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| Confronting Iran |
| 2006-11-24 |
| hat tip Frontpage magazine.com Confronting Iran By Joshua Muravchik AEI.org | November 24, 2006 We must bomb Iran. It has been four years since that country's secret nuclear program was brought to light, and the path of diplomacy and sanctions has led nowhere. First, we agreed to our allies' requests that we offer Tehran a string of concessions, which it spurned. Then, Britain, France and Germany wanted to impose a batch of extremely weak sanctions. For instance, Iranians known to be involved in nuclear activities would have been barred from foreign travel--except for humanitarian or religious reasons--and outside countries would have been required to refrain from aiding some, but not all, Iranian nuclear projects. But even this was too much for the U.N. Security Council. Russia promptly announced that these sanctions were much too strong. "We cannot support measures ... aimed at isolating Iran," declared Foreign Minister Sergei V. Lavrov. It is now clear that neither Moscow nor Beijing will ever agree to tough sanctions. What's more, even if they were to do so, it would not stop Iran, which is a country on a mission. As President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad put it: "Thanks to the blood of the martyrs, a new Islamic revolution has arisen. . . .The era of oppression, hegemonic regimes and tyranny and injustice has reached its end. . . . The wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world." There is simply no possibility that Iran's clerical rulers will trade this ecstatic vision for a mess of Western pottage in the form of economic bribes or penalties. So if sanctions won't work, what's left? The overthrow of the current Iranian regime might offer a silver bullet, but with hard-liners firmly in the saddle in Tehran, any such prospect seems even more remote today than it did a decade ago, when students were demonstrating and reformers were ascendant. Meanwhile, the completion of Iran's bomb grows nearer every day. Our options therefore are narrowed to two: We can prepare to live with a nuclear-armed Iran, or we can use force to prevent it. Former ABC newsman Ted Koppel argues for the former, saying that "if Iran is bound and determined to have nuclear weapons, let it." We should rely, he says, on the threat of retaliation to keep Iran from using its bomb. Similarly, Newsweek International Editor Fareed Zakaria points out that we have succeeded in deterring other hostile nuclear states, such as the Soviet Union and China. And in these pages, William Langewiesche summed up the what-me-worry attitude when he wrote that "the spread of nuclear weapons is, and always has been, inevitable," and that the important thing is "learning how to live with it after it occurs." rest at link |
| Posted by:FOTSGreg |
| #2 It's worth almost $1B to the Russians. Now we know why the Russians are so sure the Iranian nuclear program is peaceful. The Russians are probably hoping we go in there and mop them up (after they get paid, of course) rendering it a "No harm ==> no foul" situation which they get to skate out from under. Again. I'll bet they think they've got a pretty clever sting going here. |
| Posted by: gorb 2006-11-24 22:13 |
| #1 Old puking Putin is selling Iran advanced Russian-made air defense systems. Nice. |
| Posted by: Lancasters Over Dresden 2006-11-24 22:00 |