McCain Gets It Right; The MSM Is As Clueless As Obama About Iran

A lot of people are up in arms over the latest McCain ad.

Watch Obama in this video utterly minimize the threat posed the U.S., Israel and the West by Iran.



Now here is the latest McCain ad taking Obama to task for minimizing that threat.



According to Jake Trapper at ABC's Political Punch, this "crosses a new line into dishonesty." According to TPM, McCain has "badly distorted" Obama's words. And then there is excitable Andy, a man for whom anything said criticizing his personal saviour is per se 180 degrees of wrong.

I don't see it. Obama clearly minimized the threat posed to the U.S., Israel and the West by Iran - and it is a soon to be nuclear armed threat. True, Obama did so by analogizing Iran to other small rogue states and he did so in comparison to the Soviet Union. But that is meaningless. A nuclear armed Iran poses a threat that is, in its own way, more dangerous than that posed by the Soviet Union - both individually and because of its ramifications for the larger Middle East situation. The Soviet Union was a self contained threat and a nation fully amenable to the threat of mutually assured destruction. Obama seems to believe that Iran is and will be the same. He could not be more wrong.

Here is what I wrote on the topic a month before Obama uttered his mind-numbing judgment on Iran:

Iran is the single most destabilizing influence in the world today. Sec of Defense Robert Gates had it right when he said not too long ago

Everywhere you turn, it is the policy of Iran to foment instability and chaos, no matter the strategic value or cost in the blood of innocents - Christians, Jews and Muslims alike. . . . There can be little doubt that their destabilizing foreign policies are a threat to the interests of the United States, to the interests of every country in the Middle East, and to the interests of all countries within the range of the ballistic missiles Iran is developing.

And, as Stuart Levy, Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence recently testified before Congress, Iran is the "the central banker of terrorism." It "uses its global financial ties and its state-owned banks to pursue its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, and to fund terrorism."

To tick off the list of Iran’s threats:

- Iran is clearly doing all it can to prevent peace between Palestinians and Israel. And in rearming Hamas, it is doing so with substantially stronger rockets that can reach further into Israel, virtually insuring that Israel will have to take extreme measures to stop the daily attacks.

- Iran’s meddling in Lebanon has created a situation where both the Shia population and the country as a whole are dominated by Hezbollah, an army trained, armed and directed by Iran. Indeed, Hezbollah is now demanding veto power over acts of the Lebanese government. In the wake of the 2006 war with Israel, Iran is arming Hezbollah with much stronger rockets that can reach vitrutally all of Israel, thus insuring that the next war with Hezbollah will also be far more bloody for all of Lebanon.

- Iran has occupied several islands belonging to the UAE. Iran has supported attempted coups in Bahrain and, recently, Azerbaijan. Iran occupied a significant part of Iraqi territory immediately after Saddam's fall – some 1800 square-kilometers of the Zaynalkosh salient - and is making an effort to extend its dominance over the waterway on which sits Iraq's only major port.

- Iran is arming and training the Sudan's military, contributing to the on-going genocide in Darfur.

- Iran is now the single greatest threat to stability in Iraq. Iran is attempting to "Lebanize" Iraq, using "special groups" culled from Sadr’s Mahdi Army to create a Hezbollah type of militia that will keep Iraq’s central government weak and extend Iranian influence over Iraq’s Shia majority. Indeed, Iran’s campaign to create a satellite state of Iraq was clear from the very start of the U.S. invasion in March, 2003. Their "special groups" are responsible for the deaths of nearly 200 American soldiers and the wounding and maiming of hundreds of others.

- Iran’s drive towards a nuclear weapon is significantly destabilizing the Middle East and has already initiated what promises to be a nightmare of nuclear proliferation. "Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, the UAE, Yemen, Morocco, Libya, Jordan and Egypt have indicated an interest in developing nuclear programs, with Israeli officials saying that if these countries did not want the programs now for nuclear capabilities, they wanted the technology in place to keep "other options open" if Iran developed a bomb." According to a recent study initiated by Senator Lugar, "the future Middle East landscape may include a number of nuclear-armed or nuclear weapons-capable states vying for influence in a notoriously unstable region."

- And then of course is the threat that a nuclear armed Iran intrinsically poses. According to Bernard Lewis, the West’s premier Orientalist, Iran's theocracy operates outside the constraints of Western logic. The concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MADD) that worked against the Soviet Union and with other nuclear armed nations is not assured of working with a theocracy whose messianic rulers welcome the carnage that will presage the coming of the hidden Imam. And to add to that is the threat that Iran could well provide nuclear materials to terrorist groups in order to conduct attacks, such as dirty bombs, that could not necessarily be traced back to Iran. Such a scenario would be completely in keeping with the historical activities of Iran's theocracy.

Add to this list the tremendous threat posed by Iran as it attempts to develop an offensive EMP capability. If they succeed, they will be able to damage the U.S. irreparably with a single nuclear weapon detonated far from the shores of the U.S. There is nothing to indicate that Iran's mad mullahs would hesitate to use or threaten to use such a tactic.

McCain has it precisely right in his ad. Obama is clueless about the threat posed by Iran. I've also written here on the nature of the Iranian regime and how Obama's proposals to deal with Iran are just ridiculously naive. There is a reason Obama has the mad mullah's endorsement.

Obama's defenders are equally ignorant and naive. I guess the best analogy is this: Obama sees Iran as the Soviet Union in 1970 and amenable to talk. He is mistaken. Iran is far more like Germany in 1937. They intend to expand, and if they can do so by talk until such time as they are stong enough militarilly, than so much the better for them. The longer the they are able to draw this out, the more dangerous they become. Remember that Germany in 1936 and 1937 could have been stopped at minimal cost. Allowing the threat to percolate just a few more years set the stage for a conflagration that consumed the entire economy of Europe and saw the death of upwards of 50,000,000 people.