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January 23, 2005

Iran in the Sights?

The mullahs in Iran have apparently seen the tapes of President Bush's inaugural, and are back with what sounds like a great deal of bluff and bluster. The American public has no taste for another invasion right now, and that might not even be the best way to "deal with" the mullahs (if by "deal with," we mean, "have used as pinatas on Multicultural Day in the Teheran Public Schools"), letting them have a bomb is just not on the agenda.

I'm sure that 1) this would lengthen the war, and 2) the Left would be perfectly happy to spend the next 50 years explaining to use why this was actually a good thing, 3) the Left would also patiently explain that the whole thing was our fault anyway, 4) it would almost certainly mean the end of Israel and quite possibly mark the beginning of the end of the US as a great power.

Edward Luttwak, a realist who has been extremely skeptical of the Bush Doctrine, uses this week's Telegraph column to defend the need for such action, with or without the Europeans.

If Iran is to be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons, effective diplomatic or military action will have to come soon. Production facilities can be bombed but once actual weapons are assembled, locating and destroying them will become next to impossible. And Iran will then be in a position to threaten not just Israel, but all of our oil-producing Arab allies.

...

Conventional wisdom says that bombing Iran would lead to Iranians rallying round their government. I am not sure that would happen in today's Iran. Its rulers' bizarre combination of rigid religious conservatism, blatant corruption and economic incompetence has made them exceptionally unpopular. Half of the population is not Persian – and many of them would view an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities not as an attack upon them, but on their imperialist rulers. Even the Persian majority may not want their hated clerical despots to control nuclear bombs. A raid on nuclear sites, nearly all of which are in remote locations, may not provoke the population to rally round their rulers but, of course, the Iranian government would not collapse. Some form of retaliation would be inevitable.

...The truth is that nuclear- armed ayatollahs are unacceptable in Europe, America and Israel. Even the clerics, in their calmer and more rational moments, must know that accepting rewards for freezing Iran's nuclear programme is a better deal than getting bombed.

To which I can only say, go get 'em Edward, but I'm not so sure. The mullahs are canny and calculating, but they may be feeling the march of history a little too personally right about now. They've obviously made the calculation that the Europeans are already so cowed that a nuclear Iran won't make much difference in their foreign policies, and have staked the future of their dismal worldview on obtaining a bomb and just about all costs. They're probably right.

If we do decide to do something about Iran's reactionary reactors, it'll probably have to be another Made in the USA production.

Posted by joshuasharf at January 23, 2005 01:44 PM | TrackBack
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