Hard choices are sometimes required

Buried down in the bottom of a long, protracted, and intellectually void article written for Slate by Gary Kimaya, he claims incredulously that a 1% chance of our enemies obtaining and us using a nuclear weapon on our civilian population is insufficient grounds for attack.

Perhaps he lives in a different reality, but the one in which I live in looks at a 1% chance of millions of civilians killed as a pretty significant problem. From a very basic analysis, a 1% chance that a million civilians are killed in a nuclear attack by, say Iran, is about equivalent to a 100% chance that 10,000 Americans are killed in a war with Iran. It might seem a harsh calculus for a political party whose entire platform is built on the naive and childish notion that we can save everyone, everywhere but real leaders have to sit down and make that balance. If a war would cost 5,000 lives but has a 1% chance of saving a million, isn't that worthwhile? If the chances that Iran is, indeed, working towards a nuclear weapon that they would use against us are much greater than that - 10% or 15% - then what possible individual can rationally believe that it's not worth the sacrifice?

Is this an easy sacrifice? Of course not. However, when it comes to defending the lives and freedom of our country, we must sometimes have to make very difficult decisions and a real leader needs to sit down some times and realize that it might be worth sacrificing a few thousand to save a million.

Iraq taught us nothing
The U.S. establishment's acceptance of a possible war with Iran shows that the folly that led to Iraq still rules Washington
Current Opinion for Salon

The U.S. could attack Iran in the next few months.

Let's repeat that. The U.S> could attack Iran in the next few months.

The fact that this sentence can be written with a straight face proves that the Iraq debacle has taught us absolutely nothing. Talk of attacking Iran should be confined to the lunatic fringe. Yet America's political and media elite have responded to the idea of attacking Iran in almost the same way they did to the idea of attacking Iraq. Four and a half years after Bush embarked on one of the most catastrophic foreign-policy adventures in our history, the same wrongheaded, ignorant, and self-destructive approach to the Arab-Muslim world and to fighting terrorism still rules establishment thinking.

The disturbing thing is that we have no excuse this time. Five years ago, a wounded, fearful and enraged America was ready to attack anybody, and Bush waved his red cape and steered the mad bull toward Iraq. We now know that was folly. The completely unnecessary invasion has so far resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and almost 4,000 Americans, severely destabilized the region, cost billions of dollars, and increased the threat of terrorism. Yet today we are blithely considering attacking a much larger Middle Eastern country for equally dubious reasons, and mainstream politicians and the media are once again going along. The American people have signed off on the conventional "wisdom". In a recent poll, 52 percent of Americans say they would support attacking Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons.

This is surreal. It's as if we're back on Sept. 12 and Iraq never happened.