Reply With Quote
Bombing Iran will help transform the whole region into peaceful, co-existent democracies, right? I wonder how many family members this writer has fighting his ideological war?
Bomb Iran
Diplomacy is doing nothing to stop the Iranian nuclear threat; a show of force is the only answer.
By Joshua Muravchik, JOSHUA MURAVCHIK is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Ins ute.
November 19, 2006
WE MUST bomb Iran.
It has been four years since that country's secret nuclear program was brought to light, and the path of diplomacy and sanctions has led nowhere.
First, we agreed to our allies' requests that we offer Tehran a string of concessions, which it spurned. Then, Britain, France and Germany wanted to impose a batch of extremely weak sanctions. For instance, Iranians known to be involved in nuclear activities would have been barred from foreign travel — except for humanitarian or religious reasons — and outside countries would have been required to refrain from aiding some, but not all, Iranian nuclear projects.
But even this was too much for the U.N. Security Council. Russia promptly announced that these sanctions were much too strong. "We cannot support measures … aimed at isolating Iran," declared Foreign Minister Sergei V. Lavrov.
It is now clear that neither Moscow nor Beijing will ever agree to tough sanctions. What's more, even if they were to do so, it would not stop Iran, which is a country on a mission. As President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad put it: "Thanks to the blood of the martyrs, a new Islamic revolution has arisen…. The era of oppression, hegemonic regimes and tyranny and injustice has reached its end…. The wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world." There is simply no possibility that Iran's clerical rulers will trade this ecstatic vision for a mess of Western pottage in the form of economic bribes or penalties.
So if sanctions won't work, what's left? The overthrow of the current Iranian regime might offer a silver bullet, but with hard-liners firmly in the saddle in Tehran, any such prospect seems even more remote today than it did a decade ago, when students were demonstrating and reformers were ascendant. Meanwhile, the completion of Iran's bomb grows nearer every day.
Our options therefore are narrowed to two: We can prepare to live with a nuclear-armed Iran, or we can use force to prevent it. Former ABC newsman Ted Koppel argues for the former, saying that "if Iran is bound and determined to have nuclear weapons, let it." We should rely, he says, on the threat of retaliation to keep Iran from using its bomb. Similarly, Newsweek International Editor Fareed Zakaria points out that we have succeeded in deterring other hostile nuclear states, such as the Soviet Union and China.
And in these pages, William Langewiesche summed up the what-me-worry at ude when he wrote that "the spread of nuclear weapons is, and always has been, inevitable," and that the important thing is "learning how to live with it after it occurs."
But that's whistling past the graveyard. The reality is that we cannot live safely with a nuclear-armed Iran. One reason is terrorism, of which Iran has long been the world's premier state sponsor, through groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Now, according to a report last week in London's Daily Telegraph, Iran is trying to take over Al Qaeda by positioning its own man, Saif Adel, to become the successor to the ailing Osama bin Laden. How could we possibly trust Iran not to slip nuclear material to terrorists?
Koppel says that we could prevent this by issuing a blanket warning that if a nuclear device is detonated anywhere in the United States, we will assume Iran is responsible. But would any U.S. president really order a retaliatory nuclear strike based on an assumption?
Another reason is that an Iranian bomb would cons ute a dire threat to Israel's 6 million-plus citizens. Sure, Israel could strike back, but Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president who was Ahmadinejad's "moderate" electoral opponent, once pointed out smugly that "the use of an atomic bomb against Israel would totally destroy Israel, while [the same] against the Islamic world would only cause damage. Such a scenario is not inconceivable." If that is the voice of pragmatism in Iran, would you trust deterrence against the messianic Ahmadinejad?
Even if Iran did not drop a bomb on Israel or hand one to terrorists, its mere possession of such a device would have devastating consequences. Coming on top of North Korea's nuclear test, it would spell finis to the entire nonproliferation system.
And then there is a consequence that seems to have been thought about much less but could be the most harmful of all: Tehran could achieve its goal of regional supremacy. Jordan's King Abdullah II, for instance, has warned of an emerging Shiite "crescent." But Abdullah's comment understates the danger. If Iran's reach were limited to Shiites, it would be constrained by their minority status in the Muslim world as well as by the divisions between Persians and Arabs.
But such ethnic-based analysis fails to take into account Iran's charisma as the archenemy of the United States and Israel and the leverage it achieves as the patron of radicals and rejectionists. Given that, the old assumptions about Shiites and Sunnis may not hold any longer. Iran's closest ally today is Syria, which is mostly Sunni. The link between Tehran and Damascus is ideological, not theological. Similarly, Iran supports the Palestinian groups Islamic Jihad and Hamas, which are overwhelmingly Sunni (and as a result, Iran has grown popular in the eyes of Palestinians).
During the Lebanon war this summer, we saw how readily Muslims closed ranks across the Sunni-Shiite divide against a common foe (even as the two groups continued killing each other in Iraq). In Sunni Egypt, newborns were named "Hezbollah" after the Lebanese Shiite organization and "Nasrallah" after its leader. As Muslim scholar Vali Nasr put it: "A flurry of anti-Hezbollah [i.e., anti-Shiite] fatwas by radical Sunni clerics have not diverted the admiring gaze of Arabs everywhere toward Hezbollah."
In short, Tehran can build influence on a mix of ethnicity and ideology, underwritten by the region's largest economy. Nuclear weapons would bring regional hegemony within its reach by intimidating neighbors and rivals and stirring the admiration of many other Muslims.
This would thrust us into a new global struggle akin to the one we waged so painfully with the Soviet Union for 40-odd years. It would be the "clash of civilizations" that has been so much talked about but so little defined.
Iran might seem little match for the United States, but that is not how Ahmadinejad sees it. He and his fellow jihadists believe that the Muslim world has already defeated one infidel superpower (the Soviet Union) and will in time defeat the other.
Russia was poor and weak in 1917 when Lenin took power, as was Germany in 1933 when Hitler came in. Neither, in the end, was able to defeat the United States, but each of them unleashed unimaginable suffering before they suc bed. And despite its weakness, Iran commands an asset that neither of them had: a natural advantage in appealing to the world's billion-plus Muslims.
If Tehran establishes dominance in the region, then the battlefield might move to Southeast Asia or Africa or even parts of Europe, as the mullahs would try to extend their sway over other Muslim peoples. In the end, we would no doubt win, but how long this contest might last and what toll it might take are anyone's guess.
The only way to forestall these frightening developments is by the use of force. Not by invading Iran as we did Iraq, but by an air campaign against Tehran's nuclear facilities. We have considerable information about these facilities; by some estimates they comprise about 1,500 targets. If we hit a large fraction of them in a bombing campaign that might last from a few days to a couple of weeks, we would inflict severe damage. This would not end Iran's weapons program, but it would certainly delay it.
What should be the timing of such an attack? If we did it next year, that would give time for U.N. diplomacy to further reveal its bankruptcy yet would come before Iran will have a bomb in hand (and also before our own presidential campaign). In time, if Tehran persisted, we might have to do it again.
Can President Bush take such action after being humiliated in the congressional elections and with the Iraq war having grown so unpopular? Bush has said that history's judgment on his conduct of the war against terror is more important than the polls. If Ahmadinejad gets his finger on a nuclear trigger, everything Bush has done will be rendered hollow. We will be a lot less safe than we were when Bush took office.
Finally, wouldn't such a U.S. air attack on Iran inflame global anti-Americanism? Wouldn't Iran retaliate in Iraq or by terrorism? Yes, probably. That is the price we would pay. But the alternative is worse.
After the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917, a single member of Britain's Cabinet, Winston Churchill, appealed for robust military intervention to crush the new regime. His colleagues weighed the costs — the loss of soldiers, international derision, revenge by Lenin — and rejected the idea.
The costs were avoided, and instead the world was subjected to the greatest man-made calamities ever. Communism itself was to claim perhaps 100 million lives, and it also gave rise to fascism and Nazism, leading to World War II. Ahmadinejad wants to be the new Lenin. Force is the only thing that can stop him.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...a-news-comment
Bombing Iran will help transform the whole region into peaceful, co-existent democracies, right? I wonder how many family members this writer has fighting his ideological war?
Well, you want us to go to war with Iran based on an assumption after going to war with Iraq based on an assumption. What is the real difference?Koppel says that we could prevent this by issuing a blanket warning that if a nuclear device is detonated anywhere in the United States, we will assume Iran is responsible. But would any U.S. president really order a retaliatory nuclear strike based on an assumption?
Like a spoiled ADD brat, they've grown bored and frustrated with their old toy (Iraq) and now pine away for a new toy (Iran).
Look at a map of the region, Iran is surrounded by countries with Nuclear weapons or, like Afghanistan and the former Soviet states, by countries in defense pacts with countries with nuclear weapons. Of course Iran wants a nuclear weapon, countries with nuclear weapons don't get attacked like Iraq, that is the message the Iranian leadership got.
The neocon strategy has been utterly repudiated, even by GWB. They are irrelevant now.
There are still several in the administration, unfortunately. There should have been a Saturday night massacre.
It's funny they're both taking shots at Koppel. Ted sure as owned the first guy, maybe Josh should think twice before disagreeing, or go to Iran for a few weeks himself like Koppel has.
The nice thing that Josh totally misses is something that Barry McCaffrey pointed out plainly: a six month sustained bombing campaign would at the very best knock out maybe half of the facilities we actually know about. Is he prepared for that and the consquenses thereof? Stuff like a blockade of the Persian Gulf? Has he even thought about that? Neocons like Josh have an extremely poor understanding of what the military can do and what it can't do.
But they have the one true god on their side, so it will always make them right.
True Bryant. Every week for the past 3 years, people from local churches would come knock on the door and want to discuss religion based on the "one true God". How we need to stand together and fight the ideas of fake Gods.
Now after Hagee and a host of other rightwing mishaps, They've chosen a new path. All the literiture is led " The end of false religion is near".
Exactly. If Iran chooses to sink a couple of tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, world oil supply declines 40-50%, and that means a depression the size of which the world has never seen. That would effectively implode the economic system.
This is what the neo-cons, who are really just spinners for the military-industrial complex, want. 50 more years of sky-high defense budgets. Have they not looked at the state of US government debt???This would thrust us into a new global struggle akin to the one we waged so painfully with the Soviet Union for 40-odd years. It would be the "clash of civilizations" that has been so much talked about but so little defined.
However, Koppel is an idiot if he thinks this makes any sense. Um, there are terrorists out there who would do this just to see the US destroy the world by retaliating, Ted.Koppel says that we could prevent this by issuing a blanket warning that if a nuclear device is detonated anywhere in the United States, we will assume Iran is responsible.
Depressingly, I don't see a solution to the Iran quandry. They will develop nuclear weapons - that is inevitable - although I'm not worried about the government of Iran using them. They have power, a big vested interest, and the last thing they want to do is destroy that power by taking on an overmatched foe. We can only hope they'll have the good sense NOT to give them to terrorists, but that's unlikely, and therein lies the ned of civilisation as we know it.
Ad Hominem is easier than logical arugments and facts. Just ask Yoni.
Don't worry the Dems will re-instate the draft... all our problems will be taken care off..
RNR, you are right, they will have their atomicExactly. If Iran chooses to sink a couple of tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, world oil supply declines 40-50%, and that means a depression the size of which the world has never seen. That would effectively implode the economic system.
This is what the neo-cons, who are really just spinners for the military-industrial complex, want. 50 more years of sky-high defense budgets. Have they not looked at the state of US government debt???
However, Koppel is an idiot if he thinks this makes any sense. Um, there are terrorists out there who would do this just to see the US destroy the world by retaliating, Ted.
Depressingly, I don't see a solution to the Iran quandry. They will develop nuclear weapons - that is inevitable - although I'm not worried about the government of Iran using them. They have power, a big vested interest, and the last thing they want to do is destroy that power by taking on an overmatched foe. We can only hope they'll have the good sense NOT to give them to terrorists, but that's unlikely, and therein lies the ned of civilisation as we know it.
weapon. And they will give it to a terrorist group.
Of this I have no doubt. We are dealing with
people who are on a crusade, only their cause is
important.
Most of you don't remember WWII, but rubber
was the big problem, we solved it. And now,
natural rubber is not even sought after for tires,
tyres for you RNR. Same for oil from the ME, yes
we depend on them for it at the present
consumption rate, but nothing says we have to
continue to use it at this rate if they cut off or
we are cut off from that source. We do have
resources available and believe me they would
be exploited. We also have countries bordering
north and south who would supply us by
increasing supply. Have no doubts about that,
they have to live with us and are dependent on
us for many things.
One factor no one considers. The ME depends
on the dollars they receive for their wealth. They
cant afford to lose that revenue. Their religion
is what is going to be their downfall, maybe not
in my lifetime and maybe not even in yours but
many keep ignoring history. Does anyone
remember what they learned about the dark
ages. I do. It was the Christian faith that
caused our problem. And before I am accused of
anything, I am a Christian and I do believe.
Oh, and RNR, the answer to your quandary is
very simple. We win in Iraq.
You said this about Saddam three years ago.RNR, you are right, they will have their atomic
weapon. And they will give it to a terrorist group.
Of this I have no doubt.What does that mean?Oh, and RNR, the answer to your quandary is
very simple. We win in Iraq.
Saddam was defeated.
You don't know what win means? Means we kick butt,
do what we started out to do. Like in basketball, football, baseball and war. We win.
And thank God we got all his WMDs!Saddam was defeated.Win what? What does that actually mean? What is your desired outcome in Iraq?You don't know what win means? Means we kick butt,
do what we started out to do. Like in basketball, football, baseball and war. We win.
We will hand deliver the "win" to Iran.
What if. What if. How about what if we give them
the chance to choose their own government. What if
they have a chance to live in peace. What if the
other folks in the region learn that that they don't have
to live under a religions dictatorship. What if they have
a choice. Like we used to have in the United States.
Didn't we do that? Didn't they vote? Bush has been making hay about that for some time now. They don't seem to be turning away from their differences with each other. It appears they are making choices.
What if Sistani and Al-Sadr would have been on that ballot?
We did. Then they kept on killing us and each other.How about what if we give them
the chance to choose their own government.Would that be at the point of our guns or not?What if
they have a chance to live in peace.Or secular dictatorships like all our allies there? Be careful what you wish for.What if the
other folks in the region learn that that they don't have
to live under a religions dictatorship.The choice we dictate to them?What if they have
a choice.We used to actually declare war too. What happened to us?Like we used to have in the United States.
Maybe your right Ray. What if we just blame everybody but ourselves.
The blame for the sloppy execution of this war rests squarely on the shoulders of Bill Clinton.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
