Wobbly
The facts:
The President of the United States, September 20, 2001 (paraphrased):
The President of the United States, this week:
The President of the United States, 2002 Statue of the Union Address (paraphrased):
The policy of the President of the United States to prevent the world's most dangerous regime from acquiring the world's most dangerous weapons, 2006:
The guaranteed result of this policy?
If this sounds like the Bill Clinton/Jimmy Carter "solution" to North Korea going nuclear twelve years ago, congratulations, you're several yawning steps ahead of the guy that succeeded them.
I feel like throwing up. We're handing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad not just the world's largest carrot, but one with a fuse sticking out the top and already well-lubed to be shoved up our collective ass, lit, and ***KABOOM*** I'll wager the reason he hasn't taken our suicidally generous offer - and, for the record, I've seen nobody else anywhere in the blogosphere suggest this, so as far as I know I'm the first to make this prediction - is that the big surprise he has waiting for us on August 22nd, is a real, genuine, honest-to-goodness above-ground nuclear test. The point? To show the whole world that they don't need our steenking help to become a global superpower, nor to purchase any of our rope in order to hang us.
No, the Danegolding will come afterward, when the mullahs dictate their terms to us upon threat of Israel's incineration. And we can pretty confidently count on two of them - dismantling Israel and our withdrawal not just from Iraq, but the Middle East altogether - being very high on the laundry list.
Will George W. Bush submit to nuclear blackmail? The mullahs obviously think so. Indeed, they believe that, with his popularity in the toilet, the American people "turning against the war," and not wanting to be "responsible" for another Holocaust (as opposed to the slower version he would be signing off on), he'll simply have no alternative. Indeed, it was his Administration that pulled the plug on Israel's ineffective counter-offensive against Hezbollah and handed the Iranian proxies and their masters up the food chain in Damascus and Tehran a comprehensive strategic victory. If the latter can accomplish that with a few thousand Katyusha rockets, what reason do they have to doubt what they can win with the threat of a couple of nuclear missiles and the proof that they can deliver them on Haifa and Tel Aviv?
Three years ago in the wake of Operation Iraqi Freedom I argued that we needed to ride the military and psychological momentum of that three-week blitzkrieg straight across the border and on to Tehran while our regional "street cred" as unstoppable global badass was at its peak and before the Iranians could win their race to join the nuclear club. Lib commenters called the idea "madness," but my reasoning was brutally, well, "realistic": We're going to have to fight the mullahs sooner or later (especially since they've been fighting us ever since 1979); better to do so sooner, at our initiative, when the cost will be lower and victory much more assured, than later, when our will is sapped by internal division and short public attention span, our enemy is stronger and more confident, and the chances of a far larger and messier conflict at the time and place of the mullahgarchy's choosing - one in which victory is a whole lot more problematic - are exponentially greater.
The Bushies didn't take that advice. They went the "diplomacy with a hint of steel" route instead. And here we sit three years later, Israeli deterrence (the only thing that has prevented another general Middle East war since 1973) in ruins, Islamist Iran triumphant and feeling the oats to go for the West's jugular, even what the White House has accomplished in Iraq falling apart (at Iran's instigation), and sitting on our hands in nervous trepidation of what the Persian Hitler has in store next Tuesday.
And the President is so cowed that he has been bullied away from identifying our enemies by name - even in so clinically qualified a fashion.
Funny, when I went to my polling place two years ago I thought I was voting against this kind of boot-licking insanity. I thought it was John Kerry who was going to build the mullahs' nukes for them, serve as diplomatic lapdog to the EUnuchs, and go sit in Kofi Annan's corner, complete with dunce cap, while the Middle East went up in Islamist flames. If I'd known that Dubya was going to morph into his father in the second term, I might have taken Election Day off and curled up with a good book instead. Or maybe broken ground on a fallout shelter in my backyard. Too late for that, now, too.
The words of Jack Kinsella resonate the looming bitter harvest of failed leadership, collapsed courage, and sorely missed opportunties:
UPDATE: Gerard Baker has some toe-curlers as well.
ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of Britain's 'home-grown terrorists' planning to blow up twelve trans-Atlantic aircraft filled with non-combatant men, women and children at random are Muslims. ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of Canada's 'home-grown terrorists' are Muslims. ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of the detainees in the war on terror are Muslims.
ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of the terrorists killed in active combat against the United States were Muslims. ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of the suicide bombers who blew themselves up as an act of war against the West were Muslims.
ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of the terrorists who murdered more than three thousand innocent people on September 11 in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania were Muslims.
The President of the United States, September 20, 2001 (paraphrased):
"The nations of the world will have to make a choice: you're either with us, or you're with the terrorists."
The President of the United States, this week:
"President Bush has avoided repetition of a term that angered Muslims. Responding last week to the foiling of an alleged plot to blow up flights between Britain and the United States, Bush said, 'This nation is at war with Islamic fascists.' That triggered immediate objections from the Council of American-Islamic Relations, and another objection today from the government of Saudi Arabia. In a statement after its weekly meeting, the Saudi Cabinet 'warned against labeling Muslims with accusations of terrorism and fascism.' Bush didn't repeat the reference to 'Islamic fascists' at the State Department today, referring instead to 'individuals that would like to kill innocent Americans to achieve political objectives.'"
The President of the United States, 2002 Statue of the Union Address (paraphrased):
"[Iraq, Iran, and North Korea] constitute an axis of evil....We will not wait while storm clouds gather....We will not allow the world's most dangerous regimes to acquire the world's most dangerous weapons."
The policy of the President of the United States to prevent the world's most dangerous regime from acquiring the world's most dangerous weapons, 2006:
The Bush Administration is offering Iran a diplomatic package including cooperation on civil aviation, increased international trade and investment, and agricultural and telecommunications assistance. The package’s most stunning provisions, though, are nuclear. These include building Iran more “state of the art” power and research reactors, assuring a “buffer stock of up to five years supply of nuclear fuel,” and suspending “discussion of Iran’s nuclear program at the U.N. Security Council.” [emphasis added]
The guaranteed result of this policy?
A study [the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center] completed two years ago that reassesses the proliferation dangers of light water reactors actually details how Iran could divert spent fuel for the purpose of making weapons. Using relatively crude technology, Iran could build a small, covert reprocessing plant in a matter of months that would be almost impossible to detect until it began reprocessing spent fuel. With this plant ready, Iran could divert enough spent fuel from the reactor site to make its first bomb in less than a matter of two weeks—and an additional bomb for every day it was kept open after that. International inspectors might not even be able to detect the initial diversion. Worse, after only the first year of operation, the reactor would have produced enough near-weapons-grade plutonium to make over fifty nuclear weapons. With numbers this large, Iran might well have an incentive to overtly break out.
To address this problem, Washington urged Russia, Bushehr’s builder, to promise to take back all of the spent fuel from the reactor. There were only two problems: Moscow could only get Iran to agree to allow turn over spent fuel for the first ten years of the reactor’s operation, and even then there always would be enough spent fuel in or outside of the reactor at any time to make at least thirty or more nuclear weapons. For some reason, this was considered to be good enough. [emphases added]
If this sounds like the Bill Clinton/Jimmy Carter "solution" to North Korea going nuclear twelve years ago, congratulations, you're several yawning steps ahead of the guy that succeeded them.
I feel like throwing up. We're handing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad not just the world's largest carrot, but one with a fuse sticking out the top and already well-lubed to be shoved up our collective ass, lit, and ***KABOOM*** I'll wager the reason he hasn't taken our suicidally generous offer - and, for the record, I've seen nobody else anywhere in the blogosphere suggest this, so as far as I know I'm the first to make this prediction - is that the big surprise he has waiting for us on August 22nd, is a real, genuine, honest-to-goodness above-ground nuclear test. The point? To show the whole world that they don't need our steenking help to become a global superpower, nor to purchase any of our rope in order to hang us.
No, the Danegolding will come afterward, when the mullahs dictate their terms to us upon threat of Israel's incineration. And we can pretty confidently count on two of them - dismantling Israel and our withdrawal not just from Iraq, but the Middle East altogether - being very high on the laundry list.
Will George W. Bush submit to nuclear blackmail? The mullahs obviously think so. Indeed, they believe that, with his popularity in the toilet, the American people "turning against the war," and not wanting to be "responsible" for another Holocaust (as opposed to the slower version he would be signing off on), he'll simply have no alternative. Indeed, it was his Administration that pulled the plug on Israel's ineffective counter-offensive against Hezbollah and handed the Iranian proxies and their masters up the food chain in Damascus and Tehran a comprehensive strategic victory. If the latter can accomplish that with a few thousand Katyusha rockets, what reason do they have to doubt what they can win with the threat of a couple of nuclear missiles and the proof that they can deliver them on Haifa and Tel Aviv?
Three years ago in the wake of Operation Iraqi Freedom I argued that we needed to ride the military and psychological momentum of that three-week blitzkrieg straight across the border and on to Tehran while our regional "street cred" as unstoppable global badass was at its peak and before the Iranians could win their race to join the nuclear club. Lib commenters called the idea "madness," but my reasoning was brutally, well, "realistic": We're going to have to fight the mullahs sooner or later (especially since they've been fighting us ever since 1979); better to do so sooner, at our initiative, when the cost will be lower and victory much more assured, than later, when our will is sapped by internal division and short public attention span, our enemy is stronger and more confident, and the chances of a far larger and messier conflict at the time and place of the mullahgarchy's choosing - one in which victory is a whole lot more problematic - are exponentially greater.
The Bushies didn't take that advice. They went the "diplomacy with a hint of steel" route instead. And here we sit three years later, Israeli deterrence (the only thing that has prevented another general Middle East war since 1973) in ruins, Islamist Iran triumphant and feeling the oats to go for the West's jugular, even what the White House has accomplished in Iraq falling apart (at Iran's instigation), and sitting on our hands in nervous trepidation of what the Persian Hitler has in store next Tuesday.
And the President is so cowed that he has been bullied away from identifying our enemies by name - even in so clinically qualified a fashion.
Funny, when I went to my polling place two years ago I thought I was voting against this kind of boot-licking insanity. I thought it was John Kerry who was going to build the mullahs' nukes for them, serve as diplomatic lapdog to the EUnuchs, and go sit in Kofi Annan's corner, complete with dunce cap, while the Middle East went up in Islamist flames. If I'd known that Dubya was going to morph into his father in the second term, I might have taken Election Day off and curled up with a good book instead. Or maybe broken ground on a fallout shelter in my backyard. Too late for that, now, too.
The words of Jack Kinsella resonate the looming bitter harvest of failed leadership, collapsed courage, and sorely missed opportunties:
It is time to revisit that seminal question that so troubles American Christians in their study of Bible prophecy. Where IS America in Bible prophecy? We have now before us the clues necessary to unravel this Biblical puzzler, assuming anyone has the courage to announce the obvious conclusion out loud and in public. The answer is as obvious as it is terrifying.
Before we figured out who our enemy was, we had already lost the war.
UPDATE: Gerard Baker has some toe-curlers as well.
posted by JASmius at 3:07 PM
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