Iran: May 2008 Archives

It's become a recent staple of left-wingnut talking points that the liberation of Iraq and battle against the subsequent "insurgency" has fueled the Iranian mullahgarchy's anti-US enmity and accompanying drive for nuclear weapons (which they did not, after all, abandon five years ago, as the left-wingnut-prepared National Intelligence Estimate idiotically insisted last fall - I wish they could make up their lost minds).  If only we'd bug out, they argue, and surrender Iraq to the mullahs and their al Qaeda allies, the sun would come out, the birds would resume chirping, guitar-strumming clerics would join American flower childen in singing a rousing round of "Kumbayah," Tehran would instantly abandon not just their nukes but all their weapons of mass destruction, and we'd all live happily ever after.  Hell, maybe Adolph Ahmadinejad would to a Geico commercial.

Going to prove once again that audacity is still alive and well in the chancellories of the Democrat Party, and to illustrate the impossibility of parodying these people, it fell to Crazy Nancy Pelosi, the Speakerette of the House of Representatives, to literally turn that morony inside-out and come up with an inanity even more outrageous:

Well, the purpose of the surge was to provide a secure space, a time for the political change to occur to accomplish the reconciliation. That didn’t happen. Whatever the military success, and progress that may have been made, the surge didn’t accomplish its goal. And some of the success of the surge is that the goodwill of the Iranians - they decided in Basra when the fighting would end, they negotiated that cessation of hostilities - the Iranians.

Understand that this big, steaming pile was offered in the context of her own visit to Iraq two weeks ago and her pathological desperation to try and prop up the fiction that the "Surge" has failed, the war against Iran and al Qaeda in Iraq is hopeless, and the dramatic political progress that Dems have always insisted is THE benchmark of success is impossible.

The impetus for that frantic spin is to cite the "disaster" in Iraq as ipso facto "proof" that a military solution "can't" work in Iran, even though the need to "disarm" the mullahgarchy is even more imperative than it was with Saddam Hussein.  The reality of our victory in Iraq is thus a significant problem for the anti-war/anti-America/pro-jihadi crowd.  They simply cannot abide being judged wrong about "George Bush's war" in the court of public opinion.

Since, as Barack Hussein Obama would be finding out if he was capable of setting aside his commie-pinko dogma long enough to go take a look for himself with the open mind he claims to sport, not even the most Enemy Media-beloved Dem - or the Enemy Media itself, for that matter - can deny that the battle on the Iraqi front has been won, the rhetorical safe-haven of last resort is to give all the credit not to our men and women in uniform, not to the Iraqi Army and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's courageous statesmanship, but to the magnanimous, big-hearted, peace-loving "goodwill" of the regime that wants to wipe Israel off the face of the planet and bring the Great Satan to its knees.

I dunno.  Maybe I've been so immersed in the libs' despicable fecality fountain for so many years that my outrage threshold has risen to the orbit of Saturn or thereabouts.  I'd love to tear the Nora Desmond clone a new one, except that she's already such an old one that nobody'd know the difference.

Abe Greenwald took an at-bat, though.  Calling Crazy Nancy's bilge "inexcusable slander," he highlights her towering hypocrisy:

Furthermore, when Pelosi met with Prime Minister al-Maliki in Mosul she sang quite a different tune. She had “welcomed Iraq’s progress in passing a budget as well as oil legislation, and a bill paving the way for the provincial elections in the fall that are expected to more equitably redistribute power among local officials,” and stated, “We’re assured the elections will happen here, they will be transparent, they will be inclusive and they will take Iraq closer to the reconciliation we all want it to have.”

That's what she said to Maliki's face.  But back home on the commune, the tune changes to the old dogmatic anti-war mantra, and the Iraqi PM was, in her bizarro world, a Bushkin hack once more.

Pathological.  Utterly pathological.  And yet emblematic of the party that is going to be back in unchecked power in now under eight months.

Maybe that spectre inspired Ace to be even blunter than usual:

Oh. My. God.

Having blurted out, probably accidentally, that the surge was in fact successful, Granny Rictus McBotoxImplants now scrambles to credit the enemy nation murdering our troops with the victory our troops accomplished through blood, sweat, tears, and more blood.

It's not our troops. It's not Petraeus' leadership. It's not the Iraqis turning on the Al Qaeda murderers. No - it's Iran's goodwill.

Pardon my blasphemy but Jesus Christ All Mighty.

Will she also thank Al Qaeda for scaling back its beheadings and bombings?

Why not?  Can we rule out ANY dipshittery where these animals are concerned?  After all, it's just Dhimmicrats doing what Dhimmicrats do.  Perhaps the bile should be stockpiled for the yIntagh'pu who will commit national suicide by electing them.

The International Atomic Energy Agency finally has the "V-8 moment" of which Barack Hussein Obama is congenitally incapable:

The International Atomic Energy Agency, in an unusually blunt and detailed report, said Monday that Iran’s suspected research into the development of nuclear weapons remained “a matter of serious concern” and that Iran continued to owe the agency “substantial explanations.”

The nine-page report accused the Iranians of a willful lack of cooperation, particularly in answering allegations that its nuclear program may be intended more for military use than for energy generation.

In the immortal words of the base drummer in my high school marching band after the announcement of the winning school at a competition which was beyond obvious to every living soul on that football field: "Noooooo [expletive]; [expletive], what was your FIRST guess?"  It's only taken the IAEA - what? - five years to figure this out?  Ten?

Look at the level of sleuthing skill that a little dose of aggrieved cynicism can produce: 

Part of the agency’s case hinges on eighteen documents listed in the report and presented to Iran that, according to Western intelligence agencies, indicate the Iranians have ventured into explosives, uranium processing and a missile warhead design — activities that could be associated with constructing nuclear weapons. ….

Naw - really?  The mullahs might actually be....CHEATING?  They may have been [*GASP*] LYING TO US ALL ALONG???  But...but...how can this be?  We were so sincere!  We sat down and talked to them!  So did the Brits, French, and Krauts!  We offered them money, we offered them trade, we offered them kitchen sinks!  We did everything Barack Hussein Obama says we should have done except for President Bush making a pilgrimmage to Tehran with a prayer rug, and now it turns out that they were bargaining in bad faith???  What are we going to learn next - that there is no Santa Clause?

The rational mind reacts to a story like this in one of two ways: (1) snorting a big loogie all over the monitor/newspaper/TV screen; (2) hurling a brick through the monitor/newspaper/TV screen, before or after the loogie snort.  After which one wonders plaintively if it might actually be possible for anybody in a position of influence and or power to finally put two and two together and not get something other than four, which is to say, to admit that diplomacy is a failed option that never had a prayer of changing the minds of insane, mass-murderering theocrats who are determined to get nuclear weapons and use them against their enemies in order to bring their messiah back to establish the Global Caliphate, and that it is time to accept the inevitability of military conflict while there might possibly still be time to pull the trigger on terms and a timetable favorable to us.

God only knows whether the Bushies are too far gone into cowed, pussy-whipped passivity at this point.  But we can always rely on the New York Times to take their dogmatic pacifistic idiocy to the mass graves:

Amid all of the White House’s saber-rattling, it is tempting to discount Iran’s genuine misbehavior. The latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency is a grim reminder that Tehran is pressing ahead with its nuclear program, and the United States and its allies don’t have a strategy for containing it. …

This latest report is alarming, but it must not be used as an excuse by Washington hard-liners to launch another war. There are no good military options.

The United States and the other major powers — Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany — have yet to put together a serious package of incentives and sanctions that might persuade Iran to change course.

That must include a credible American offer of security guarantees and normalized relations if Tehran abandons any nuclear weapons ambitions. If Iran persists, it must face sanctions with a lot more bite than Russia and China have been willing to consider, including a broader ban on doing business with Iranian banks and bans on arms sales and new investments in Iran.

Translation: Iranian nuclear intransigence, duplicity, and defiance is all George Bush's fault for not going to Tehran and getting on his knees before Adolph Ahmadinejad and offering even more "incentives" and even more "security guarantees" and even more "normalized relations," backed up by even more toothless "sanctions" - "if" they don't comply.  Like the "sweet deals" we've offered already haven't been spurned with contempt already - and then lavished upon the mullahs anyway.  They weren't "serious," you see.

If you ever wondered what the old saying meant about insanity being defined as employing the same failed idea over and over and over and over again in the blind [*ahem*] hope that through sheer repetition it will eventually succeed, you'll never get a better real-life example than the Democrats' Iran policy.  These people will pump the air full of meaningless words right up until Iranian warheads start vaporizing our cities, then turn around and bitterly condemn George Bush for not offering the mullahs enough "incentives" and "security guarantees" and "normalized relations" to "persuade" them to not destroy us.

Thus is any diplomatic initiative doomed to failure before it starts, quite apart from its futility where the Iranians are concerned.  As a diplomatic axiom holds, if you aren't willing to walk away from the negotiating table without a deal, you've already lost.  Libs were panicking when Ronald Reagan told Mikhail Gorbachev to go pound sand in Reykavik in 1985 rather than give up SDI; four years later the Berlin Wall was gone, and two years after that so was the Evil Empire.  Even if the mullahs were persuadable, our government's telegraphed determination to not take the only step that can stop their drive toward nuclear Armageddon - pre-emptive military action - tells them all they need to know about how little heed they need give to our words.  Thus the lefty obsession with diplomacy is by definition self-defeating, and actively dangerous, yet they are psychotically welded to it.

The parallels to the rise of Nazi Germany to world-threatening status in the 1930s would be too obvious to merit mentioning if not for the abysmal historical ignorance that permeates "the reality-based community" and their charlatan unhatched-chicken counter.

The issue isn't whether there are "good" military options, but that there are better ones and worse ones.  The latter involves continuing this endless diplomatic masturbation until Tel Aviv, and perhaps London and Manhattan, go up in flames; the former is acting now before Tehran gains that capability.  It really is that simple.

That makes Jimmy Carter's latest escapade that much more tragicomical:

Mr. Peanut knew exactly what he was doing.  By drawing global attention to Israel's "undeclared" but commonly acknowledged nuclear arsenal, he's almost usurping the role of Adolph's nuclear negotiator by as much as inviting the Iranians to make de-nuking the Jews a pre-requisite to any further "incentive"/"security guarantee"/"normalized relations"-laden diplomatic give-aways.  That's bait you just KNOW the anti-Semitic American Left and its "peace process" fantasism couldn't resist.  Thus would the Rodbama administration bulldoze the Israelis into surrendering the last remaining guarantor of their national existence - the ability to, like Samson of old, take their enemies to oblivion with them.

The parallel with Munich 1938 is already becoming ear-splitting.  But only for those who still have ears to hear.  Unfortunately, deafness has come into vogue, and looks to be staying there for a long, long time to come.

UPDATE: Admit it, this man was BORN to be Secretary of State....

France - you know, the country that used to be...well, not quite an enemy, but certainly no friend under the corrupt ignomy of the departed and unlamented Black Jacques Chirac, but last fall turned back in our direction by electing the closest thing to a Gallic Reagan that country is ever likely to produce in Nicholas Sarkozy - has decided to take the offensive in the Global War Against Terror by beginning the process of normalizing relations with Hamas.

Pakistan has struck back in its war against al Qaeda and the Taliban by throwing in the towel, effectively ceding several provinces to the Islamist terror network.  The birth of a nuclear "al Qaedastan" now seems to be only a matter of time.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, whether out of sheer insanity or to try and save his own sorry political ass, has offered to more or less unilaterally cough up the strategic Golan Heights back to Syria.

As if this trio desultory developments were a pre-arranged signal, Lebanon has now followed suit on the creation of a de facto Hezbostan, giving Hezbollah veto power over the Lebanese cabinet:

According to the terms of the deal, Hezbollah will be given eleven seats in a thirty-member cabinet — enough to exercise an effective veto over government policies, as the group had demanded. Army leader General Michael Suleiman will be installed as president, a step the parties had agreed to months ago but which had been delayed by the dispute over cabinet seats and other issues…

“We’ve won. We have got what we wanted,” said Ali Badran, a 47-year-old Hezbollah supporter who had joined a tent city erected in protest more than a year ago near the Lebanese parliament as the political crisis deepened. Though the protest encampment had dwindled to a symbolic few, it stood as a sign of Hezbollah’s support in the country’s large Shiite community.

“We were victorious over the American and Zionist project.”

Indeed.  The entire fiasco was a classic case study of appeasement from beginning to end.  The bad guys force the "political crisis," back it up with violence and intimidation, the good guys flinch, flee, and ultimately capitulate, and the bad guys "get what they wanted."  And then it's on to the next "political crisis," and so on, until their ambitions are stoked so high, and the good guys are backed up against the proverbial wall to such an extremity, that the end result is, inevitably, war.  But not just any war, but a war at the time and place of the bad guys' choosing, with the good guys at their weakest and greatest disadvantage.

AP enumerates the near-term implications:

Without two-thirds approval, the cabinet can’t do anything — like, say, demand that Hezbollah finally disarm, just like that nice UN resolution asked them to. In fact, the summit that led to this capitulation was supposed to resolve the issue of Hezbollah’s weapons. The solution: The issue has been postponed indefinitely, although it doesn’t matter since any effort by the government to enforce a disarmament deal would simply be vetoed anyway. As Time puts it, “The new agreement broadly gives Hizballah what it wants: legitimacy as an armed state-within-a-state.” Even the new president the various factions agreed on, Michel Suleiman, is notorious for being soft on them.

A state, thanks to its Iranian masters, that is far better armed than that ceremonial force known as the "Lebanese Army," which has become an effective adjunct to it rather than a legit opponent of it.  With this defensive political power in the Hezbos' hands, and their offensive military power having given them effective domination over Lebanon long, long ago, their decks are cleared for another attack on Israel just as the Jewish state teeters on the ragged edge of self-dismemberment.

Just for the record, gentles, I'm not the only one tying all these adjoining threads together and christening it a trend.  A trend that, as you might have expected, bears the A-OK stamp of approval of our good friends at the U.S. Department of State:

The Bush Administration [!] seemed to try to put the best face on the deal even though it gave more power to Hezbollah, considered a terrorist group by Washington and Israel. Assistant Secretary of State David Welch called the agreement "a necessary and positive step."

 But a step in a much larger diplofantasy Foggy Bottom is calling "the Grand Bargain":

"Many analysts believe that the relationship between Iran and Syria is a purely tactical and transactional one. Implicit in this belief is the idea that if only the United States would make Syria an offer of sufficient size and sweetness, the axis from Tehran to Damascus could be shattered and the Middle East transformed. Syria, in this view, might even join our team.

In exchange for the return of the Golan Heights, and the restoration of its overlordship of Lebanon, Syria would renege on its relationship with Hezbollah, give Hamas the boot, and slam the door shut on Iran. The mullahs would be cut-off from their Lebanese and Palestinian terrorist proxies and isolated completely in the region. The flow of jihadis from Syria would dry up-perhaps in return for a restoration of Saddam’s old largess with Iraq’s oil-and the situation in Iraq would settle down, further isolating Iran from the Arab hinterland. Faced with a united Middle East, the ayatollahs would set their dreams of hegemony and Islamic revolution aside, and give up their nuclear program in exchange for international security guarantees."

This lunacy isn't a house of cards, it's a skyscraper.  What if the relationship between Iran and Syria ISN'T just "tactical and transactional"?  This smells like the same kind of "analysis" that insisted Saddam Hussein (the socialist Muslim apostate) and Osama bin Laden (the rabid theocrat) could never work together (they did) and that Sunni al Qaeda and Shiite Iran were similarly irreconcilable (Iran is hosting and supporting al Qaeda's operations in Iraq and Afghanistan).

Take note of the fact noted in the Fox link that both Iran and Syria praised Hezbollah's Lebanese Anchluss.  Bashar Assad is the junior partner in this alliance and takes his orders from Tehran.  He's no free agent that can pick and choose his friends and switch "teams" at a whim.  Even if he were to be so entinced, what reason is there to believe the the mullahs would just let him jump ship?  Assad may be chinless, but I can't think he's completely clueless; all he has to do is look at the direction of American politics and the ascendant party's determination to abandon the fledgling democracy next door in Iraq to see how much any American alliance offer, no matter how ostensibly "sweet," in exchange for betraying Iran, Hezbollah, AND Hamas is truly worth.  Would said offer include defending Assad's regime against an Iranian-ordered terror reprisal offensive?  Would we be prepared to send troops into Syria not to liberate it, but preserve its Ba'athist dictatorship?  Has anybody at State actually devoted a single brain cell to thinking through this breathtaking nonsense?

Of course not, because they don't have two brain cells to rub together between them.  They assume every player in this hypothetical circle-jerk is as cynically materialistic, and brain-dead passive, as they are.  We buy off Assad, the mullahs do nothing.  Iraq buys off Assad, the mullahs do nothing.  The mullahs who have spent the past thirty years fomenting Islamic revolution across the region, dreaming of conquering the entire planet under the Shiite Islamic banner, waging war against Israel and the West, and are closing in on the nuclear weapons with which they will finally bring these stupendous ambitions to fruition, will sit passively back, let all their gains be reversed without a peep, and then meekly pack in everything they stand for, become just another UN-administered backwater, and take up the Islamic extremist equivalent of golf.

Astonishingly, it was a prominent Democrat - Representative Gary Ackerman, chairman of the U.S. House Middle East subcommittee - who called this sick policy dementia the bullbleep it really is:

"I’m not convinced. It sounds lovely, and it has a sort of logic to it. But it’s a fantasy. The relationship between Iran and Syria is longstanding, durable, and is based on a bedrock of shared interests. This relationship is meant to fulfill each party’s deepest strategic aspirations and regional ambitions. Neither state wishes to live as a second class citizen in a Middle East ordered, organized and run by Washington, Cairo, and Riyadh. They have bigger dreams."

Or, in plain non-diplospeak, Syria's relationship with Iran is not "purely tactical and transactional."  Yes, they really are our enemies; yes, they really have thought through what they think their interests are; and no, they can't be bribed out of them for the right price.

Besides which, they've already attained one of the two biggest enticements - Hezbollah's all-but-formal takeover of Lebanon - and the other one - return of the Golan - has been at least informally offered.  Aren't bargains supposed to be driven at least a little harder than that?

The reality is that little or nothing short of the U.S. Army invading Syria, smashing into Damascus, and giving the "chinless opthamologist" two choices would persuade him that crossing us would be less to his advantage than crossing the mullahgarchy.  Any "sweet deal" he'd just pocket, or more likely pass on to his Iranian "senior partners", and renege on the rest.  Which would trigger an overpowering impulse on our part to....resume negotiations to "sweeten the deal" even more.

I say that, my friends, because that is precisely what Foggy Bottom has been pursuing with Iran itself for (at least) the past two years:

To recount: We were dealing with an apocalyptic regime certain that radical Islam’s global triumph was as imminent as the long lost Mahdi’s arrival any day now. President Bush had said time and again that it was pointless to negotiate with terrorists because they are — surprise! — incorrigible. Yet, Secretary Rice convinced the President that the ball would really be advanced by [drum-roll] . . . direct U.S. negotiations with Iran....

What was the price? What stringent preconditions did Condi Rice persuade the President that we should demand?  A commitment to foreswear, or at least suspend, the development of nuclear weapons?  A commitment to refrain from abetting Iraqi insurgents in the murder of American troops?  A commitment to stop funding Hezbollah, the world’s most adept terrorist organization — and the one that, prior to 9/11, had trained al-Qaeda operatives and killed more Americans than any other?  A commitment to restrain its Revolutionary Guards and Qods force from targeting Americans?  A commitment to retract its threats to wipe Israel from the face of Earth?

Well . . . not exactly.

In the midst of the war on terror, at a time when the express policy of the United States was to regard and treat as terrorists the regimes that sponsor terrorism, in circumstances where Iran was actively coddling al-Qaeda and killing American soldiers, the Bush Administration insisted on . . . no preconditions for negotiating with Iran.

Oh, but we did offer them a "sweet deal," alright.  Did the mullahs swoon in appreciation and gratitude for our good-hearted, generous largesse?  Did they fleece us in public comity and private contempt?

Nope and nope:

[A]s would have been effortlessly predicted by anyone who has followed Iran for the last thirty years, when the mullahs looked at the Bush Administration’s front-loaded, precondition-free offer, they laughed their heads off. They told us to take a $3- (now $4-) dollar-a-gallon hike.

So what did the Bush State Department do?

It gave Iran the civil-aviation assistance anyway. And it continued to sit down with the regime’s diplomats while the regime continued to build nukes, kill Americans, and dispatch Hezbollah to kill Israelis.

That is to say, we not only demanded no preconditions for negotiations; we persisted in patently futile negotiations even as they thumbed our eyes. [emphasis added]

Such was the oceanic depths of Iran's contempt that they didn't deem us worthy of even taking advantage of our abject, incurable idiocy.

Some readers of this space probably think that I'm a rigidly recalcitrant warmonger who has utterly no use for diplomacy whatsoever.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Well, okay, some things are probably further from the truth, but that would still be a vast overstatement.  My view of diplomacy aligns with that of the first German chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck.  It was he who became the most famous practitioner of "realpolitik," in which diplomacy was employed not for ludicrously high-minded foolishness, seditious pacifistic twaddle, or simply the mindless pursuit of process (sharks eat, swim, and make baby sharks; diplomats pump the air full of useless words), but in the aggressive pursuit of national interest.  Bismarck had in mind a realistic objective - the unification of Germany and establishing her as the leading power in Europe.  He also sought to protect that accomplishment via the isolation of her natural enemies, France and Russia, from the rest of Europe as well as each other.

Bismarck achieved all of these goals (almost) entirely at the negotiating table.

You can quibble with those goals, and you can argue that Bismarck was an extraordinary international horse-trader whose diplomatic ledgerdemain was virtually unemulatable.  What no one can deny is that he employed the art of negotiation in the perceived interests of his country, and the end result was good not just for Germany but for Europe as a whole.  It was only after Kaiser Wilhelm II fired Bismarck that all his painstaking diplomatic accomplishments unraveled, and the march to World War I began.

Would that at least the spirit of Otto Van Bismarck, if not (God help us) the skill, could animate any echelon of the State Department, rather than the spirit of Neville Chamberlain.  The latter has permeated Foggy Bottom for decades.  It exhausted and outlasted even the Bush Doctrine.  And it has us backpedaling toward the full-scale escalation of World War IV into the apocalyptic disaster that the continuation of the pre-emptive "medicine" of five years ago could so easily have prevented.

That's before Barack Hussein Obama journeys to Tehran to bow down to the mullahs as President Rodham's personal representative.  And, what's more, if John Sith McCain represents "the third Bush term" (on foreign policy, at least, which is supposed to be his selling point to the Right), how would his presidency differ from Rodbama's other than the symbolic cherry atop the "presidential diplomacy" sundae?

Do you yet see why neither I nor any other conservative can cast a meaningful vote in the 2008 presidential election?  By the time Darth Queeg or Rodbama are finished socializing domestically and retreating abroad, we'll be comprehensively screwed beyond the ability of even another Ronald Reagan to fix.

You know what the biggest irony of all is?  Iranian dissidents are practically begging us to forget "jaw jaw" and let the bombs start falling:

As Barack Obama and John McCain thrash it out over how they would deal with Iran, voices from inside Iran are weighing in with an unusual message: If the United States strikes hard and fast, we will support you.

Emissaries from inside Iran have been meeting with Iranian exiles in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere in recent weeks to deliver this provocative message, which they claim comes from pro-U.S. dissidents at the upper-most levels of the regime.

“U.S. airstrikes must be powerful and sustained enough to break the myth of the regime’s absolute power and reveal the weakness of the leadership,” a former official who traveled outside of Iran recently said.

They're not talking about former Ambassador to the UN John Bolton's limited strikes on Quds Force bases feeding Shiite insurgents into Iraq, or even Iran's hardened and dispersed nuclear facilities, either; they want us to take the head off the snake:

The United States should target the office of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards Corp, the offices of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and that of his predecessor and rival, Mullah Hashemi-Rafsanjani, Iranian sources say.

The goal should be to carry out sustained airstrikes over a 48-72 hour period that would “decapitate” the regime.

Such a strike would send a clear message to the Iranian people and to disgruntled officials throughout Iran’s faction-ridden government that the United States is serious about confronting the regime over its bad behavior in Iraq and is willing to strike the leaders responsible for that behavior, the Iranian sources argue....

“The conventional wisdom is that limited strikes will allow the regime to rally the people around the flag,” says Mohebat Ahdiyyih, an Iran media analyst at the office of the director of National Intelligence.

“However, if the U.S. launches a major strike that goes after the leadership in Iran, that’s different,” he told Newsmax. “Most Iranians hate the regime. People would be very happy to see a major strike that took out the leadership.”...  

And the ultimate endgame of this decapitation strategy?

U.S. airstrikes that target the top leadership of Iran and refrain from extensive damage to civilians or religious targets, could win strong support from the Iranian people for a pro-U.S. coup by the security services, many Iranians in positions of responsibility believe....

Dissidents within the Iranian military and the Revolutionary Guards believe that U.S. air strikes that take out the leadership will open the doors to a coup led by the military that would put an end to the Islamic Republic.

Readers of this space also know that I believe it is years too late for merely "encouraging uprisings" against the Islamic regime, to the degree that that was ever a tenable option.  Also that history shows no examples whereby a country was defeated in war by airpower alone.  Only by putting boots on the ground can power be not just projected, but imposed, which is the prerequisite to true and full "regime change".  Given that we're on the clock of how soon the mullahs can get possession of functioning nuclear warheads, and how close to fruition that process is (as little as three months from now, if they haven't already), and the likelihood of their promptly using those warheads against their enemies - Israel, our European allies, and ourselves - time is vanishingly short for exercising the only option that can avert this apocalyptic scenario: the military option.

Given all the uproar that invading Iraq has incurred, one can understand why the airstrike option would appeal to whatever hawks still exist in the Bush Administration, if any.  Personally, I'm skeptical about the efficacy of a "decapitation" strike - how many times did we try to off Saddam Hussein during the "major combat" phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom? - but if we really don't have the capability of invading and occupying Iran (and God help us if we don't), I think it is worth the gamble.

But despite lingering reports here and there - the latest from Israeli Army Radio - that President Bush intends to keep his promise to de-nuke Iran via air power before he leaves office, the White House again pissed all over that possibility depressingly definitively:

In a statement issued on Tuesday afternoon, the White House said that Bush believed that “no president of the United States should ever take options off the table, but our preference and our actions for dealing with this matter remain through peaceful diplomatic means. Nothing has changed in that regard.”

Some Washington, D.C. analysts take the White House at its word. “The Bush Administration has decided that the nuclear issue [in Iran] should be decided by the next administration,” Patrick Clawson, deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy told the conference at AEI.

Translation: We'll leave the heavy-duty appeasement to our successors.

Exit questions: Is GDub even aware of the policies that are being pursued in his name?  If he's not as abjectly stupid as that would make him, how did he get through that anti-appeasement speech to the Knesset without his nose growing right out the door?

And either way, do you still harbor any lingering doubts of just how screwed we really are?

UPDATE: Et tu, Iraq?:

Iraq’s most influential Shiite cleric has been quietly issuing religious edicts declaring that armed resistance against U.S.-led foreign troops is permissible — a potentially significant shift by a key supporter of the Washington-backed government in Baghdad…

So far, al-Sistani’s fatwas have been limited to a handful of people. They also were issued verbally and in private — rather than a blanket proclamation to the general Shiite population — according to three prominent Shiite officials in regular contact with al-Sistani as well as two followers who received the edicts in Najaf…

A longtime official at al-Sistani’s office in Najaf would not deny or confirm the edicts issued in private, but hinted that a publicized call for jihad may come later.

“(Al-Sistani) rejects the American presence,” he told the AP, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment to media. “He believes they (the Americans) will at the end pay a heavy price for the damage they inflicted on Iraq.”

Ingratitude at best, treachery at worst.  If, of course, the story is on the level.

Makes a convenient new "RETREEEEEAAAAAT!!!!!" talking point for Rodbama, though, doesn't it?

Today's Iran-related war bulletins focusing on the mullahgarchy's Hezbollah tentacle....

Military sources: Hezbollah training Iraqi militias in Iran:

Militants from the Lebanese group Hezbollah have been training Iraqi militia fighters at a camp near Tehran, according to American interrogation reports that the United States has supplied to the Iraqi government.

An American official said the account of Hezbollah’s role was provided by four Shiite militia members who were captured in Iraq late last year and questioned separately…

In a possible effort to be less obtrusive, it appears that Iran is now bringing small groups of Iraqi Shiite militants to camps in Iran, where they are taught how to do their own training, American officials say.

The militants then return to Iraq to teach comrades how to fire rockets and mortars, fight as snipers or assemble explosively formed penetrators, a particularly lethal type of roadside bomb made of Iranian components, according to American officials. The officials describe this approach as “training the trainers.”

The training, the Americans say, is carried out at several camps near Tehran that are overseen by the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Command, and the instruction is carried out by militants from Hezbollah, which has long been supported by the Quds Force.

This is hardly the first time this story has made it onto the media radar screen.  It may be, though, that it has become the straw that broke the, um, camel's back - kinda-sorta.  I'll still believe any sort and degree of strike on Iran only when I see it, and perhaps not even then.

An Iranian strike on Israel through Lebanon, on the other hand....

Almost two years after its war with Israel, Hezbollah has rearmed and is stronger than before the conflict, according to Israeli and Western officials and the Lebanon-based Shiite Muslim group itself....

Hezbollah now has about 27,000 rockets and missiles, more than double its supply before the 2006 war, Israeli officials say. Acquisitions include Iranian missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv, they allege.

"The Syria-Iran-Hezbollah axis is closer than it has been since 2006," an Israeli security official said in an interview. "In operational planning, the Syrians know that Hezbollah is part of their defense architecture. Hezbollah is stronger than before the war. They have improved their antitank capabilities, the number and quality of their rockets."

Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah has asserted that the militia's arsenal has attained or surpassed its prewar level. He has said that his weapons can hit "any area in occupied Palestine." [emphases added]

It's not a question of if Iran will attack the West, but when, where, and how.  Another Hezbo-Hamas double-team of Israel would be a promising fuse for Armageddon indeed.

To see how I've been made a dime-store prophet again, click on the "extended" entry (We're working on getting Enzite to sponsor it) link.