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Originally Posted by RDixon
It will be what we call conventional war and if iraq has taught us anything over the past three years, it is that we pretty much suck at conventional war, mostly due to ineffective and incompetent leadership.
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Awe, come on. It only took our army one month to sweep through Iraq. If anything, that proves that our army is better at conventional warfare than any in history. The only incompetent leaders during the invasion were Saddam and his subordinates. What you're perceiving as failure is the fighting that has occured since the end of the invasion, fighting that has been anything but conventional.
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Originally Posted by theknife
so, with respect to Iran and North Korea, it's not that the policy of MAD won't work against them, it's that the policy of MAD won't work against us.
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Preciesly. We could nuke them today and be done with them, but we'd have to be pretty unscrupulous to try it. The problem with having the biggest arsenal in the world is that there are always unscrupulous people in our government and we can't always count on human decency to keep them from pushing the button. The reason we make rules for ourselves is to prevent us from making things worse during periods of crisis, but where rules fail we must set traps for ourselves. Leaders in both the US and the USSR accelerated the arms race in order to set such a trap.
For the most part that trap has been defused, but there are still people who think that victory can be acheived in a nuclear battle, despite the inevitable cost of human casualties and collateral damage. The people whom MAD was meant to reign in are as much a threat to us as our enemies. It only takes one nuke to kill thousands of Americans, and we only have to launch one nuke at an enemy to provoke that kind of retaliation. So until we dismantle our arsenal we need Russia and even China to point their missiles at us.
Now we just need to make it clear to North Korea and especially Iran that we wouldn't hesitate to nuke them into oblivion, despite the reality that we wouldn't do such a thing. It's a paradox: we need MAD to prevent dangerous men from making bad decisions, but we need dangerous men that can make the kinds of threats that make MAD feasable. In other words, we need MAD men like Rumsfeld to keep madmen like Ahmadinejad in their place.