Iran: August 2008 Archives

Why is it a majority of Americans still understands the Iranian nuclear threat and what needs to be done to stop it better than our so-called "leaders" do? (via Newsmax Insider):

More than six in ten Americans — 63% — say they would approve of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities if diplomacy fails to solve the Iranian nuclear crisis, a new poll reveals.

Somewhat fewer, 55%, would approve of a strike on Iran by the U.S. and its allies, according to the poll conducted by Public Opinion Strategies and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research.

A solid 80% of those polled said Iran would likely use nuclear weapons if it acquired them.

Also, 87% of American voters believe a nuclear-armed Iran would pose a threat to the U.S.

Americans worry about the direct threat to Israel from Iran “and fear Iran’s potential to share nuclear technology with terrorist groups,” Stan Greenberg of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research told the Jerusalem Post.

These numbers have remained consistent over the past several years, even as the Bushies' weak, craven, feckless, stubborn insistence on useless "diplomacy" has provided the mullahs all the time and resources they need to break the atomic barrier and build an indigenous nuclear arsenal that they will not be long in "deploying" against the Israelis, Europe, and ourselves.

However, the moral rot of appeasement has taken its toll on the clarity of public thinking:

However, 62% of respondents feel it is still possible to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis.

That is the approach the Bush Administration currently favors.

“Everyone from this White House, including the vice president’s office, is in agreement that the military action is not the best option at this point, and we should pursue diplomatic and economic pressures,” an American official told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius.

But Ignatius added that if the diplomatic track does not work, “and there are no signs yet that Tehran is willing to bend, all the deadly options will remain on the table.”

And what will be the threshold of confirmation that "the diplomatic track" has failed?  The very nature of "diplomatic tracks" is that they're treadmills that go nowhere and yet whose riders never want to dismount because of the comfortable sheen of sweaty complacency the masturbatory exercise generates.  "If we just keep talking long enough, if we just offer enough concessions, why, the mullahs are BOUND to come around sooner or later.  After all, they're reasonable, rational human beings like we are, right?"

Therein lies the lethal trap.  It was clear years ago that the "diplomatic track" against Iranian nukes was a fool's errand, and that they have simply been stringing us along in order to buy enough time to gain the means of our destruction at their hands.  But, predictably, we and the EUnuchs haven't acknowledged that failure and moved on to more "direct" measures because we don't want to face the alternative, even though pre-emptive conventional action on our terms will be infinitely preferable to suffering nuclear attack on theirs.

It's like a dental check-up.  We all know we need them, but none of us wants to make that appointment, and so we duck it, taking comfort in that nothing bad has happened - yet.  Then comes the inevitable toothache that forces our hand.

That middle section is, most likely, the context for the majority support for military action against Iran cited above.  We continue to negotiate with Tehran not because doing so will be successful in "disarming" the mullahgarchy, but because we don't want to fight them.  And we're all for taking them out - just as soon as we've "exhausted all diplomatic options".  Which will never happen until the first mushroom cloud rises over Tel Aviv and/or Paris and/or New York.  And maybe not even then, if President Hussein is calling the shots.

Hard to believe that lesson isn't indellibly ingrained just seven years after 9/11.  Three thousand dead American civilians weren't sufficient to drive it home; will thirty thousand be enough?  Three hundred thousand?  Three million?

UPDATE: A US attack coming "within weeks"?  Haven't we heard reports like this before?

UPDATE II: Still, I pray to God they're true.

Please, PLEASE, do not EVER credit Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with possessing so much as a fraction of a shard of a scintilla of a smidgen of propaganda prowess when "Breathless Brian" Williams is the breed of infidel pissant with which he is presented as a "sparring" partner:

Would you like to know the essence of the mullahgarch's "new stance, ready for further engagement"?  Courtesy of AP:

Lift the sanctions, defang the already mostly defanged Security Council, and then, maybe, they’ll be willing to talk about suspending enrichment via a whole new round of negotiations that “would take a minimum of several years,” according to one European diplomat familiar with the plan. Mind you, since this “offer” was extended, Ahmadinejad himself has said that they won’t retreat one iota from their nuclear rights and Iran’s vice president has hinted they might stop cooperating with the IAEA — which, per the blockquote, is already the only entity they’ll even consider cooperating with.

A lot of us have been using the parallel of Nazi Germany rolling Britain's Neville Chamberlain and France's Eduard Daladier in the late 1930s, but I'm beginning to think that's unfair to Chamberlain and Daladier.  Hitler made fools of them at Munich, but after his double-cross of taking all of Czechoslovakia instead of just the Sudetanland, and their guarantee of Poland's security, when Wermacht tanks rolled across the Polish frontier on September 1, 1939, they didn't offer more diplomatic incentive packages to lure der Fuehrer back to the negotiating table - they declared war, even if it was just a "sitzkrieg".  There does not appear to be ANYTHING Hitler's Iranian counterparts could do short of nuking Washington, D.C. that will slacken Democrat obsession with "tough diplomacy":

Heck, we might be selling the mullahs short as well.  Hitler believed that he had to move quickly to conquer Europe because his window of opportunity would short.  But I think he underestimated Western decadance, cowardice, and willful gullibility.  Contrastually, the old Soviet Union may have been TOO patient, failing to make their checkmate move for global takeover in the late 1970s when they had their optimal chance.  Instead, they hesitated, Ronald Reagan came to power in America, and both their window of opportunity, and then the Soviet communist regime itself, came to a close.

But the mullahs have taken our measure, and may well be seeking to buy those additional years of time to not just gain the ability to make their own nuclear weapons, but to manufacture a huge arsenal of them, and perhaps even challenge the "Great Satan" for strategic nuclear superiority.  Or, put another way, our contemporary decadance, cowardice, and willful gullibility may have convinced the Islamic regime than their window of opportunity, as well as their global ambitions, may be a lot bigger than they thought it was.

Such as....hydrogen bombs:

The official Iranian news agency (IRNA) quotes Expediency Council chief, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani as saying, “We have started the first activities of nuclear fusion.”

Rafsanjani made the remarks today during a speech delivered to a gathering of students at Tehran’s Jamaran Hoseynieh.

Parenthetically, isn't "Expediency Council" a remarkably candid name for a government entity?  I guess dictatorships can get away with some honesty in their nomenclature after all.

But, getting back to the point, even WE don't yet have nuclear fusion reactors for power generation.  And there's only one other practical application of nuclear fusion.

The irony, I suppose, is that by our relentless fecklessness and foolishness ratcheting up Iranian perceptions of just how much we will allow them to take from us, an immediate Iranian "forward deployment" of the first fission warheads to roll off their assembly line may be less likely in the near term than I have been assuming.

Or it may not, if they can assymetrically get the ultimate drop on us:

Iran has carried out missile tests for what could be a plan for a nuclear strike on the United States, the head of a national security panel has warned.

In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee and in remarks to a private conference on missile defense over the weekend hosted by the Claremont Institute, Dr. William Graham warned that the U.S. intelligence community “doesn’t have a story” to explain the recent Iranian tests.

One group of tests that troubled Graham, the former White House science adviser under President Ronald Reagan, were successful efforts to launch a Scud missile from a platform in the Caspian Sea.

“They’ve got [test] ranges in Iran which are more than long enough to handle Scud launches and even Shahab-3 launches,” Dr. Graham said. “Why would they be launching from the surface of the Caspian Sea? They obviously have not explained that to us.”

Another troubling group of tests involved Shahab-3 launches where the Iranians "detonated the warhead near apogee, not over the target area where the thing would eventually land, but at altitude,” Graham said. “Why would they do that?”

Graham chairs the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, a blue-ribbon panel established by Congress in 2001.

The commission examined the Iranian tests “and without too much effort connected the dots,” even though the U.S. intelligence community previously had failed to do so, Graham said.

“The only plausible explanation we can find is that the Iranians are figuring out how to launch a missile from a ship and get it up to altitude and then detonate it,” he said. “And that’s exactly what you would do if you had a nuclear weapon on a Scud or a Shahab-3 or other missile, and you wanted to explode it over the United States.”

The commission warned in a report issued in April that the United States was at risk of a sneak nuclear attack by a rogue nation or a terrorist group designed to take out our nation’s critical infrastructure.

"If even a crude nuclear weapon were detonated anywhere between forty kilometers to four hundred kilometers above Earth, in a split-second it would generate an electro-magnetic pulse [EMP] that would cripple military and civilian communications, power, transportation, water, food, and other infrastructure," the report warned.

And just like that, the United States would cease to exist as a global superpower and obstacle to Iranian, and/or Russian, and/or Red Chinese global ambitions.

And all our so-called leaders - in both parties - are consumed with is more diplomacy, more negotiations, more talk designed to bring the mullahs back to the table, while they busily prepare the means of our decimation.

Seventy years ago there was Winston Churchill; thirty years ago there was Ronald Reagan; but who, oh who, is going to save the West from itself now?