20060515
    The World Watch Preview is a post that takes a look at news items that are currently making their way through the never ending 24-hour news cycle. The Preview calls attention to and provides a quick commentary on some of those events. This week: ‘A Military Issue?’ and ‘Iran, Still’
A Military Issue?
    The political debate over what to do about the complex issues of immigration reform and border security are about to take a turn for the worse as President Bush outlines his plan for calling as many as 10,000 National Guardsmen (6,000 according to the President’s speech) to help secure the nation’s border by military force rather than address and solve the lingering problems that have led to this debate to begin with.
    In truth, this solution, while incorrect as previously explained on this weblog, is also politically expedient and allows the political establishment to pretend it is doing something about these problems without really doing anything about the actual problems. Further, it allows the American people, already guilty of almost fatal apathy about their own government and national interest, to believe that ‘something has been done’ even if what is being done is wrong.
    As previously explained, the solution to the immigration and border security issues do not lie in a militarized border, but in a complex solution of enabling agencies already tasked with those responsibilities by providing them with adequate funding, proper training, proper equipment, and enough manpower to do their jobs.
    Chief among those jobs is the enforcement of already existing law, thereby denying American employers the right to employ illegals implicit in the failure to enforce the law and in applying existing immigration law to the illegals already in the United States.
    There can be no doubt that this solution is not immediate, however it is also correct, and in the long run the correct solution is also the one most likely to achieve the results those Americans who really care about the immigration and border security problems really want to achieve.
    One can only hope that the current stop gap measure of using the National Guard will buy enough time for the nation to engage in realistic dialogue on the subject and to reach solutions that really solve the problems at hand.
Iran, Still
EU Plan | Iranian Pre-Response
    The latest European negotiating offer to the nuclear standoff with Iran appears to have been rejected out of hand by the Iranians before it has even been formally offered. Of course, this is because Iran has every intention of building nuclear weapons in its ongoing quest to establish itself as the leader of an Islamic fundamentalist world that defies the rest of the world.
    Recent revelations, including the not surprising discovery of traces of enriched uranium at Iranian military facilities purportedly not involved in Iran’s nuclear program only reinforce the notion that Iran has no real intention of abandoning its ambitions through negotiation or international pressure.
    Instead, Iran is using the liberal mindset of international diplomacy as a foil against nations who really want to build a consensus for action against a nation that may well prove to be one of the greatest threats faced by the world in the 21st century. Iran is doing this by manipulating the diplomatic front with a deftness derived from the lessons learned from the successes of then mistakes of its allies like North Korea and Syria.
    The inevitable end result of this process, unless some nation is willing to act unilaterally and with great courage, is going to be a fundamentalist Islamic Iran, armed with nuclear weapons and in a position to widen its sphere of influence under the threat of nuclear devastation.
DLH
