Wanted: a real cowboy; no RINO’s need apply
Mark Steyn does his usual excellent job of clarifying things:
Perhaps it’s unduly pessimistic to write the civilized world automatically into what Osama bin Laden called the “weak horse” role (Islam being the “strong horse”). But, if you were an Iranian “moderate” and you’d watched the West’s reaction to the embassy seizure and the Rushdie murders and Hezbollah terrorism, wouldn’t you be thinking along those lines? I don’t suppose Buenos Aires Jews expect to have their institutions nuked any more than 12 years ago they expected to be blown up in their own city by Iranian-backed suicide bombers. Nukes have gone freelance, and there’s nothing much we can do about that, and sooner or later we’ll see the consequences—in Vancouver or Rotterdam, Glasgow or Atlanta. But, that being so, we owe it to ourselves to take the minimal precautionary step of ending the one regime whose political establishment is explicitly pledged to the nuclear annihilation of neighboring states.
Once again, we face a choice between bad and worse options. There can be no “surgical” strike in any meaningful sense: Iran’s clients on the ground will retaliate in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and Europe. Nor should we put much stock in the country’s allegedly “pro-American” youth. This shouldn’t be a touchy-feely nation-building exercise: rehabilitation may be a bonus, but the primary objective should be punishment—and incarceration. It’s up to the Iranian people how nutty a government they want to live with, but extraterritorial nuttiness has to be shown not to pay. That means swift, massive, devastating force that decapitates the regime—but no occupation.
The cost of de-nuking Iran will be high now but significantly higher with every year it’s postponed. The lesson of the Danish cartoons is the clearest reminder that what is at stake here is the credibility of our civilization. Whether or not we end the nuclearization of the Islamic Republic will be an act that defines our time.
Our time, and well beyond it. We just have to hope that the folly of 60’s-era liberalism hasn’t already defined the boundaries of our will to act decisively against our enemies, or of our willingness to acknowledge we even have enemies in the first place. And somebody ought to hip the ostriches in the Bush admin to this little development:
TEHRAN (Reuters) – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday Iran had joined the group of countries possessing nuclear technology and was determined to achieve industrial-scale uranium enrichment.
The United States said Iran was “moving in the wrong direction” with its nuclear program and if it persisted, the United States would discuss possible next steps with the U.N. Security Council.
“I am officially announcing that Iran has joined the group of those countries which have nuclear technology. This is the result of the Iranian nation’s resistance,” Ahmadinejad said in a televised address from the northeastern city of Mashhad.
“I am proud to announce that we have started enriching uranium to the 3.5 percent level,” Gholamreza Aghazadeh said, adding that the pilot enrichment plant in Natanz, south of Tehran, had started working on Monday.
Influential former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said earlier on Tuesday that Iran was producing enriched uranium from a cascade of 164 centrifuges.
It may already be too late. Bush needs to show some leadership here and stop dicking around trying to get the cooperation of people who will never, ever give it to him. You’d think he would have learned that lesson from the absurd impasse leading up to the Iraq invasion, but apparently you’d be wrong. The UN, the EUros, and liberals everywhere wouldn’t lift a finger to render any assistance at all if Bush was physically trying to prevent Ol’ Scratch himself from personally pitchfork-raping their daughters, simply because of who and what he is; it’s a cinch he won’t get any help from them now, and it’s time to admit that at last and get on with it.
- Entries
Bigot.
The problem is the process and equipment for enriching uranium and reprocessing spent fuel for peaceful purposes is identical to that for producing weapons-grade material.
What we need to do, therefore, is find a mechanism that will allow all NPT countries to enjoy the benefits of a civilian nuclear energy program while preventing the production of weapons-grade nuclear material through close supervision.
The five permanent members of the UN Security Council should be prepared to make the following offer to Iran. Acknowledging that Tehran has every right to exploit nuclear energy for civilian use, Iran should be guaranteed an adequate supply of nuclear fuel for its reactors in return for abiding by all International Atomic Energy Agency regulations. This, in turn, should serve as the basis for a new international fuel-cycle regime that applies to all countries. Any approach to stemming nuclear proliferation that singles out specific countries - such as the Bush administration is doing with Iran - is not likely to succeed.
[snip]
In particular, China is caught between its stated desire not to see Iran become a nuclear weapons state and its growing energy dependence on Iran. The US and other countries should be prepared to guarantee to China that if, as a result of pressure placed on Iran to give up its nuclear weapons program, oil and gas supplies to China are affected, all efforts will be undertaken to minimise the disruption to the Chinese economy and that China would suffer no more than anyone else.
Washington should be prepared to offer similar considerations to other countries (such as Russia or European countries) that may have to put significant economic interests at risk to apply pressure to Iran.
We should never take the stand that "virtue is its own reward" when dealing with a serious issue such as nuclear non-proliferation.
Nuclear weapons technology is no longer a closely guarded secret in the possession of a handful of countries. An approach that relies on determining the character of regimes to assess worthiness to use nuclear energy is full of loopholes.
Only by creating an international regime - and applying it without exception, across the board - can we hope to guarantee that all countries can enjoy the benefits of nuclear energy without risking the spread of the world's deadliest weapons."
"Other than the likely nothing, what will the United States have done in the months and years ahead to prepare for the failure of diplomacy and sanctions? The obvious option is an aerial campaign to divest Iran of its nuclear potential: i.e., clear the Persian Gulf of Iranian naval forces, scrub anti-ship missiles from the shore and lay open antiaircraft-free corridors to each target. With the furious capacity of its new weapons, the United States can accomplish this readily. Were the targets effectively hidden or buried, Iran could be shut down, coerced and perhaps revolutionized by the simple and rapid destruction of its oil production and transport. The Iranians know their obvious vulnerabilities, but are we aware of ours?
In this war with a newly revived militant Islam, we think systematically and they think imaginatively. As we strain to bring the genius of imagination to our systems, they attempt to bring systematic discipline to their imagination, and neither of us is precluded from success. Despite our superior power, its diminution by geography, overcommittment and politics means that they might confound us. And because they believe absolutely in the miraculous, one must credit their stated aim to defeat us in the short term by hurling our armies from the Middle East and in the long term by causing the collapse of Western civilization."
Of course the realism and advice of Scowcroft worked so well in the early 1990's with regard to Iraq that we should certainly follow it now with regard to Iran.
Except we are charting a different course, post-Cold War, with respect to the Middle East than the maintenance of "stability" above all things.
It is always curious that those who spend their time accusing the United States of wrongdoing for supporting such horrid despots as represented by most of the rulers in the Middle East are the first to scream bloody murder when the United States proposes removing any of those despots. Why such a strange split?
The answer is quite simple: if it is proposed by the United States government as its policy, if it represents any action by the United States government, then it is automatically evil. Quite easy to understand why these same people who condemned Scowcroftian, Kissingerian realism and power-politics during the Cold War are so keen to maintain it when the United States proposes to do something different. Those people are anti-American bigots. Any action of the United States is evil, even if five minutes earlier they had been advocating that action. They have to cling to some shred of their old beliefs now that communism has gone to the crapper, so anti-Americanism will do until they find something else that will do.
"Anti-Americanism - the Opiate of the Intellectual Bigot since at least 1848."
It's bullshit. The "Domino Effect" (McNamara), or the "Tipping Point" (Rumsfeld) or whatever slogan the intelligencia come up with to make the US public believe it will be easy, or even attainable, is all bullshit.
The $272,922,365,116.00 this war has cost to-date is not worth it. Add the thousands of lives lost and ruined, and it becomes criminal...evil, even.
And the things that we SHOULD be spending lots and lots of money and effort on, such as developing new and safer fuels like hydrogen-cell, are given nothing more than lip-service.
But there is hope...as i said last year on this forum...one of my first posts...these men will over-shoot. They'll push too hard and leave us in temporary ruin. But just like the countries of South America, there will be a decisive swing to the left, and the manipulating war-mongers will be swept to impotent irrelevance, back to where they were 15 years ago- writing letters to the President of the United States.
I quote from that letter to President Clinton:
"It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard. As you have rightly declared, Mr. President, the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century will be determined largely by how we handle this threat."
Many of the signers of that letter are the architects, planners, journeymen and purveyors of the current mess we have created in Iraq. May their own words haunt them till death.
I should make it clear...before you go off on it...not TOO far to the left- I hope.
"The United States should continue to maintain its robust position of active passivity in the face of any national security threat that may arise in the future, for this strategy of vigorous submission to the tides of fate and the wills of all dictators and terrorists served this nation well during the 1990's."
Even shorter: "Don't you dare do anything, you nasty United States! I've got my eye on you."
"Behind every failed war is a failed metaphor (remember The Domino Effect, the Vietnam-era version of The Tipping Point?) that mesmerized its masters into waging it, kept them waging it once they started losing it, and immobilized them with disbelief when it turned back into intellectual smoke. From business-section bestseller to Pentagon battle-plan. Only in America. And it was a phony, decrepit notion to start with, despite being updated for today's executives and cleverly remarketed to every no one who ever dreamed of being a someone by working at home, in his or her spare time. The idea that one straw can break the camel's back, that one well-placed lever can move the world, that one added particle can bring on "critical mass" is the delusion that wears a thousand faces. It's the manic creed of the assassin: fire a single bullet, alter history. The principle rarely works when applied on purpose, but because it quite often works by accident (or seems to have worked, when viewed in retrospect; Henry Ford built his Model T and, presto, freeways!) it never loses its appeal."
Even shorter: everything that comes out of this WhiteHouse is bullshit- dangerous bullshit.
Because everything we were doing for the decade before 09-11-2001 worked so well.
Khobar Towers.
USS Cole
Embassy bombings.
First WTC.
Millenium Plot.
And before that, well there was never any problem in the Middle East that maintenance of the stasis couldn't cure. Nope, everything was gas and gaiters until GW Bush took over.
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Mesmerizing slogans. Yeah, that's hilarious. Magic words, it's all about magic words. Only failed wars had slogans. Oh wait, no, successful ones had slogans too.
Like "unconditional surrender."
And "domino effect"? Tell it to the Cambodians. And the Laoatians. I'm sure they'd appreciate it.
Thanks for contributing, Zorro, but promoting the adoption of the fetal position as a strategy really is going to be a hard sell around here.
And you're still a bigot.
As China carries off the world's largest reduction in poverty, we are sliding backwards financially, ideologically and morally.
That makes you a bigot.
That and your kneejerk anti-Americanism.
Israel is a Nation, not a race of humans, like negros or hispanics or asians.
Jews are a followers of a religion, like christians, muslims, hindus and moonies.
So again, I don't understand how criticizing Israel's backstabbing politics is anti-semitism. Enlighten me, oh sage one.
Richard Frank's book "Guadalcanal" lists 1077 personnel killed by the Japanese during that one battle. We have witnessed the American media and anti-war ilk in America decry some 3,000 Americans killed over three YEARS in our war against terrorism in Iraq and our effort to demonstrate to two-bit nation tin horn dictators that Hitler-like behavior in a nuclear age is not to be tolerated.
The cost of freedom according to Thomas Jefferson would be periodic death and bleeding and we are experiencing one of the most important confrontations with those who would invoke terror on the innocent. I would like to up the ante on the perspective of how many Americans died for preserving world-wide liberty. During the Battle of Okinawa during WWII, over just two months of naval activity around Okinawa, around 5,500 sailors were killed by Japanese kamakazis and on the island itself, over 7,500 Marines and soldiers were killed making a grand total of around 13,000 lives lost in just TWO months.
After Pearl Harbor, Americans left their partisan ways behind them and won the war united together, as opposed to current American disunity after 3,000 civilians were murdered on American soil on 9/11.
If it ever gets to Iran nuking American cities (facilitated by partisan anti-war efforts that succeed in suppressing appropriate preemptive strikes), I anticipate retaliation by patriotic Americans against anyone guilty of current Democratic partisan politics.....and I don't mean tarring and feathering. Can you envision a civil war of enraged patriots if we receive any nuclear attacks? In spite of the fact that Iran would be annilhilated, American survivors at that point just might feel as close to "coming home" to God as Jihadists feel to Allah and the liberal Left will probably lament, quite intensely, their failure to have disarmed Americans.
That's what this partisan hack was saying back when he was actually in a position of responsibility -- instead of carping from the sidelines as he is now, trying to disract attention from his old boss's miserable failure, and rehabilitate his legacy of foreign-policy disaster and disgrace.
Feel free to keep right on posting comments here, "General." But don't think for a moment you're fooling anybody except those who desperately wish to be.