Keeping Our Eye On the Ball

With all the fear mongering over Iran and the possibility that Iran could acquire a nuclear weapon at some point in the distant future, I wonder if we might have taken our eye off the ball in terms of real threats to world security. Iran, okay, they have a crazy guy who wants to blow Israel off the map, but the crazy guy doesn't actually have the means to make good on his threat. And it may be 10 years or more before Iran acquires the technology to make good on that threat. 10 years is a long time, the crazy guy might die of natural causes, or be over-throw in a coup, leaders in the middle east have a pretty short shelf life. While we are all getting spooked over the nuclear ambitions of Iran, who is watching Pakistan?

Pakistan already has nukes.

My understanding of middle-east politics is rudimentary at best, but the noise this last year out of Pakistan has been loud and disturbing, even to someone one doesn't get the whole picture. I wasn't really paying close attention until this summer when the President Pervez Musharraf sent troops into a mosque that had been taken over by fundamentalist extremists to level the place. As you can well imagine, the killings in the holy place didn't go over so well, and the security situation deteriorated pretty quickly. The President also had some problems with a tiny legal issue, being the head of the army and the head of the state at the same time, a separation of power that is actually just as important as separation of church and state. In a real democracy such as the US, only Congress has the power to declare war, and the President supposedly has none, if only our Congress would read the Constitution and figure it out. In Pakistan, Musharraf took a cue from Dick Cheney and decided that Presidential powers should include absolute authority over the armed forces, and he fired any legal minds that said otherwise. The situation has begun to un-ravel even further, with the deportation of the ex- Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, and the attempted assassination of former Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto just a month ago. On Saturday, just two days ago, Musharraf imposed Marshall law, and we are now looking at a nuclear armed country, with a huge population of radical Muslims, in the middle of civil unrest. Who knows how long Musharraf can maintain order?

And we are worried about Iran?

You know, I have no love for the Islamic Republic of Iran, but they have a tight rein on the crazy people, and they don't have any nuclear capabilities. Right now, I'm thinking that Pakistan is up for grabs, if you hold free elections, you might end up with some really crazy guys getting their fingers on the trigger of a big old atomic bomb, but if you keep the dictatorship in place, it is sure to fall.

But what I truly don't get, is why we are spending all of our waking moments worrying about a non-threat from Iran, when Pakistan is falling to pieces.

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