America at its best

William Culbert Jr. of Oak Ridge wrote a great letter to the editor responding to Congressman Zach Wamp's support of military force in the Middle East. We thought it was worth sharing.

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America has never been at its best when it is motivated by fear. Political ideologues that conflate minor threats into mass social turmoil drive us toward our most petulant instincts. Combining fear with ignorance can have disastrous consequences in foreign affairs.

Should Americans be afraid of Ahmadinejad as Zach Wamp implies in his June 11 article? The unpopular Iranian leader’s most inflammatory rhetoric is designed to appeal to his minority base while most of his countrymen have traditionally been pro-western.

Historically, Iran has never lived up to these threats just as a real power like China never acted upon Mao's threats to the West.

Iranians, on the other hand, have the legitimate fear that if their country ever used a nuclear weapon in Israel their own lives would be in great danger. They also know that if their country obtained a nuclear weapon, the U.S. would likely leave them alone.

The U.S. has 68 times the economy of Iran. We spend 110 times more money on defense. We have 5,000 strategic nuclear weapons. Israel has more than 270 nuclear warheads, half of which have second-strike capability from submarines. Iran has not one nuclear weapon. Who should be afraid of whom, Mr. Wamp?

Iranians have just seen their Iraqi neighbors decimated by the United States. If their radical elements were to launch a synchronized attack on a U.S. aircraft carrier doing maneuvers in the Persian Gulf, they would be facing the threat of a similar invasion with horrible consequences for both nations and perhaps the world.

The likelihood of an American dying in this country from a terrorist attack is about like that of drowning in one’s own bathtub or being killed by lightening. Terrorism is a real threat, but is it worth $10 billion a month and tens of thousands of lives? Might we be safer if we spent more of that on homeland security, energy independence, controlling the spread of fissile material, or even rebuilding the infrastructure of our cities?

Some wars are legitimate and necessary. The Iraqi war is illegitimate and an utterly failed enterprise, but Mr. Wamp conjoins the transient improvements in Bagdad with the legitimacy of a confrontational approach to engagement with Iran. This is dangerous rhetoric that can only lead to a horrible mistake if it is believed.