Iran: September 2009 Archives

I swear to you, folks, it's almost like pushing a button:

Today White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Iran's "recent missile test validated Obama's decision to switch from a missile defense system in Eastern Europe targeting long-range Iranian missiles to a program concerned more with short and medium range Iranian ballistics."

And even while Beltway Bob was gibbering like a trained seal:

Iranian state television said the Revolutionary Guards, which controls Iran’s missile program, successfully tested upgraded versions of the medium-range Shihab-3 and Sajjil-2 missiles. Both can carry nuclear warheads and can reach up to 2,000 kilometers, putting Israel, U.S. military bases in the Middle East, and parts of Europe within striking distance.

Oh, but don't worry, "Obama’s a genius, we’re holding all the cards, and today’s tests are likely just a peevish little expression of machismo ahead of Iranian concessions at nuclear talks this week."

Obama's no "genius," but it beggars belief that he could be this willfully obtuse.  I'm telling you, there's more going on here than just Carteresque naivete.  Barack Obama wants the mullahs to get nuclear weapons and ICBMs, because his idea of a "balance of power" is to make sure that we can NEVER remove the Islamic regime in Tehran, and that Israel will no longer be the only nuclear power in the Middle East.

And perhaps a further goal that would be more...."final".

....but not for the mullahs:

Bush issued this same ultimatum maybe five hundred times and yet here we are, still wringing our hands over whether Russia and China will agree to one more turn of the economic ratchet. Ask yourself: If you’re Khamenei, knowing per the North Korean example that the West will go on negotiating with you forever even after you’ve got the bomb, why not plow ahead and build one? Then you can come back to the table, nuclear leverage in hand, and bargain for some sort of treaty in return for sanctions being lifted. The One and the media may believe that the time for talk is over, but the grand lesson of the Iranian nuke kabuki over the past seven years is that it’s never really over.

Until they've got the nuclear means to (1) deter any military attempt to take out their nuclear facilities and arsenal or effect regime-change in Tehran outright (And, just as a reminder, I believe they've had those means for a full year now), and (2) deploy said means against Israel and the Great Satan, as they have, after all, long promised to do.  Then, and only then, will it really be over.  Or, in other words, far, far too late.

Again, just as a reminder, nothing will stop the mullahgarchy from getting AND USING nuclear weapons except American military power.  The six years the Bushies wasted on endless, pointless, feckless, worthless negotiating and UN masturbating and empty sanctionizing redundantly demonstated this truth beyond any reasonable doubt.  Which makes Jake Tapper's argument non-functional:

My friend Olivier Knox of AFP reminds me that in May, former Bush State Department official Nicholas Burns testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about Iran, and said: “Some continue to argue that the only way to halt Iran’s accelerating nuclear research effort is through American or Israeli air strikes. But, there is no convincing scenario where such use of military force would work effectively to end the Iranian nuclear program. Even worse, air strikes would undoubtedly lead Iran to hit back asymmetrically against us in Iraq, Afghanistan and the wider region, especially through its proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas. This reminds us of Churchill’s maxim that, once a war starts, it is impossible to know how it will end. An America that is already waging two difficult and bloody wars should be wary of unleashing a third. Choosing military power at this stage would surely be precipitous and unwise.”

Burns is wrong.  Once a war starts, it is entirely possible to know how it will end, if we have the will to make sure it ends in victory.  My lone overlap with Tapper is that I've never been sanguine about airstrikes alone; I've always believed, and still do, that nothing less than an Iraq-style invasion of Iran will eliminate their nuclear threat by eliminating the mullahgarchy itself.

In that sense, it is indeed too late by virtue of who the American people foolishly elected as Bush's successor.  But then he never did what needed to be done, either, when the window of opportunity still was open.

And yet the reality of Armageddon remains.  The choice facing Barack Obama on this issue is between a bad and a worse, between war and disaster.  There are no other options.  Not talk, not sanctions.  War on our terms or disaster on theirs.  Sacrificing hopenchange versus "secure phones throughout government begin ringing. Including one on the President’s nightstand."

He's already made that choice.  Which makes the famous "3 AM" ad even more ominous than it was a year and a half ago.

Here's how the lede should read: "Iran scurried to the IAEA in order to reveal one of its numerous previously-secret uranium enrichment facilities after it got wind that the US and its allies had discovered it three years ago and lied about it to the American voting public to discredit President Bush and help bamboozle them into electing the pro-Iranian Democrat candidate, Barack Hussein Obama, who will do everything in his power to guarantee that the Islamic Republic of Iran becomes a nuclear power."

Did I leave anything out?:

Iran revealed the existence of a covert uranium enrichment facility to the U.N. nuclear watchdog this week after it discovered the project’s secrecy had been breached by Western intelligence agencies, FOX News has learned.

The U.S., Britain and France will accuse Iran on Friday morning of building the facility underground in secret and charge that it has hidden the facility for years from international weapons inspectors, a senior White House official said.

At an announcement before the opening of the G-20 economic summit in Pittsburgh, President Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy will demand weapons inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency be granted immediate access to the facility.

An official told FOX News that Iran revealed the existence of the second plant in a letter sent Monday to IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei.

Pardon me for being flip, but....so?  Is anybody surprised by this "revelation"?  Does anybody expect anything to change from the Iranian stooge sending in the IAEA's keystone cops yet again to circle this facility seven times and then jerk off in the biggest centrifuge?  The Russians and ChiComms to stop aiding and running interference for Tehran at the UN?  Red Barry to ever change his "tough diplomacy" dance right up until Hezbollah pulls the nuclear trigger outside the White House gate?  Shinola, sending the "inspectors" in for the umpteenth time was most of why Obama revealed this intel nugget, doubtless hoping that this once and for all gives the lie to the treasonously mendatious 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that claimed the opposite of what the Bush-hating intelligence community KNEW was not the case.  The rest of it was to get the Russians on board for merely useless sanctions, as opposed to completely laughable ones.  I wouldn't count on that side of it accomplishing anything but squat either.

No, the completely laughable item was the Talky Warrior issuing inspection "demands" while moving his line-in-the-sand deadline for an Iranian acceptance of direction negotiations another three months down the road.

For my money, I think they picked the "secret uranium enrichment facility" near Qom - a Shiite Islamic "holy" site - to "reveal" more to throw an additional wrench in Benjamin Netanyahu's do-or-literally-die military preparations for an air offensive against the mullahgarchy's nuclear installations than because of anything The One was about to spill.  Though I'm sure the others are probably located right beneath every Iranian civilian population center of any significant size.  A spike in Iranian birth defects and mutations is something to be on the lookout for as this countdown ticks ever downward.

Which, of course, Adolph Ahmadinejad - and Obamunists - will blame on George W. Bush, and for which B.O. will doubtless apologize profusely to the Supreme Leader.  Evidently the Geico Caveman expects it, as he issued his own demand that Obama apologize for exposing what he was going to reveal anyway:

Money quote: "'We do everything transparently.' He added, 'I’m not the person who should be giving this advice to Mr. Obama because principally, Mr. Obama’s mistakes work in our favor.'"

Couldn't have put it better myself, 'dolph.

Vice President Joe Biden earlier refused to confirm to CNN that the George W. Bush-era plan was being shelved.

 

But he did explain the logic of doing so, saying Iran — a key concern for the United States — was not a threat.

 

“I think we are fully capable and secure dealing with any present or future potential Iranian threat,” he told CNN’s Chris Lawrence in Baghdad, where he is on a brief trip.

 

“The whole purpose of this exercise we are undertaking is to diminish the prospect of the Iranians destabilizing that region in the world. I am less concerned — much less concerned - about the Iranian potential. They have no potential at this moment, they have no capacity to launch a missile at the United States of America,” he said.

Experts at the world’s top atomic watchdog are in agreement that Tehran has the ability to make a nuclear bomb and is on the way to developing a missile system able to carry an atomic warhead, according to a secret report seen by the Associated Press…

 

The document says Iran has “sufficient information” to build a bomb. It says Iran is likely to “overcome problems” on developing a delivery system.

Sunni states in the Gulf are now scrambling to install their own missile systems and why, as ABC tersely notes, “There is real fear and some expectation here of a military confrontation.”