Our bad and worse choices about Iran
Friday, January 13th, 2006 9:31 pm by NealIf Iran can play brinkmanship now on just the promise of nuclear weapons, imagine its roguery to come when it is replete with them.
Our bad and worse choices about Iran is the latest from Victor Davis Hanson on the grim facts concerning the West’s imperative to prevent a nuclear Iran. After making the case that Ahmadinejad must not be allowed to possess nukes, Hanson reviews the options which, unfortunately, range from bad to horrible.
The fourth scenario is as increasingly dreaded as it is apparently inevitable — a U.S. air strike. Most hope that it can be delayed, since its one virtue — the elimination of the Iranian nuclear threat — must ipso facto outweigh the multifaceted disadvantages.
The Shiite allies in Iraq might go ballistic and start up a second front as in 2004. Muslim countries, the primary beneficiaries of a disarmed Iran, would still protest loudly that some of their territories, if only for purposes of intelligence and post-operative surveillance, were used in the strike. After Iraq, a hit on Iran would confirm to the Middle East Street a disturbing picture of American preemptory wars against Islamic nations.
Experts warn that we are not talking about a Clintonian one-day cruise-missile hit, or even something akin to General Zinni’s 1998 extended Operation Desert Fox campaign. Rather, the challenges call for something far more sustained and comprehensive — perhaps a week or two of bombing at every imaginable facility, many of them hidden in suburbs or populated areas. Commando raids might need to augment air sorties, especially for mountain redoubts deep in solid rock.
The political heat would mount hourly, as Russia, China, and Europe all would express shock and condemnation, and whine that their careful diplomatic dialogue had once again been ruined by the American outlaws. Soon the focus of the U.N. would not be on Iranian nuclear proliferation, or the role of Europe, Pakistan, China, and Russia in lending nuclear expertise to the theocracy, but instead on the mad bomber-cowboy George Bush. We remember that in 1981 the world did not blame the reckless and greedy French for their construction of a nuclear reactor for Saddam Hussein, but the sober Israelis for taking it out.
Ugh. If the US does what it must, expect the Democrats to be wailing and whining as loudly as the French and Russians. The Dems (with the MSM marching in lockstep) have become so pitifully predictable that you can bet the farm on how they’d react to US action in Iran. Hanson concludes
Finally, the public must be warned that dealing with a nuclear Iran is not a matter of a good versus a bad choice, but between a very bad one now and something far, far worse to come.