Wrong Question

Matt Drudge links to a news story about what could be a series of covert military attacks against Iran, and whose headline is, "Has the War with Iran Already Begun?" The headline borders on sensationalism in this day and age, with its pacifistic -- and misplaced -- concern for civilian casualties during war. (The blame for all casualties a country fights in a war of self-defense lies with the aggressor.) However, this headline is anything but perspicacious. Iran started a war against the United States when it stormed our embassy and took hostages over thirty years ago, and invited war long before that, when it nationalized the oil fields of British and American countries sixty years ago.

Were it true that America is fighting back, the proper headline would be more like, "It's About [insert expletive here] Time!" However, I would find such a headline premature, absent an unequivocal condemnation of Iran, a declaration of war, and something quite a bit more impressive than the kinds of pinprick strikes that will leave its evil regime in place, undeterred, and able -- in any way, shape, or form -- to continue waging its barbaric war against the West.

What the headline ought to ask is this: "Why Beat Around the Bush?" As Ayn Rand once indicated, we have had the right to invade Iran for decades.

Dictatorship nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba or any other slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self-interest, not of respect for the non-existent "rights" of gang rulers. It is not a free nation's duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses.

And, yes, we have ample reasons, related to our national self-interest, to do just that.

Sadly, our current administration, like the one before it, does not regard national self-interest as a legitimate reason to exercise its military might, which could lay waste to any Middle Eastern "power" in a very short time.

Stay tuned for wishful official "intelligence estimates" that Iran hasn't enough nuclear capability to do anything sufficient to outrage the West -- what would that take, anyway? -- and more of the same raving denouncements of America and earnest preparations for war by the Medieval barbarians of modern Persia.

-- CAV

--- In Other News ---

Right Target, Wrong Reason: OWS squatters have come to Washington, but are still making redistributionist demands. Given their propensity to use the ground as a latrine, the first image in this pictorial, of copies of the U. S. Constitution lying on the ground, is unintentionally apropos.

Farhad Manjoo makes part of a case that needs to be made against modern culture when he notes that, "You're as much to blame for Facebook's privacy woes as Mark Zuckerberg." I agree with his pithy advice to apply a sort of bedroom window test to anything you may contemplate posting there. And this beer cozy might help, too!

Clint Dempey's lone goal yesterday was the difference as Fulham beat Liverpool, and with it, he broke Brian McBride's record as the highest-scoring American player in the EPL.

Updates

12-7-11: Corrected a typo.