Iraq may be the central front in the War on Radical Islam, but there should be no doubt about who the central enemy is. Iran's leader has told the Palestinians to be patient for just a little while longer, the Badr Brigade is busy giving the Iraqi government a bad name, and the Iranian armed forces are essentially fighting a proxy war against the British and us in Iraq.
Today, FrontPage publishes an interview with a former UNSCOM inspector. While his comments about Iraq have gotten most of the attention, this paragraph seems to have immediate relevance:
It was probably on my second inspection that I realized the Iraqis had no intention of ever cooperating. They had very successfully turned The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections during the eighties into tea parties, and had expected UNSCOM to turn out the same way. However, there was one fundamental difference between IAEA and UNSCOM that the Iraqis did not account for. There was a disincentive in IAEA inspections to be aggressive and intrusive, since the same standards could then be applied to the members states of the inspectors. IAEA had to consider the continued cooperation of all the member states. UNSCOM, however, was focused on enforcing and verifying one specific Security Council Resolution, 687, and the level of intrusiveness would depend on the cooperation from Iraq.
(Hat tip: Powerline)
Note that right now, today, as Iran either nears a bomb or bluffs its way to more time, the IAEA is the organization responsible for enforcing their cooperation, as task at which it has completely and utterly failed.
This is a real threat. Here. Today. Now.
If the Senate Democrats were part of a serious party, they'd be paying attention, prodding the Administration, turning up the heat on real, rather than imagined, enemies. But they have no agenda for dealing with Iran, any more than they have for dealing with Iraq. Their vocabulary for dealing with enemies doesn't extend past the international alphabet soup that already doesn't work. Any more than their worldview allows for the existence of actual enemies.
So it's not only that they're reduced to Orwellian rewritings of history, using selective readings that do little more than prove that all intelligence analysis is a judgment call, that you can always find someone who disagrees. (See Joel Engel, Norman Podhoretz, Stephen Hayes, and others for more complete rebuttals.) It's that they fundamentally don't see anything wrong with trying to cripple the Administration diplomatically, or keep it from acting effectively.
I'm sure that when they wake up to newscasts talking about the former city of Tel Aviv, they'll be full of remorse.
Until the next news cycle.
