In the days leading up to the war, one of the things I kept hearing people say (and that I said myself) was, "Why are we going after Iraq, who MIGHT have WMD, when we know that a crazy ass country like North Korea DOES have WMD?" That's a reasonable question, and the obvious answer is - we don't want a nuke tossing contest on our hands. It's the deterrence factor that kept the good old Cold War chugging along for oh so many decades.
What does this say to the rest of the world? If I'm El Presidente of a nasty nation that may have supported terrorists, or who really just hates the US, or who happens to be sitting on a bunch of oil, I start to realize that America is not going to come after me if I have some WMDs sitting out back. I take the Kim Jong Il route and stock up those bad bitches, and even more than that - I start waving them around. And you know what happens in that scene in a movie when some poor bastard is scared shitless and waving a loaded gun around, right? It accidentally goes off. I mean, this is one of those things that you see coming the second the sweaty, twitchy Steve Buscemi type picks up the gun. You sit there wondering who he's going to accidentally kill - the hero, the girlfriend, the innocent little kid?
We're creating a world where nations are going to scramble for WMDs. They are going to see the US stomping around the globe smashing countries without WMD (or at least the will to use them) while utterly ignoring countries that do have them. It's like we're creating a nice warm wet climate for proliferation to grow out of control, just like that mossy green shit all over Stephen King in Creepshow.
There's this interesting paradox in Batman comics that I like a lot. In the comics, Batman dresses as a huge bat looking guy to strike fear into the hearts of criminals (what with them being a cowardly and superstitious lot). But his presence in Gotham City ups the ante, bringing crazier and more dangerous criminals out of the woodwork. Do we want to fill the world up with more wacky supervillains, each more willing than the last to do something really out of control?
What does this say to the rest of the world? If I'm El Presidente of a nasty nation that may have supported terrorists, or who really just hates the US, or who happens to be sitting on a bunch of oil, I start to realize that America is not going to come after me if I have some WMDs sitting out back. I take the Kim Jong Il route and stock up those bad bitches, and even more than that - I start waving them around. And you know what happens in that scene in a movie when some poor bastard is scared shitless and waving a loaded gun around, right? It accidentally goes off. I mean, this is one of those things that you see coming the second the sweaty, twitchy Steve Buscemi type picks up the gun. You sit there wondering who he's going to accidentally kill - the hero, the girlfriend, the innocent little kid?
We're creating a world where nations are going to scramble for WMDs. They are going to see the US stomping around the globe smashing countries without WMD (or at least the will to use them) while utterly ignoring countries that do have them. It's like we're creating a nice warm wet climate for proliferation to grow out of control, just like that mossy green shit all over Stephen King in Creepshow.
There's this interesting paradox in Batman comics that I like a lot. In the comics, Batman dresses as a huge bat looking guy to strike fear into the hearts of criminals (what with them being a cowardly and superstitious lot). But his presence in Gotham City ups the ante, bringing crazier and more dangerous criminals out of the woodwork. Do we want to fill the world up with more wacky supervillains, each more willing than the last to do something really out of control?
