Iran: January 2009 Archives

Once again, the people of Israel may, in the throes of unprecedented national crisis, finally be returning to their electoral senses (via Newsmax Insider):

Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is the "single most important issue" facing incoming President Barack Obama.

And he insisted Israel would not compromise on Iran's nuclear program.

Appearing on Fox News' Your World with Neil Cavuto on Thursday, Netanyahu — who many observers believe is the leading candidate to become prime minister in the upcoming Israeli elections — discussed the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and said: "In the case of Hamas and its patron Iran, they openly declare, both of them, their desire to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.

"Iran is racing to produce a nuclear weapon to that end. And so, with people who want to destroy you . . . there is no compromise. What compromise could we make with them? The method of our destruction? Of course not.

"In the case of this forward base of Iran's next to our cities, ultimately that regime will have to go."

Netanyahu went on to say: "I think there is [an] issue that will be perhaps the single most important issue facing incoming President-elect Obama. And that is the decision to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, for two reasons.

"One is that they intend to use those weapons directly against us. And the second is — you can imagine what would happen to these Iranian bases on the Mediterranean, one in Gaza and one in Lebanon, with Hezbollah, if its proxy terrorists also enjoy a nuclear umbrella.

"The prospect of having a militant Islamic regime committed to Israel's destruction, a sworn enemy of the United States, having nuclear weapons, which it can give to its proxies, is something very, very frightening indeed.

"And even if it doesn't give it to its proxies, the fact that it will wield a nuclear sword over the heads of the United States, of Israel, and many other countries, is something that should give halt to anyone concerned with the peace of the world. I think this is the biggest and most fundamental challenge facing the United States and the world."

Cavuto referred to incoming Vice President Joe Biden's remark that Barack Obama could be tested in his first few weeks in office and asked Netanyahu if he agreed.

"I have no doubt that the terrorists and their patrons — or the terrorist states and their proxies — will continuously challenge the leadership of the United States," the former prime minister answered.

"But from my two conversations with President-elect Obama, I could see that he understood this threat.

"He said that he was absolutely committed to making sure that Iran would not acquire nuclear weapons. And I think this was very important."

As Newsmax reported, Netanyahu said in late 2006, "It's 1938, and Iran is Germany, and Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs."

Benjamin Netanyahu understands this threat as one that can only be eliminated by military means.  Barack Obama does not, because he thinks that he can simply to go Tehran and sweet-talk the mullahs into giving up their nuclear ambitions.  Or, failing that, simply make enough concessions to buy them off instead.  Or, in other words, what the Bush Administration and its equally feckless Euro allies have been attempting for the past five years, to utterly and embarrassingly no avail.

Something tells me President Hussein and a reinstated Prime Minister Netanyahu aren't going to see eye to eye on this threat.  And since the former will have the latter by the shorthairs, there won't be much Bebe can do about it.

Put another way, just as he did in 1996, Netanyahu will inherit a house already condemned and awaiting what in this case will be Iran's nuclear wrecking ball, and a former American patron that will have taken the side of his enemies.

To ape the old WWII British poster after Winston Churchill took his belated but rightful place as prime minister, "All behind you, Bebe".  I suspect the Jewish state will be even more alone than the UK was seventy years ago in the dark days ahead.

Could it be that the assurances of the New York Times that Israel will not pre-emptively strike Iran's nuclear weapons program facilities before President Bush rides off into the sunset next Tuesday have been typical NYT BS?  Newsmax's Jim Meyers thinks so:

Informed sources in Washington tell Newsmax that Israel indeed will launch a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities soon – possibly in just days as President George W. Bush prepares to leave office.

The reason: The time clock has begun to run out. Iran is close to acquiring a nuclear device under the control of its radical president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said in June that Iran would have a nuclear weapon in as little as six months.

That six-month period has passed.

Of course, we have no idea of the identities or credibility of Meyers' "informed sources" or how "informed" they really are.  But then we DO have a fairly decent idea of the credibility and ideological biases of the Times, and that gives Meyers and Newsmax a benefit of the doubt from the git-go equivalent to Britney Speares' advantage over the late Mother Teresa in the skankiness department.

That thought did cross my mind as I was composing that earlier post on this dreary topic.  Unfortunately, the unwillingness of anybody in the West, including the Israelis, to confront Iranian nuclear ambitions head-on before they can be realized, with apocalyptic results, has been so long established over the past several years that even the NYT crowing triumphantly about the Bushies pulling back on a leash the pathetic Olmert regime in Jerusalem was never really straining at was nevertheless all too believable.  It fit the existing baseline of recent history.

So what do Meyers' "informed sources" know that nobody else does?  Nobody knows, other, presumeably, than Meyers himself.  But here, for the offering, are the recent events that auger in their favor:

Last year one hundred Israeli jets took part in an exercise over the eastern Mediterranean that was interpreted as a dress rehearsal for a possible attack on Iran.

And on September 6 Israel launched an air attack against a site in Syria believed to be a nuclear-related facility containing material delivered by North Korea.

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton predicted that Israel would stage a raid against Iran's nuclear facilities if Barack Obama won the presidential election.

Bolton stated that he believed the Israeli attack would take place sometime between the day after Obama's win and his inauguration on January 20.

In an interview with FOX News, Bolton reasoned that Israel wouldn’t be able to hold off a strike on Iran any longer than that given Obama’s more conciliatory approach to Iran.

The Israeli government “would have to make a judgment whether to [strike] during the remainder of President Bush’s term in office or wait for his successor,” Bolton added.

First off, obviously, striking a target in next-door Syria is a far less daunting proposition than attacking Iranian targets nearly a thousand miles away through the latest Russian-built air defense system without the bunker-buster warheads necessary to ensure their destruction.  But, unlike Meyers, given those daunting hurdles, I think the repurcussions of this hypothetical strike are not unclear at all.

If the IAF can't carry out this strike without a reasonable chance of success, they, and we, will be incurring the wrath of the mullahgarchy and its Syrian, Hezbo, and Hamas puppets without having removed Tehran's burgeoning nuclear capabilities.  If even the Bushkins denied the Jews the means to infict critical damage on Iranian nuclear facilities, one would have to question the efficacy of proceeding with the attack anyway.

And that leaves aside the overpowering "dovishness" of the current Israeli Kaditha regime, which is currently, and futilely, squandering still more IDF resources on another half-hearted incursion into the Gaza Strip to try and show the disgruntled Israeli electorate in advance of next month's national elections that they've still got as long a penis as ANY Likudnik.  If the Olmert-Livni-Barak axis isn't capable of seriously solving its self-inflicted Hamas problem, what in the name of all that's kosher convinces Meyers and his "informed sources" that they'd be willing or able to "go Osirik" on the mullahs?

And ponder this thought over this next, last week of American freedom: what will President Hussein do to the Jews if they embroil him in a war with Iran he doesn't want before he's even been able to display his Jemimah glory for all the assembled inaugural worshippers (and the al Qaeda operatives trying to kill them all, and him)?  The Olmert regime is far more sympatico with Red Barry than it ever was with Dubya, in any case.  Even if they weren't pacifists, they wouldn't want to piss off B.O. for a mission even his predecessor denied them the means to pull off.

Maybe I'll be wrong about this.  Maybe the New York Times is just dispensing enemy propaganda, as usual, and Meyers' "informed sources" are not risibly mislabeled.  Heaven knows I'd like to believe that SOMEbody will at least buy us some additional time in which to "disarm" the mullahgarchy.

But it's not the way to bet.

If, you know, any of us had any money left to wager.

Sadly, this doesn't surprise me at all:

President George W. Bush rejected a plea from Israel last year to help it raid Iran's main nuclear complex, opting instead to authorize a new U.S. covert action aimed at sabotaging Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program, the New York Times reported.

Israel's request was for specialized bunker-busting bombs that it wanted for an attack that tentatively involved flying over Iraq to reach Iran's major nuclear complex at Natanz, where the country's only known uranium enrichment plant is located, the Times reported Saturday in its online edition. The White House deflected requests for the bombs and flyover but said it would improve intelligence-sharing with Israel on covert U.S. efforts to sabotage Iran's nuclear program.

The covert efforts, which began in early 2008, involved plans to penetrate Iran's nuclear supply chain abroad and undermine electrical systems and other networks on which Iran relies, the Times said, citing interviews with current and former U.S. officials, outside experts and international nuclear inspectors who spoke on condition of anonymity. The covert program will be handed off to President-elect Barack Obama, who will deciding whether to continue it.

According to the Times, Bush decided against an overt attack based on input from top Administration officials such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who believed that doing so would likely prove ineffective and could ignite a broader Middle East war.

Any reader of this space knows that I have been one of the few neoChurchillian voices in the blogosphere making the case that war with Iran is inevitable, and thus it is to our advantage to attack first - before they obtain a nuclear weapons arsenal - than to dick around timidly and ineffectively with useless sanctions and covert actions that assume we've got all the time in the world to de-nuke the mullahgarchy, and wake up one day to an Iranian nuclear ultimatum, or a sneak nuclear terrorist attack on our cities.  A growing possibility given that their first warhead could have rolled off their indigenous assemblyline as much as five months ago.  Said reader also knows that I thought the Bush Administration would invade Iran, just as it did Iraq, early in his second term when his warchest of political capital was guaranteed to be at its apex, both to remove the burgeoning Iranian nuclear threat and to help stabilize Iraq by removing Iranian meddling and subversion through its Shiite proxy forces.

Regrettably, the Bushies took their near-defeat in 2004 (the closeness of which was completely unnecessary and the product of timid assumptions and the strategy they spawned) over the liberation of Iraq as a near-death experience, and it de-neo-con-ized (i.e. castrated) them.  The second Bush43 term became, from a foreign policy perspective, the second Bush41 term - timid and "realist" to the core.  That was typified by the aforequoted horrible "advice" from SecDef Gates, who'll you'll notice is not missing a beat from the changing of administrations.  Think Red Barry will keep even that covert dilly-dallying going after next Tuesday?  We know what Gates will advocate, don't we?

We also know that Israel's Kaditha-ite regime wasn't really serious about turning Iran's nuclear facilities into a parking lot, either, or they would have done so regardless of what the Bushkins urged.

All of which means that it's the Obamunists who will have to "pay later" for the failures of its predecessors to read and heed the glowing handwriting on the Middle East wall - as no less than Sick Willie's second SecDef just pointed out:

William Perry, who headed the Pentagon during a 1994 nuclear standoff with North Korea, predicted on Thursday that President-elect Barack Obama will soon face a nuclear crisis with Iran.

Iran is "moving inexorably toward becoming a nuclear power," with ominous implications for the Middle East, Perry said.

"It seems clear that Israel will not sit by idle while Iran takes the final steps toward becoming a nuclear power," Perry told a conference on foreign policy challenges facing the incoming Obama administration. The former Clinton administration defense secretary held out hope that more vigorous U.S. and international diplomacy could reverse North Korea's nuclear weapons program. But he was less confident about stopping Iran's ambitions.

"President Obama will almost certainly face a serious crisis with Iran," Perry said. "Indeed, I believe the crisis point will be reached in his first year in office. So on the nuclear front, President Obama will face a daunting set of problems, none of which can be solved unilaterally."

In one statement, "The Refridgerator" both states the problem accurately and displays the Beltway establishment's deliberate obtuseness and cowardice in refusing to confront it seriously.  The truth is this "serious crisis with Iran" not only CAN be solved unilaterally, MUST be solved unilaterally, but it cannot be solved any other way.  Diplomacy cannot solve it because the mullahs cannot be talked out of their pursuit of nukes; economic carrots or sticks cannot solve it because of why they want nuclear weapons: to (1) be recognized as a major global power and (2) eventually conquer the world for Islam.  That cannot be done until the United States is removed as planetary hegemon, and that cannot be accomplished without the use of nuclear weapons.

The only way to avert a nuclear war with Iran is to pre-emptively destroy the mullahgarchy using overwhelming conventional military power.  And only the United States has the means and proximity to carry out this blessed, holy mission.

Tragically, what it no longer has is the will to do so.  That mettle was torn out of President Bush years ago by the Fifth Columnist Left, and his FCL successor plans a "new direction" that, were truth in advertising a requirement, he'd be forced to call "tough, direct surrender without preconditions".

They say that you know you've gotten old when you see the same cycles start to repeat themselves.  The world's 1930s-esque slide toward global conflagration pre-dated me by a generation, but that cycle is definitely coming round again, with consequences even more horrific than our parents and grandparents could have imagined.

Winston Churchill passed away the year after I was born, but I can hear him now, spinning and weeping in his grave at the same time.