Why should RIC give up Iran and help with AfPak?

EDITORIAL: What Mr. Obama Said, and Didn't Say, New York Times, September 23, 2009

Good editorial that only points out the difficulty of asking Russia and India and China to put their economic interests in Iran at risk and THEN expecting help on Af-Pak.

Why should a bankrupt superpower think it's going to have its cake and eat it too?

Talk about unrealistic.

Comments

[gordon]

I was disappointed in George Friedman's assessment yesterday of Obama's choices regarding Iran.

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20090928_obamas_move_iran_and_afghanistan

He describes the option of the US declining to attack Iran as "the United States [being] unwilling to take military action regardless of provocations." Not a word about exactly what specific US security interests would be served by attacking Iran.

His reasons for favoring a US attack on Iran are:

1) so as not to appear weak2) Israel's going to do it anyway, but they don't have the assets to do a good job of it, so the US should do it for them3) If Israel does it and Iran responds by mining the Straits, the US will get sucked into a naval war with Iran anyway4) if not "the American position in the Islamic world will decline dramatically" and US inaction "would reshape U.S. relations in the region far more than a hundred Cairo speeches."

1) is just foolish2) sounds like getting manipulated by a passive-aggressive3) maybe a good reason for the US to be ready to keep the Straits open, but no more than that4) please don't throw me in that briar patch

I expect this kind of "strategic" thinking from Eliot Cohen, maybe, but not Stratfor.

[Tom Barnett]

Then what it is doing on my blog?