Current Events: Iran and "Incentive" Rewards

For awhile, Bush didn't support the general European idea of offering Iran economic rewards as an incentive to stop their nuclear weapons programs, an idea which makes no sense to me. He recently changed his mind and now agrees with that idea. Not that it matters, because Iran just said that they won't stop their programs anyway.

What I don't get is the very concept of offering rewards (why don't they just call it "bribes"?) as an incentive to get a country to stop trying to make nuclear weapons! When someone's doing something you don't want them to, you don't offer them something to make them stop! That implies that you're weaker than they are. Pretend that the ability to make nuclear weapons is a treehouse, and the countries are young boys. Countries like the U.S. that have nuclear weapons are the boys in the treehouse, and countries like Iran that don't are the ones on the ground. If there's just a small boy in the treehouse, he might pay a bully to keep him from coming up. There's nothing else he can do to keep him out. But what about the boy who's bigger than the bully? The bully's trying to climb up to the treehouse, and the bigger boy says, "Hey, don't come up here! We'll reward you if you don't!"

No! It's not the big boys in the treehouse who have to bargain with the little bullies! If the big boys don't want them in the club, they use physical force to keep them out. Why on earth would we want to give Iran "economic rewards" to keep them out of the treehouse? That's negative reinforcement! If they accepted it, we'd put ourselves in a position of blackmail---what's to prevent their saying, "give us more rewards or we'll start it up again." I'm actually surprised Iran rejected the offer; it's very confusing. But it appears that nothing short of physical force will be effective.

Economic bribes---because that's what they really are---only work if the issue is not something that's fundamentally important to you. If someone offered me a million dollars to never eat another bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, I'd take it immediately. I might miss the CTC, but it's not that important to me. On the other hand, I wouldn't take a hundred million dollars to stop publishing this blog of mine! Why? Because having a voice in the world and sharing my opinions is worth more than tangible things to me.

And I don't think I'm wrong in saying that getting nuclear weapons is worth more than tangible things to Iran. We told them to stop, and they said no. We told them we'd bribe them and give them goodies if they'd stop, and they still said no. They really want it. So why on earth did we humiliate ourselves and try to bribe them? Do Bush and the Europeans actually think that would be effective? Because it seems completely uneffective to me. If we want them to stay out of the treehouse, we're gonna have to physcially pry them off the ladder.

Edmond the Hun