That's the case with looking back at the elections last year and considering our present. What if John McCain had won? What would our stance toward the disputed Iranian elections be then?
One question you'd have to answer first is whether there'd even be a dispute. Would the people of Iran see the US as a potential partner or as an enemy? And, if it were the latter, would they have voted for the reformer or the hardliner?
We don't have the answers to those questions. We can make educated guesses, but we can't know. It may be that the situation facing President Obama would never have happened at all under a President McCain. All we can really do is look at the way things are now and see how McCain reacts to this situation. That's as close as we'll ever come and as close as we'll ever know.
What we can learn from this time machine game is that McCain would've been... let's say "incautious." Where Obama has an end-game in mind for Iran -- one that doesn't really depend on the name of Iran's president -- McCain's the guy who takes the pawn because it's unprotected, mistaking a game of chess for an exercise in destruction, rather than as a constructive process... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
