Ending DADT: net effect will be...pretty much nothing will happen. Certainly our soldiers won't go out and start getting body art and drunk. What happened everywhere else in Europe/Israel? Nothing.
Iran: Hyperventilating aside about them and the DRPK's nuclear programs, I'm a lot less worried about Iran than the North Koreans being belligerent and actively using such a weapon. I have a little more faith in rational actors at the nation-state level. The purpose of these leaders is to extract rents for favored bases of support in the economy. That won't happen if they bomb someone with a nuke. MAD doesn't apply and there's no way you'd restrain a country with nuclear arms that showed after the death of a few thousands of its citizens that it was willing to support invasions of two sovereign nations from using them. Money (and life) talks a lot louder than faith in some jihadist ideology for the people in charge.
Most likely outcome may be something stupid like quasi-unilateral sanctions that will be toothless because Russia, most of Europe, and China won't go along with them and will succeed in doing nothing at all over the nuclear energy or any weaponization programs. People pushing that this sort of diplomacy is effective are either 1) being willfully stupid in the examination of any history to the contrary that sanctions have almost never worked (maybe apartheid in South Africa is your one ace in the hole card for this strategy) or 2) willfully aware that it will fail to accomplish anything and that will open the door for more substantial actions, like bombing or invasion. The public in Iran is broadly supportive of a nuclear energy program and not significantly opposed to possessing nuclear weapons in theory and because sanctions have the effect of rallying further support against the hostile, belligerent, and unreasonable Americans who have succeeded in harming the average Iranian and further entrenching the gangster-ized profits of established authorities so there's not much chance that these things wouldn't continue unabated if the Clintonian-neoconservative unholy alliance of "sanctions" gets its way.
08 February 2010
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