Iran Emboldened

Iran remains the #1 threat to world security, something we first highlighted 4 years ago.

Background: Recall the Nov/07 release of the US National Intelligence Estimate on Iranian nuclear ambitions - "We judge with high confidence that in the fall of 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." Oops. The NIE claim that Iran halted nuclear activities in 2003 through at least mid-2007 was a hatchet job cooked up by ex State Dept employees. We said in Dec/07 that it was false. (It was however great news for appeasers everywhere.)

With the latest widely-publicized intelligence release of a secret nuclear enrichment facility (a facility western intelligence has known existed for a long time, yet not perhaps, its purpose) it is clear that we were spot on. Too bad.

Now what? The mullahs are not worried. Obama kept quiet, did nothing while thousands went into the streets of Tehran to protest brutality and a rigged election. The administration's excuse then was that Obama would wait for October to showcase his transnational diplomatic charisma. Naturally the mullahs concluded that since BO lacked the guts to support an infant democracy in Iran, no way he will confront them on nuclear, aside from contentious table talk. They are right.

Two years ago we noted that an embargo of gasoline imports was the most effective tool, the most effective sanction to thwart an Iranian nuclear objective. The central idea of course - let the Iranian masses act as our agent, as our proxy. We have seen recently that they lack nothing by the way of courage. When that country’s out of gas, due to the belligerence of its oafish, troglodyte rulers, the masses will, despite the Revolutionary Guards, put these guys out of business. Pretty much everyone in Congress agrees with us. The problem is in implementation and for some reason (wonder, wonder) the notion can’t gain traction with other Western nations. And the US under the current administration will not go it alone.

That leaves the military. We predicted an Israeli strike by the end of Q1. We were wrong in our timing, but only in our timing. The NEI release gave instant motivation to Israel to institutionalize something that earlier had been only an outlier - a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. They knew then they would have to go it alone. Certainly, short of a gasoline blockade, they will. Or, we might one morning read of an industrial "accident" in Iran (US special forces about). Maybe that’s in the works. Wouldn’t that be lovely?

Robert Craven

Iran's Nuclear Ambitions - We Wish Obama the Best

We’re in the end game. We all know that the Bush administration failed to discourage Iran’s mullahs. The UN is impotent. Europe - chronic hand wringers. China and Russia - in this for the buck. The one potent tool available to the West - a gasoline embargo, now shedding horsepower as Chavez aids the mullahs to increase refining capacity. That leaves Israel, who will protect herself, striking for certain if the US/UK are not successful.

In this, Obama has a template, a role model, and as we will see, the applicability is obvious.

The conduct of foreign affairs is Obama’s chief responsibility. He had better take the time to post himself on a bit of history and on someone who did it right. Obama is after a legacy through the vehicle of health care. We would rather he establish his legacy through the vehicle of foreign policy as directed towards Iran.

Let John Pitney, gov’t professor at Claremont, take us back to another struggle: "The intellectual fad of the day when Reagan took over was ‘moral equivalence,’ the notion that a flawed America could not claim moral superiority over the Soviets. Reagan saw past this nonsense, declaring the USSR to be ‘the focus of evil in the modern world.’"

Indeed, Reagan knew that to define evil one must call it by its name. Reagan asked Americans (circumventing the press, most of Marin County, and the intellectual class as children at the dinner table) to stop labeling both sides as equally at fault, not to ignore the facts of history and results of aggression, not to remove from the struggle between good and evil.

In judging people and events we have often recalled the maxim - complexity is the last refuge of the scoundrel. We know readers understand how this applies. When Reagan took over the liberal premise was that all our many problems were just too, too complicated; there were no easy answers; any remedy required complicated legislation and extensive bureaucratic management. Anyone who thought otherwise, like Reagan, was a "simpleton." But Reagan knew better - "The fetish of complexity, the trick of making hard decisions harder to make - the art of rationalizing the non-decision, have made a ruin of foreign policy." Reagan said that there are simple answers to our problems, simple but hard.

Reagan had been dismissed as a dimwit but instead he became the most effective leader of the free world ever. "Some people think I’m simplistic," Reagan told Rich Allen in 1977 (later his security advisor), "but there’s a difference between simplistic and being simple. My theory of the cold war is that we win and they loose. What do you think of that?"

One biographer found the likes of von Mises and Hayek in his library - dense works of the political economy (often featured in our blogs) and all heavily underlined and annotated in Reagan’s handwriting. He was very bright, very focused. An epigram often cited when referring the Reagan - "The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Most politicians pretend to know many things. REAGAN KNEW ONE BIG THING - government is a threat to liberty, whether in the vicious form - Communism, or its benign form - the US bureaucracy.

Some say that he felt God was looking out for America. With that assist, he got the job done. His views may have been unsophisticated but as is was put by Bill Kristol in a piece on Reagan in Nov/97, "Political greatness requires the courage to be unsophisticated."

Need we say more? Good luck Obama.

Robert Craven