I don't know about the rest of you out there, but,
personally, I'm scared.

With only 13 months remaining in President Bush's tenure,
nothing can stop him now. There are no more congressional elections, no
possibility of a third term and no possibility to salvage his legacy. There is
no chance for success and with the imminent completion of his failure on the
near horizon, he is willing to go out with a bang. And then, six weeks ago, the
vision of that explosion came forcefully from his mouth when he uttered to the
American people that we are on a crash course with Iran, one that could lead us
to "World War III."

Mr. Bush and his administration have, since October 2001,
been accused of fear-mongering of the highest extent. However, Mr. Bush's
warning of a seemingly inevitable military conflict with Iran had me nervous
for the first time. If Mr. Bush was able to deceitfully gain approval for war
with Iraq, what would stop him from doing the same with Iran? Moreover, if our
president has already started one war in which he lacked the necessary
background information to succeed, why wouldn't he do so again, even if on a
much more dangerous scale?

Well, last week, with the release of an updated National
Intelligence Estimate, the American people and I breathed a sigh of relief. Mr.
Bush, we assumed, would be forced to tone down his rhetoric in the face of a
new report saying Iran ended their nuclear weapons program in 2003 and has not
started it up again since.

But, as is the procedural norm, Mr. Bush did not use the new
information to accept any possibility of peace through diplomacy; he in fact
spun it into what he termed "a warning signal." Rejecting the obvious benefits
of an Iran with less of a nuclear capability than had been previously
conceived, he asked, "What's to say they couldn't start another covert nuclear
weapons program?" It is this sort of blind assessment in contrast to facts that
may lead our country into something as disastrous as we have ever seen.

First, Mr. Bush needs to understand that by increasing
threats to Iran, he is isolating a group of people who are not as anti-American
and anti-democratic as others are in the region. The Iranian people, for the
most part, don't align with the sentiments and grandiose judgments of their
president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. A man without a significant amount of power,
Mr. Ahmadinejad is not the voice of his people. But by allowing them to believe
they are under the threat of attack from the most powerful military in the
world, Iranians might be led right into the arms of the man who is prepared for
the challenge.

Second, and perhaps the most important notion that Mr. Bush
seems to dismiss, is the regional upheaval that anti-Iranian rhetoric may
invite. Iran has close ties with both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in
Palestine. While geography might have been one of those classes that Mr. Bush
didn't do so well in at school, any of his experts can tell him that those two
terrorist groups reside extremely close to Israel, our most powerful, and most
hated, ally in the Middle East.

Mr. Bush, in attempting to isolate the Iranians as a state
that "needs to be taken seriously as a threat to peace," is serving only to
push their citizens into the hands of one of the most anti-Western politicians
in the Middle East, Mr. Ahmadinejad, while also infuriating violent groups of
people hell-bent on the elimination of our invaluable Middle Eastern ally.

However, the negatives of any type of Iranian conflict do
not stop there. Mr. Bush's rhetoric is causing most European investors to pull
their assets out of Iran. While this may seem like a positive punishment toward
a nation that is doing wrong (although the new NIE says they aren't), it is
simply leading Iranian industry to look elsewhere for investors. Here,
elsewhere means to their easterly neighbors, China — a nation with a booming
economy that represents the unquestioned future challenger to American hegemony
in the 21st century.

It must then also be understood that any military conflict
with Iran would be extremely difficult. Our American forces are stretched so
thin in Afghanistan and the quagmire that is post-Saddam Iraq that we simply
lack the manpower to take on a nation as large as Iran. With more than 70
million people and an advanced — although split — military, an Iranian invasion
would not resemble the walk in the park that was the overthrow of Saddam's
government.

So as I said, yes, I am fearful of the future. It seems like
there is nothing to stop Mr. Bush from his mission to do whatever he pleases.
America must have come a long way from times when we were told that there is "nothing
to fear but fear itself." I guess we are now at the time when we have
everything to fear. All we have now to do is wait, and hope 13 months isn't
long enough for our president to ratchet up the beginning of World War III.

Ben White
(bwhite2wisc.edu) is a junior majoring in sociology and political
science.