| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: WoT |
| The Struggle for the Middle East |
| 2004-12-25 |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #1 Another excellent post from tipper. Tell the Europeans in crystal-clear language that the United States intends to strike preemptively clerical Iran's nuclear-related facilities unless they insist to the Iranians that Western inspectors must be allowed immediate free access to any challenged site in Iran. This is not a viable option. Iran has lied continously with respect to their nuclear facilities and operations. Inspecting whatever portion of them they choose to reveal is not just self-delusional but outright foolishness. The only sure way of interdicting Iran's aspirations for a clerical nuclear bomb is to physically demolish all traces of their network. Preferrably while exterminating a large portion of their proliferation-oriented staff as well. What a preemptive attack would certainly do is provoke another debate about the competence of a ruling clergy who led the nation into a head-on collision with the United States. Khamenei and Rafsanjani, and the Revolutionary Guard Corps behind them, would not look so clever or so unchallengeably strong the day after U.S. missiles and planes destroyed the nuclear facilities. The clerical regime might well try to retaliate against the United States clandestinely. It rose to power in large measure on deceit and a willingness to use intimidation, ruthless violence, and terrorism against its opponents (which is, of course, why you don't want them to have a nuke). This is the bottom line and little else matters. The only responsible rejoinder here is to threaten your enemy with massive retaliation, aimed directly at the world he cherishes, and especially at the military and security-and-intelligence structures that guarantee his survival. If we want to stop Iran's terrorist-supporting clerics from getting nukes, we have to be prepared to stare them down. Only when Iran's mullahs are staring down the barrel of American military guns will this ever happen. Yet as of now, the initiative contains no coercive measures for encouraging dictators and kings to loosen their grips on their societies. In the State Department's view, this evolution is all supposed to happen voluntarily. Don't bet the farm on it. There is absolutely nothing to indicate such change will come from within. If the president's counterterrorist democracy project makes sense in the Middle East--and it is certain that this president believes passionately that it does (a good example of a man who knows virtually nothing about the Middle East knowing more than many "realist" foreign-service and intelligence officials who've dedicated their lives to the region)--then his administration needs to prove that the Broader Middle East Initiative is more than just ideological window dressing. It should attach pro-democracy conditionalities to American aid. Hit 'em in the pocketbook. American taxpayers deserve better accountability for how their tax dollars are cast upon overseas waters. And no American government post-9/11 is going to force the democratically elected government of Israel to move it, not before the Palestinian people have proven beyond doubt that they have gone cold-turkey on terrorism. It is in fact the "Wall," not Arafat's death, that is the real catalyst for change among West Bank Palestinians. If the Arab world continues to use the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a stalling point, then implosion of the corrupt Palestinian system is a priority. Arafat's dead-end political strategy must be laid open for the self-defeating and power-grabbing methodology that it has always been. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2004-12-25 5:57:03 PM |