Two Good Ones on Iran

First, via Thrutch, there is an outstanding article in the Jerusalem Post on the threat posed by Iran and what the United States must do about it. The article does what no one in the American media has done to my knowledge: It hold our President accountable for his stated objectives in this war versus his record so far. The article (1) reminds us of our President's own words, (2) examines the case of North Korea to find his actions so far wanting, (3) notes that the stakes are much higher with Iran, and (4) raises a question for our Commander-in-Chief. Excerpts pertaining to each of these points are, in turn:

(1) At his January 2002 State of the Union address, the president declared that the regimes of Iran, North Korea and Iraq comprised an axis of evil and a central goal ... of the US-led war was to prevent them from acquiring or maintaining arsenals of weapons of mass destruction.

If we accept Bush's definition of the aims of the war, then five years on, the inescapable conclusion is that the US and its allies, such as they are, are losing this war and losing it badly. Iraq's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction was not captured by US forces who heroically brought down Saddam Hussein's regime three years ago this week. It vanished before they arrived.

(2) As for North Korea, 10 months after Bush labeled the Stalinist regime in Pyongyang a member of the axis of evil, North Korea announced that it had systematically breached its 1994 agreement with the US not to develop a nuclear arsenal and had harvested plutonium from some 8,000 spent fuel rods at its Russian-built Yangbon reactor. Immediately after the North Koreans admitted their duplicity, the US acknowledged that China, Russia and Pakistan had all actively assisted North Korea in developing its nuclear weapons program behind America's back.

So Bush was being played for a fool. A year after the September 11 attacks, America learned that neither its enemies nor its purported allies took Washington's war goals seriously. North Korea thumbed its nose at Bush, and Pakistan, China and Russia willfully betrayed him.

The Bush administration reacted to the ruin of its Asian strategy by pretending that it hadn't failed. Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and other top administration officials lauded Pakistan for its commitment to preventing North Korea from acquiring nuclear capabilities even as it became public knowledge that Islamabad had transferred centrifuges for uranium enrichment to the North Koreans. They said that China and Russia both knew that a nuclear-armed North Korea was inimical to their national interests and to global security even as neither Beijing nor Moscow expressed the slightest regret for their assistance to North Korea's nuclear program and gave no pledge to cease that assistance.

(3) To date, the US's official policy for contending with Iran is to seek redress in the UN Security Council. That is, the US has placed the responsibility for meeting what it has itself admitted is the greatest threat to global security in the hands of nations that do not share its assessment of Iran. By seeking Security Council action on Iran, the US has delegated the power for contending with the Iranian nuclear threat to China and Russia which have both assisted Iran in developing its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

Like its policy towards North Korea, the US's policy towards Iran serves not to thwart Teheran's nuclear aspirations but to facilitate them. It serves not to expand America's options for contending with this grave and gathering threat to its national security and global interests, but to limit them.

(4) This week Teheran threw down the gauntlet. The greatest battle of this war - the battle to prevent the world's most dangerous regime from attaining the most dangerous weapons known to man - has begun. The moment has arrived for President George W. Bush to make clear if he is, in the final analysis, the leader of the free world or its undertaker. [numbers and bold added]

If there is a flaw in this article, it is that it seems to agree with Bush that "the most crucial goal" of the current war is to prevent rogue states from acquiring WMDs. While this is undeniably important, it is not the only (or even the primary) reason we should depose the regime in Iran. On that matter, Robert Tracinski of TIA daily weighs in.

For the past week, newspapers and magazines have been filled with discussion of possible military action against Iran. The debate, so far, is between those who merely want to "threaten" the use of force, and those who argue that the Iranian threat is illusory. No one is yet willing to face the fact that Iran is already at war with the United States -- and that Iran is the central enemy we have to defeat if we are going to win the War on Terrorism. [bold added]

And if the central reason for fighting Iran is that it is the lynchpin of the Islamic Totalitarian axis in the current war, that fact affects our goals as well.

A war with Iran must begin with the destruction of its nuclear facilities, but it must not end there. Iran is likely to respond to any American attack by escalating, inciting an uprising in Southern Iraq, unleashing a wave of terrorist attacks, launching missiles against US targets in the Middle East, attacking oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. And even if we neutralize all of these threats, Iran's theocrats will not drop their global ambitions. They will merely wait for our attention to wander and attempt to strike us again. The goal of a war against Iran must be to topple the Iranian regime -- and to support the rise of a new government formed by the secularist dissidents who now languish in Iran's prisons.

The wars we have fought so far, against the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Baathist regime in Iraq -- were necessary, but they left the largest, most dangerous Islamist regime untouched. The Iranians know it. Sensing American weakness, they are moving against us on all fronts -- and any further delay in pushing them back will only make the task more difficult. We have to act -- and we have to act now.

There can be no victory in the War on Terrorism until we confront -- and defeat -- the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is the real war, and it's time we started fighting it. [bold added]

Both articles are must-reads.

-- CAV