Mullahgarchy Scorecard

Add three more provocations to the miles-long list of Iranian acts of war against the United States:

***Five more American hostages taken:

The words “Iran” and “hostage” typically evoke memories of 1979, but in truth the Khomeinists are still kidnapping minions of the Great Satan. Thursday the State Department confirmed that the Islamic Republic has taken yet another American hostage: Ali Shakeri, a U.S. citizen who visited Iran, disappeared there in March, and is now thought to be held in Tehran’s brutal Evin Prison. His seizure is an opportunity to reflect on the failure of President Bush’s current Iran policy, which has achieved nothing, is unlikely to achieve anything, and ought to be jettisoned.

We say “another American hostage” because several are already languishing in Iran’s dungeons. They are Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbaksh, both academics, and Parnaz Azima, a journalist. All were arrested on recent visits to Iran, and all have been accused of spying, a charge that carries the death penalty. A fifth American — Robert A. Levinson, a former FBI agent who was in Iran earlier this year on private business — has also vanished. Iran claims not to know what happened to him, but we have a theory.

The kidnapping in rapid succession of five Americans is an obvious pattern of aggression against the U.S. and the West.

***An Iranian connection to the "JFK Four" plot to blow up JFK International Airport and incinerate all of the borough of Queens with it:

The thing that caught our eye in the plot to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport and its oil lines concerns a detail in respect of the arrest of one of the key Guyanese suspects. It was the fact that the former member of the Guyanese legislature who was fingered in the plot, Abdul Kadir, was arrested in Trinidad on his way to Caracas, Venezuela. According to Mr. Kadir's wife, who was quoted in the Guyanese press, he was there to pick up an Iranian visa that would enable him to attend an Islamic conference in Tehran.

No doubt we will learn more about this plot as the weeks go on....But our attention has been riveted for some time on growing evidence that the Iranian regime has been moving aggressively to gain influence in our hemisphere, and the big surprise in the latest case is only that it took so long for something to develop....

While the Iranian entente with anti-American regimes in South America and the Caribbean was economic in nature, we predicted that eventually it would become military in nature. We noted that in the last several years Venezuela has been making billions of dollars in arms purchases, including both small arms and more serious weapons like the Sukhoi Su-30 Russian fighter jets and Russian-made attack helicopters. There is also increasing troop movement among the left-wing Latin American states. The military ambitions of Messrs. Chavez, Ortega, and Ahmadinejad spell trouble.

***The mullahs are not only running the "insurgency" waging war against the United States in Iraq, but are doing the exact same thing for the Taliban in Afghanistan:

NATO officials say they have caught Iran red-handed, shipping heavy arms, C4 explosives and advanced roadside bombs to the Taliban for use against NATO forces, in what the officials say is a dramatic escalation of Iran's proxy war against the United States and Great Britain.

"It is inconceivable that it is anyone other than the Iranian government that's doing it," said former White House counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, an ABC News
consultant.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stopped short earlier this week of blaming Iran, saying the U.S. did not have evidence "of the involvement of the Iranian government in support of the Taliban."

But an analysis by a senior coalition official, obtained by the Blotter on ABCNews.com, concludes there is clear evidence of Iran's involvement.

"This is part of a considered policy," says the analysis, "rather than the result of low-level corruption and weapons smuggling."

So much for the anti-war sacrament that Sunnis and Shiites won't cooperate against the common infidel. Just like the debunked left-wing claim that an Islamist imam/terrorist chieftain and a secular Ba'athist dictator wouldn't collaborate against the good ol' US of A.

Pity I can't say the same thing about what can only be described as the Carteresque non-response of the Bush Administration to these escalations. Not only are the mullahs bulldozing us out of their part of the world, but they're busily boxing us in in our own backyard. And what is the retort of the Bushies?

NRO's editors say it so well:

You sure wouldn’t know [that Iran was at war with America], though, from the relative silence of Washington officialdom — which has preferred, apart from a few milquetoast statements by a State Department spokesman, to treat the [hostage takings, terrorist plots, proxy wars] as isolated incidents....

We suspect the [Bush] Administration hasn’t made a bigger ruckus for fear of sabotaging the delicate “diplomacy” underway over Iran’s nuclear program. In practice, this diplomacy consists of interminable whining for Iran to stop enriching uranium and the mullahs’ none-too-subtle reply that the West should take a hike....

Why, then, does the Bush Administration’s strategy to stop the mullahs seem to start and end at the U.N.? Four years after giving Europe a green light to sweet-talk Iran out of its nuclear program, and nine months since the Security Council took up the issue in typically glacial fashion, the only fruits of diplomacy are two exceptionally weak sanctions resolutions. Faced with this impotence, why wouldn’t the mullahs keep sprinting toward the bomb? IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei, a reliable gauge of opinion in the “international community,” acknowledges that the attempt to block Iran from enriching uranium has failed. If at first you don’t succeed, try to revise your ambitions: ElBaradei now says we should merely ask Iran not to expand its enrichment operation. There is a word for this, and it is “appeasement.”...

What we fear — and, more alarming, what some of our friends close to the Administration fear — is that [the President] has no endgame outside Turtle Bay.

Thus cometh the inevitable end of the Bush Middle East/War On Terror strategy. He gambled that liberating Iraq and Afghanistan would be enough, and the example of their democratic transformation would overwhelm the surrounding autocracies and dictatorships and spread freedom and self-determination across the Muslim world. Instead the principle enemies of the West there - Iran and Syria - immediately began undermining and subverting the newly minted Iraqi and Afghan democratic experiments, guaranteeing precisely the type of long struggle that our modern political culture cannot tolerate. Last November the first stage of the Democrat return to power closed the window of opportunity for preventing an ultimate Iranian-instigated nuclear conflagration in the Middle East. Now we can do little but hope and pray that the political tides can somehow be turned before a disaster dwarfing 9/11 can land on us first.

George W. Bush, his presidency reduced to an empty, blackened husk of his own making, most likely "has no end game outside Turtle Bay" not just because he lacks the clout to make it happen like he did Operation Iraqi Freedom four-plus years ago, but also, I believe, because he has no desire, no stomach for fighting the War Against Islamic Fundamentalism to a victorious finish. Even if he did have the clout, I don't think he'd do what needs to be done - the invasion of Iran and toppling of the mullahgarchy. His heart wouldn't be in it. And in truth, I don't think it ever fully was.

He tried to fight a global war on the cheap. He tried to fight half a war and win the other half with wishful thinking. He's the burro that starved to death between two bales of hay. He's the guy who tried to drive his jalopy across a stream and got stuck, and now is inexorably being swept away by the current.

He's the President who began his presidency with a bullhorn atop some rubble, and will end it buried beneath more rubble.

God willing, all of it will be figurative. Otherwise, the rest of us won't be nearly as fortunate.