See, this is the kind of stuff I was talking about in my old blog:

Study: War on Iraq Will Heighten Risk of Further al-Qaida Attacks, Nuclear Conflict

A U.S.-led war on Iraq would heighten the risk of regional conflict and increase support for Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network, researchers warned Monday.

The independent Oxford Research Group said conventional war would kill 10,000 civilians in Iraq, and could trigger a desperate and destructive response from Saddam Hussein's regime.

And what were their estimates of the effects should we *not* strike militarily to disarm Iraq? What are the chances that within the next ten years a nuclear weapon, developed by Iraq, will be used either against one of their neighbors or against a Western target? I don't know the answer to that...nobody does. But I believe the risk is substantial, greater than the potential detrimental effects of military intervention in Iraq.

People who think that Cold War strategy is going to work in the 21st century are being dangerously naive. Deterrence simply does not work against non-state entities spread across multiple continents whose adherents have no problem with dying for their cause. And the greater the number of nuclear powers, the overall number of nuclear weapons with little or no safeguards, the greater the probability that an aggressive non-state actor is going to acquire and use one. This seems like common sense, and I don't hear anybody arguing intelligently to the contrary.

Very simply: the international community needs to stop the spread of nuclear technology to new countries, and countries with existing stockpiles need better safeguards and further treaties whittling the number down, with an eye towards total elimination. This is the direction we need to be going, and instead, we're going in the complete opposite.

It's dangerous and it's stupid.