Militants burn 15 trucks of nato supplies in Mosul, Ir모나코 카지노aq, April 9. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)
AUSTIN — When former vice president Al Gore decided in 1990 to announce the end of the cold war, he wrote that the “the first half of this century has been a triumph of hope over reality” for the United States and the world. In a speech from the White House, Gore concluded the Cold War was “on the decline.”
But, as the world’s attention turns to U.S. preparations for war with Iran over its alleged nuclear-weapons program, the stakes have grown higher for those of us who are dedicated to ending the nuclear age. If the war in Afghanistan were fought today — which is widely feared by intelligence and defense officials, in addition to by members of the public and the press — we would not only defeat the Taliban but would also win this country’s first permanent, world-class peace treaty, which is widely feared as well.
Gore might have had a point. The Cold War is over — albeit one with its own challenges and risks. But as a U.S. national security expert, I also recognize the risks of war that the Cold War faced. And while I can’t help but view the Bush administration’s Afghanistan policy as a continuation of previous administrations, I still believe the risk of war today is not as remote as Gore might have envisioned it to be.
I am, for example, convinced, not only that there is not just the threat of a conflict, but also the risk of a situation in which Iran could decide to retaliate — and launch a direct offensive — for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. As I was preparing for my appearance here today, I thought it would be wise to put these two options side-by-side on the map and see if there really are any similarities.
Iran doesn’t look like it wants to wage war in Afghanistan (see “Bush administration is ‘at war’ in Afghanistan.”) Tehran has never been close to waging a war with Israel, and it has not conducted more than a handful of missile tests to demonstrate it might attack the United States. Yet while in 2008 and 2009, when an Israeli warplane approached Israeli airspace in response to some nuclear tests, Tehran’s response was swift and unambiguous. For a leader such as Iranian presi에스엠 카지노dent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to dismiss such warnings as “delusions” or the expression of the “madman m온라인 슬롯 머신 사이트entality” was, if not a warning, a bit disingenuous