CONFRONTING IRAN
Diplomacy is doing nothing to stop the Iranian nuclear threat; a show of force is the only answer.By Joshua Muravchik, JOSHUA MURAVCHIK is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
November 19, 2006
WE MUST bomb Iran.
It has been four years since that country's secret nuclear program was brought to light, and the path of diplomacy and sanctions has led nowhere.
First, we agreed to our allies' requests that we offer Tehran a string of concessions, which it spurned. Then, Britain, France and Germany wanted to impose a batch of extremely weak sanctions. For instance, Iranians known to be involved in nuclear activities would have been barred from foreign travel — except for humanitarian or religious reasons — and outside countries would have been required to refrain from aiding some, but not all, Iranian nuclear projects.
But even this was too much for the U.N. Security Council. Russia promptly announced that these sanctions were much too strong. "We cannot support measures … aimed at isolating Iran," declared Foreign Minister Sergei V. Lavrov.
It is now clear that neither Moscow nor Beijing will ever agree to tough sanctions. What's more, even if they were to do so, it would not stop Iran, which is a country on a mission. As President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad put it: "Thanks to the blood of the martyrs, a new Islamic revolution has arisen…. The era of oppression, hegemonic regimes and tyranny and injustice has reached its end…. The wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world." There is simply no possibility that Iran's clerical rulers will trade this ecstatic vision for a mess of Western pottage in the form of economic bribes or penalties.
Snip...
Our options therefore are narrowed to two: We can prepare to live with a nuclear-armed Iran, or we can use force to prevent it. Former ABC newsman Ted Koppel argues for the former, saying that "if Iran is bound and determined to have nuclear weapons, let it." We should rely, he says, on the threat of retaliation to keep Iran from using its bomb. Similarly, Newsweek International Editor Fareed Zakaria points out that we have succeeded in deterring other hostile nuclear states, such as the Soviet Union and China.
Snip...
Can President Bush take such action after being humiliated in the congressional elections and with the Iraq war having grown so unpopular? Bush has said that history's judgment on his conduct of the war against terror is more important than the polls. If Ahmadinejad gets his finger on a nuclear trigger, everything Bush has done will be rendered hollow. We will be a lot less safe than we were when Bush took office.
Edited to add perspective:
Sunday, November 19, 2006
Josh Muravchik is a real prize, but at least he helps me hold out hope that, if I fail to get tenure, I could drop 40 or so IQ points in the ensuing binge and still get a job at the American Enterprise Institute. Josh:
In short, Tehran can build influence on a mix of ethnicity and ideology, underwritten by the region's largest economy. Nuclear weapons would bring regional hegemony within its reach by intimidating neighbors and rivals and stirring the admiration of many other Muslims.
<...>
The only way to forestall these frightening developments is by the use of force. Not by invading Iran as we did Iraq, but by an air campaign against Tehran's nuclear facilities.
Right, and since Muravchik allows in this very column that an attack will give Tehran MORE influence, GREATER capacity to build on ethnicity and ideology, and win the admiration of many other Muslims WITHOUT the need for a nuclear program, it's quite likely to exacerbate the very problems that Muravchik poses. To make things worse, Muravchik cuts and pastes from half a dozen or so Weekly Standard articles in an effort to compare modern Iran with Germany in 1933 or the Soviet Union in 1917. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, Josh, but isn't it true that only a genuine moron would believe that the rise of either Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia could have been forestalled by a few airstrikes. Indeed, as Yglesias points out, the Western Allies (and Japan)
DID intervene in Russia in a failed effort to strangle the revolution in its crib. There's nothing worse than a neocon without the courage of his own convictions.
The LA Times typically refrains, Jonah Goldberg aside, from publishing the incoherent scrawlings of stoned 8th graders. Hopefully there will come a time when nonsense like this receives the same treatment. It barely rises to the level of the
New Federalist.
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