoddy case.
Now, some could argue that in cases of potential international disaster, the act requirement and the mental state requirement both need to be reduced a hell of a lot in order to save millions of lives. I don't dispute the merits of that argument, but there are policy considerations as well. We can't keep making the unilateral decision to attack countries just because we think their leaders are rogue warlords but have no real proof. If we had hard proof, it would be a different story, but this administration seems to have a habit of allowing some pretty shaky evidence to serve as a firm basis for launching an attack. Doing so has led to a weakening of our international clout and a dangerous stretching of our military power. We don't have the resources to do so - and frankly, I don't think we have the moral basis to do it, either.
The problem is, you can't let a sociopath play with the pieces of a gun without any supervision, and you can't let an openly hostile, aggressive leader of a nation play with the pieces of a nuclear bomb without supervision either. The challenge that we really face, I think, is going to be trying to improvise and institute a system of supervision that is effective without trampling needlessly on a nation's sovereignty. A nation is a nation, and just because one happens to be more bellicose than most of the others, that's no reason for us to chain it up in our international backyard and feed it nothing but bread and water.
My brain is tired now, but I'll spend more time thinking about this and we can talk about it once we're in the same time zone again.
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