The Cost of Inaction

David Warren, our clear-sighted Canadian friend, via RCP, on the necessity of confronting Iran:

Might the ayatollahs get nuclear weapons but not use them? President Bush and other Western leaders should begin alerting their publics, to the possibility that this could be worse than if they did use them. For if the ayatollahs launched a surprise nuclear attack, on anyone, the West would respond robustly. At that point it would cost a few million lives, mostly Iranian; or at most, a few tens of millions.

But if Iran can continue to exploit American diplomatic weaknesses, by keeping the confrontation in the diplomatic arena, the ayatollahs can raise the stakes much higher. They could, in an easily foreseeable future, use nuclear blackmail in combination with an oil embargo -- and with the cooperation, subtle or overt, of Russia, China, a post-Saudi Arabia, perhaps a client Iraq, and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.

Such a challenge could bring about the sort of "new world order", compared to which a few million casualties might seem a lucky break. It would create an order in which North America, Western Europe, and Japan, were deprived of the use of high technology, by the loss of the fuel to move goods around; and likewise deprived of the food supplies that require oil at every stage of production and distribution. All the cards of power would be suddenly transferred from the bourgeois democracies to the planet's most ruthless dictatorships.

Look into the eyes of an Ahmadinejad, or a President Hu Jintao (currently tightening controls at all levels of Chinese society, in direct response to the perceived weakness of the West), and ask yourself whether you wouldn't prefer to be ruled by men like Bush, Blair, Harper. The reader who is tempted to answer, "What's the difference?" may live to find out.