How it's gonna work

Commander Huber has an excellent take on what the war in Iraq, and the probable attacks on Iran, have gotten us. Not much, but by golly we sure gave Iran what it wanted (Part 1 - Part 2):

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Cheney's real problem is that he broke his promise to his big oil buddies by letting his pal Don Rumsfeld spray the Iraq situation into the fan. That gave China and its partners the opening they needed to crack the western world's control of the energy market. If Iran, with help from Russia and China, can develop a mature, independent nuclear energy industry, and if those three countries, along with Venezuela, can take over the energy sources for Asia, eastern Europe, the Middle East and South America, British Petroleum and Mobil Exxon will start going the way of Ford and General Motors.

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In a nutshell, the goal of Realpolitik or "realistic foreign policy" is to strengthen your alliances, divide your enemies, and convince everybody else to stay out of the way. The Bush administration's pursuit of the neoconservative ideological policies has united our adversaries, pushed formerly non-aligned states into our adversaries' camp, and convinced former allies like the western European states to take a largely neutral position.

If we pull the trigger in Iran we'll shoot off another of our few remaining toes, and we won't have a friend left in the world but Israel. The senior military types who have been pushing back at the idea of attacking Iran understand this better than their civilian bosses, and that's a sad comment on contemporary America.

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A great read for Saturday afternoon.