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Yet a policy of regime change for the mullah-run Iranian state is somehow deemed too aggressive by critics. Meanwhile, as we were fostering the failed EU negotiations with Iran and the Russian negotiations which netted Russian nuclear fuel . . . , Iran's EFP weapons sent into Iraq have claimed 10% of all American casualties in the entire war there. Ten percent of American combat deaths. This is not including Iranian rockets, mortars and ammunition, evidence of which has been seized on numerous occasions. Who is the aggressor?Don't hold your breath waiting for any of this to be discussed in the campaign by any of the people who are angling for the job of being the person to deal with Iran. God forbid they should be inconvenienced by asking them about a real theocracy that spends millions to finance terrorists.
Changing the Iranian regime's path necessarily means changing the regime. . . .
Imagine Hizballah, Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and others without an Iranian state lifeline of terror. Imagine Lebanon and Iraq without the subversive and disruptive hand of Tehran. Ponder, if you will, the next steps of Syria, no longer a conduit for the Iranian supply lines into Beirut and the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon and weakened by the starvation of Hizballah and Hamas, who maintain headquarters in Damascus.
Instead, we seem to watch nervously as the regime fosters conflict, feeds nearly every significant terrorist group, and kills our soldiers in Iraq. And while it continues un-intimidated on the path toward nuclear weapons, we scarcely impede them with sanctions and talk of sanctions.
In an American presidential election cycle where nearly every candidate promises “change,” the one change that would have the most impact lies in Tehran, not Washington, DC. The Iranian regime is the head of many snakes, and the significance of its demise would be historic.
On the Democrat side of the campaign, their idea of a strategic issue is school lunch menus.
Interview with Steve Schippert, co-founder of the Center for Threat Awareness and managing editor for ThreatsWatch.org at "The China-Russia-Iran Axis." By Jamie Glazov, FrontPageMagazine.com, 1/22/08 (emphasis added). This interview is also good for insight into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, an "anti-terrorist" organization into which Russian and China have just invited . . . Iran.
2 comments:
Well, we did arm Saddam with chemical weapons to use against Iran. And we did topple their democratic government to re-install the shah. And we did train their secret police. And we did shoot down their civilian airliner and then lied about it ...
And now we're trying to deprive them of nuclear power programs that we encouraged them to start in the first place...
My point was that there has been no "direct penalty" that Iran has suffered as a consequence of taking U.S. diplomats hostage or killing our troops. I thought it was great that we pitted Saddam against the Iranians, a rare bit of arranging for Muslims to fight each other. Iran suffered greatly but it wasn't as a direct result of our own military power.
The toppling of the Iranian government occurred before the Embassy takeover. The same for training Savak. (Would that the Shah had used the power that he had to crush the Islamicists. And the Savak was replaced by something far worse, but that's beside the point here.)
The circumstances of the shooting down of the plane were odd, but I'm not willing to say that a commissioned officer of the U.S. Navy deliberately shot down a civilian airliner. As I recall, the plane flew a course on takeoff that was of concern to that officer. (In view of the provocative maneuvering of the Revolutionary Guard Corps boats recently we can at least say that the tactic of provocation is not unknown when dealing with the Iranians.)
I also remember something to the effect that the bodies of some of the passengers in the water did not look right, as though they had died before the plane took off. I don't know if that "fact" was disproved. In light of 9/11, the concept that the Iranians might have used an airliner as a missile (with suicidal pilot and creative props) is hardly one that is shocking to us now.
I don't know what we did to encourage the Iranians to start a nuclear "power" program. You may well know something I don't but it seems strange that we would have since Iran is sitting on top of an immense pool of oil. I think a lot of people who think about Iran's nuclear program wonder why they went that way rather than, say, building a lot more gasoline refining capacity. That would make a lot of sense. Pursuing nuclear power just doesn't. It's as though I had a 5,000,000-gal. tank of free propane outside my house to heat it in the winter and then spent a lot of money to put in electric heating system as well.
The latest Democrat NIE aside, it's clear to me that if you are engaged in a bona fide "power" program, there would be no need to disperse the components of that effort. The fact that the Iranians have dispersed those components, coupled with their bellicose rhetoric about wiping Israel off the map, make it crystal clear that they are intent on building nuclear weapons (link, link).
It is beyond dispute that uranium enrichment activities necessary for a "power" program are the same required for a weapons program. Once you get the enrichment part down, it's a relatively quick process to go on and develop the weapons. The North Koreans, Pakistanis, and, I have no doubt, the Russians are more than willing to help out with design and production suggestions.
Steep learning curve? I don't think so.
Source on the dispersal point: Group Says Iran Resumed Weapon Program. By Marc Champion and Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal Online (subscription), 12/11/07.
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