Pax et Defensio Libertatis

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As reported in The Washington Post on Friday, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs announced that the Pentagon has begun drawing up plans to attack Iran, citing recent acts of a bombastic nature on the part of the Iranians.This declaration was quickly qualified with a kind of statement we’ve come to expect from the Bush administration: “Diplomacy will precede war.” Of course. Well, does diplomacy work if Iran now knows–if it did not know already–that the Pentagon is war-gaming attack strategies? And who would carry out such diplomatic discussion? The hawkish diplomat-in-chief Condi Rice? Or the war-thirsty commander-in-chief himself?

Either way, war has been inevitable for almost two decades. General Wesley Clark (U.S. Army, ret.) says that plans for attacking and invading Iran were drawn up and considered back in the first Bush administration. If Bush had won in 1992, according to General Clark, the Pentagon–under the watchful hawk eyes of Wolfowitz–was more than ready to initiate war against Iran, being just one in a list of a half dozen target nations in the region.

It would seem that Mr. Bush has taken the path less intelligent. But, after all, he has little political capital with which to wage such a war anyhow–and our nation has little blood and treasure left to sacrifice. Three undeclared, unconstitutional, morally and financially bankrupting wars seem a bit excessive, in my opinion. Yet three useless presidential candidates, two of which would probably be in favor of a war with Iran, are all the hope we have of a better future in the near term. It is with great fear and disgust that I am compelled by the facts to admit (as another anti-war conservative recently did in the pages of The American Conservative) that an Obama administration is probably the only path to peace. What has this world come to?