Still a Dangerous World

Democrats imply the U.S. can talk its way out of global threats.

By Daniel Henninger
Thursday, December 6, 2007 12:01 a.m.

The most disturbing thing about the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran wasn't the news itself, but how the episode displayed the wild and manic swings that now characterize American politics. A regular watcher of our politics could be forgiven for feeling that one isn't watching a serious country but a place that conducts its internal affairs like a Saturday morning cartoon show. Thunk! Boooinng!

For some time, the conventional storyboard drawn for the Bush presidency has been that the U.S. is led by a bumbling Elmer Fudd, who outlandishly overestimates the danger from such imagined threats as Saddam Hussein, Syria or Iran's mysterious-looking mullahs. Prominent political figures here design their comments on world events to fit inside cartoon dialogue balloons. John Edwards, after the NIE story broke, denounced the Bush-Cheney "rush to war with Iran." Sen. Harry Reid demanded a "diplomatic surge."

These wide, all-or-nothing swings may serve the melodramatic needs of politics and the press, but they don't much help an electorate that will vote a year from now to send a new U.S. president out into the world. With or without the NIE's opinion of Iran's nuclear program, that world is still a dangerous place.


Let's assume for argument's sake that Iran did stop its nuke program in 2003. Why, then, in 2006 was Iran performing test flights of the Shabab-2 and Shabab-3 ballistic missiles, the latter with a range of some 1,200 miles? Commenting at the time, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the Iranians "are not unaware that the security environment is one in which if they actually were to do something, Iran would suffer greatly." But as of this week, they might not.

Indeed last week, just as the U.S. intelligence professionals were preparing to tell the world it could forget about Iran (as yesterday's news reports made clear the world is about to do), the Iranian defense ministry announced it has built a new 1,200-mile missile, the Ashura. In September, it put on display the 1,100-mile-range Ghadr-1 missile. If this is all an inconsequential feint, it's a remarkably big one.

North Korea in July 2006 tested the long-range Taepodong-2, a nuclear payload-capable ballistic missile. North Korea has exported its missile technology to Iran and Pakistan. And of course Hezbollah, in the same month North Korea was testing the Taepodong-2, fired thousands of Katyusha rockets at Israel, re-establishing the operational viability of short-range bombardment.

China is developing three strategic, long-range missiles--the JL-1, and the DF-31 and DF-31A; the latter two are mobile ICBMs. This technology did not go away with the Cold War.

In January, after much effort to do so, China successfully used a kinetic-kill vehicle launched from a ballistic missile to destroy a satellite orbiting at 500 miles altitude.

The Bush administration's effort to place a missile-defense system in Eastern Europe as counterweight to Iran's missiles was conventionally mocked by elite opinion as a rerun of Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars scheme." In fact, Japan, Australia, Germany, Italy, Israel and Denmark are all attempting to develop antimissile technology. France is building a short-range ballistic missile defense system, the SAMP/T. What are they all afraid of?

Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, indeed virtually all the nations of the Middle East are seeking nuclear-power capability. Possibly it's all just to keep the lights on in the tourist hotels, but nuclear-energy production is still a dual-use technology. It is now believed that Israel bombed Syria in September to destroy a nuclear-bomb facility built in part by North Korea.


This is a more complex and hair-trigger world than the Cold War years between the U.S. and Soviet Union. The idea that George Bush's handling of all these volatile moving pieces has been "incompetent" and has "isolated" the U.S. is a dangerous caricature, though that caricature is the way our Roller-Derby politics has chosen to talk about the world. The NIE/Iran drama this week is a case study--reduced in press reports to another Bush intelligence "flip-flop," as though the president wrote this stuff himself in the Oval Office.

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, John McCain and even Mike Huckabee want us to entrust them with managing the world's flourishing threats. Has any offered sufficient reason why we should? In other political systems, a candidate's strategic policies tend to flow from his party. Here we mostly get whatever these hyper-ambitious individuals choose to reveal during a campaign--and the foreign-policy views of their party in Congress.

This Wednesday, after the NIE's release, the Democratic candidates had a fresh opportunity at an Iowa debate to describe how their presidencies would address Iran and the world. John Edwards chose to attack Sen. Clinton for voting in September to label Iran's Revolutionary Guards as terrorists. She and Sen. Obama, along with Democrats in Congress, said the new Iran intelligence estimate now mandates diplomacy only. Sen. Obama: "They should have stopped the saber rattling, should have never started it. And they need, now, to aggressively move on the diplomatic front."

But in a July essay for Foreign Affairs, Sen. Obama said nuclear weapons "in the hands of a radical theocracy" is "too dangerous." While he favored "tough-minded" diplomacy with Iran, "we must not rule out using military force."

Which version is one supposed to believe? The candidates seeking votes from their party's pacifists, or the person who wants to represent his country's interests in a hostile world?


One would like more on this than we're getting from the candidates in both parties. But the Democrats especially have tied themselves to the word "diplomacy," giving the impression that the U.S. can literally talk its way out of any bad outcomes that Iran, Syria, North Korea or free-agent terrorists have planned for us.

Put it this way: Would they, like Israel, have bombed that factory in Syria without pre-discussing it with Bashar Assad or Kim Jong-Il? No candidate's answer to that will make everyone happy. But the more than 100 million Americans who'll vote next year need a better idea than they've got of how the next president plans to deal with the world. Not the cartoon world, but the real world.