Need cool heads on Iran
When hotheads salivate over another Mideast war (Iran) that will benefit only the arms makers and dealers, I give thanks to The Spokesman-Review for printing Trudy Rubin’s good sense. The Jan. 18 column calling for a hotline such as existed between the U.S. and USSR during the Cold War could defuse an unintended crisis that would lead us into heart-stopping disaster. There is at the moment an excitement over confrontation rather than diplomacy that befits testosterone-high teens, not Congress. They don’t have a nuclear bomb. Let’s not push them toward it.
Warnings of grave and unknown consequences are coming from the U.S. military and Israelis, too. Just two: Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff for former Secretary of State Colin Powell: “We’re marching down a road for yet another war in western Asia. A war that will be disastrous not just for the region but for the United States of America, too.”
And from Meir Dagan, former head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency: (Attacking Iran is) “the stupidest thing I have ever heard.”
As we have learned from painful budget cuts hurting us all, war debt is as local an issue as it gets.
Jean Maryborn
Sandpoint