http://www.msnbc.com/news/1000962.asp?0cl=c1It’s not easy being a hawk nowadays. Especially if you’re hawkish about all the things that took us to war in Iraq: rogue states, weapons of mass destruction, and the weakness of the United Nations. While the Bush administration devotes most of its resources to Iraq, there’s precious little time, manpower or money to fight the bigger battle against the countries that are developing and spreading the lethal firepower we fear so much.
IT WASN’T MEANT to be this way. Iraq was supposed to make life easier for the doommongers who spend their lives fretting about the things we would rather forget: nuclear weapons, long-range missiles and the hostile regimes that try to get their hands on both. Most of the hawks who obsess about weapons of mass destruction—including many inside the Bush administration—believed that Iraq would help them force the world to wake up to the threats they were studying.
Even those who doubted whether Iraq was the most pressing threat facing the United States felt that was good enough reason to support the war. “The best thing you can say about it,” one weapons expert told me in the run-up to war, “is that this is the first time we’ve gotten serious about weapons of mass destruction.”
Instead, the hawks are hamstrung by Iraq. Inside the administration, there is no appetite—and no resources—to focus on another crisis, no matter how serious or imminent. Outside the United States, there is even less appetite to invest more political capital in another American adventure. At a time when pro-U.S. officials are getting killed in Iraq, including seven Spanish intelligence officers and two Japanese diplomats over the weekend, there is precious little support for more tough action against other targets.
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