Watcher's Council Forum - Are Negotiations With Iran Worth Continuing?

Each week, the Watcher's Council hosts a forum, as well as a weekly contest among the council members for best post of the week. This week's forum question is "are negotiations with Iran worth continuing?" I have kindly been invited to respond.

Update: The Forum is up at the Watcher's Council. Do click over to read a variety of intelligent views on this issue.

Until the reelection of Obama in 2012, negotiations with Iran were based on multiple UN declarations requiring that Iran cease any further enrichment of uranium that could be used for a nuclear arsenal. Those negotiations were backed by sanctions that were hurting the Iranian economy and, deep in the background, there was a threat of force if the negotiations failed. Arguably, force should have been applied years ago, but be that as it may, the sanctions were hurting Iran sufficiently that they've come to the table to have them lifted.

But the negotiations as they now exist are over a Proposed Framework that would lift sanctions, see the continuation of the Iranian nuclear program as well as continued development of Iran's delivery systems for nuclear weapons, and give the imprimatur of the U.S. and the U.N. to full scale development of an Iranian nuclear arsenal in a decade. The collateral effect of a deal on these terms would be to see Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey create their own nuclear arsenal. All of this would be, in the words of Charles Krauthammer, "a catastrophe, not a strategic objective."

No, the negotiations over the Proposed Framework are not worth continuing. The mere fact that they happened is insanity itself.

The contention from Obama that it is either this or we de facto acquiesce to an Iranian nuclear arsenal is suicidal fallacy. According to Obama, sanctions will not work to end the Iranian threat. As to force, Obama stated in his NYT interview with Tom Friedman, that “a military strike or a series of military strikes can set back Iran’s nuclear program for a period of time — but almost certainly will prompt Iran to rush towards a bomb, will provide an excuse for hard-liners inside of Iran to say, ‘This is what happens when you don’t have a nuclear weapon: America attacks.’"

As I wrote in a critique of that interview:

. . . Economic sanctions with a threat of force is what brought Iran to the table. Now Obama claims that neither continued and ever increasing economic sanctions will work and use of force will only lead Obama to a nuclear weapon more quickly? That is ludicrous. One, economic sanctions were crippling Iran's economy and can work if given time. The negotiations ongoing now are proof.

But if we run out of time, there must be a threat of overwhelming force. The Iranian regime is wholly dependent on sales of oil and gas for it's economy. Cut them off from their oil and gas and the bloody theocracy would soon fall. All of Iran's oil and gas fields are on a strip running along the western border of the country. Indeed, when Iraq attacked Iran in the 1980's, their master plan was to take control of a portions of that western border region. It was actually a workable strategy, had Saddam Hussein not been an incompetent commander. Bottom line, there is no need to attack all of Iran to bring the theocracy to its knees and destroy it. Because of its dependence on oil revenues and the vulnerability of its oil fields, it would be much easier to bring decisive force on the theocracy than it might at first blush appear. The whole concept of using force is based on the truism that you use it until the other side gives up. It's kind of been that way since before the written word. Obama's claim that force would only lead Iran to faster development of nuclear weapons would only be true if the force used were utterly insufficient and ineffective to convince the mad mullahs that they would lose everything if they continue to pursue nuclear weapons.

So bottom line, negotiations over a Proposed Framework should end now. Negotiations from the deck of the 5th Fleet anchored in the Persian Gulf and backed by the threat of overwhelming force to end, once and for all, Iran's nuclear program should recommence. But those negotiations should come with a hard end date, when words end and diplomacy "by other means" begins. And that threat of force should be multilateral, including not just the U.S. and Israel, but all of the other nations that have a stake in seeing that Iran's mad theocrats never gain a nuclear arsenal. That should be about 205 by my count. There are no other acceptable options. Peace in our time with a nuclear armed Iranian theocracy is as impossible today as "peace in our time" was impossible in 1930's Europe with Hitler and his Nazi regime.

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The Iran Deal - A Framework For Disaster

Above is President Obama's speech yesterday announcing a framework for an agreement with Iran regarding its nuclear program. This framework is a disaster.

It's impossible to fathom just what is motivating President Obama to seek out and make a deal with the mad mullahs of Iran that would allow them to keep an operational nuclear program that has but a single purpose -- the creation of nuclear weapons. It is no secret that Iran's theocracy is a rogue regime; that they are at war with the U.S. and have been since 1979; that they are the world's leading sponsor and central banker of terrorism; and, because the made mullahs believe that to die in jihad is a sure ticket to an endless heavenly sex orgy and because they have an apocalyptic vision of the Second Coming of their savior, the Mahdi, that requires chaos throughout the world, they are not likely to be deterred from the use of nuclear weapons by the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction. It is a regime that is every bit as bloody and expansionist as Hitler and the Nazis, and one that recognizes no moral strictions on its goal to export the Khomeinist revolution. They are an existential threat to every nation in the Middle East, to America, to Israel, and quite literally every other nation in the world.

There is only one possible acceptable solution to the Iranian nuclear program -- it must end and end completely, whether that be voluntarily on Iran's part or brought about by force of arms. Anything else is sheer suicide and every day we wait, the potential cost in gold and blood to accomplish this necessity rises.

Since word leaked to the world in 2002 that Iran had a covert nuclear program, the U.S. policy has indeed been that Iran must end its uranium enrichment program, period. President Bush built an international coalition that demanded an end to Iran's uranium enrichment and backed up that demand with ever more restrictive economic sanctions. When Obama ran for the Presidency in 2008 and 2012 he sounded these same calls, indicating that he would back them up by force if necessary. But after his election in 2012, Obama immediately sought to loosen Congressionally imposed sanctions on Iran that were really starting to bite the Iranian economy and, if kept in place for the long term, would have left the regime with a choice between economic disaster or its nuclear weapons program. Obama began secret negotiations with the regime that have ended in the disaster we see before us today.

So let's take a look at the framework for agreement that the Obama administration is now touting. You can find a State Dept. Fact Sheet on the agreement here.

Note at the outset two points. One, Iran has already contested the accuracy of the fact sheet being presented to our nation. Iran claims that the Obama administration has already agreed to lift all sanctions immediately upon inking a final agreement, no waiting for verification of Iran's compliance. Two, this deals contains sunset provisions, as Obama indicates in his statement at the top of this page. That means that, in reality, this agreement does worse than nothing. It allows Iran to continue their nuclear program and experimentation, and then emerge on the threshold of a nuclear arsenal in ten or fifteen years with the approval of the U.S. government. Here is how the Washington Post describes this abortion:

THE “KEY parameters” for an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program released Thursday fall well short of the goals originally set by the Obama administration. None of Iran’s nuclear facilities — including the Fordow center buried under a mountain — will be closed. Not one of the country’s 19,000 centrifuges will be dismantled. Tehran’s existing stockpile of enriched uranium will be “reduced” but not necessarily shipped out of the country. In effect, Iran’s nuclear infrastructure will remain intact, though some of it will be mothballed for 10 years. When the accord lapses, the Islamic republic will instantly become a threshold nuclear state.

That’s a long way from the standard set by President Obama in 2012 when he declared that “the deal we’ll accept” with Iran “is that they end their nuclear program” and “abide by the U.N. resolutions that have been in place.” Those resolutions call for Iran to suspend the enrichment of uranium. Instead, under the agreement announced Thursday, enrichment will continue with 5,000 centrifuges for a decade, and all restraints on it will end in 15 years. . .

Even if this agreement went on in perpetuity and actually stood a chance, on paper at least, of stopping Iran from getting a nuclear arsenal, it still suffers from fatal defects. One, it involves the UN Security Council directly in issues of our national security. Anyone who remembers the perfidy of Russia and China in the leadup to the second Gulf War, as well as the incredible treachery of France, will immediately grasp that the UN Security Council is not concerned with U.S. national security and should not be able to insinuate itself in any way into our national security decisions. Two, the inspection regime, which looks quite detailed and complete on paper, is far too unwieldy to allow for timely and aggressive response to cheating by Iran. That is the point made forcefully by former CIA Director Michael Hayden, Olli Heinonen, formerly of the IAEA, and Iranian expert Ray Takeyh in a Washington Post op-ed yesterday.

This agreement, best case scenario with Iran meticulously complying with every provision, will accomplish the following.

1. It will leave Iran with an operational nuclear program and a clear path to nuclear weapons development in fifteen years. It is in essence a sure path to war in the Middle East, but one which gives the mad mullahs a fifteen year breathing space in which to prepare. Hitler should have been so lucky.

2. It will remove sanctions from the Iranian economy, allowing them to become far more secure even as they promote war and terrorism across the globe.

3. It will leave Iran the strongest power in the Middle East and directly threaten the survival of our allies in the region, not least of which is Israel.

4. It will not touch Iran's development of ICBM's to deliver their eventual nuclear payloads to any spot in the world, including our nation.

5. It will touch off nuclear proliferation in some, if not most, of the Middle Eastern nations threatened by Iran. The only thing more frightening than Iran with a nuclear capability is Saudi Arabia, the nation whose Wahhabist form of Islam has been the wellspring for virtually every Sunni terrorist group, from al Qaeda to ISIS.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but how is any single one of those outcomes in the interests of our nation. Bottom line, this agreement is a recipe for disaster and it must be stopped before its foreseeable costs in blood and gold come due.

Udpate: Charles Krauthammer's opinion of the framework:

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The National Security Disaster That Is The Obama Administration

According to an article in the WSJ (available around the paywall here), the 2012 raid on the bin Laden compound in Pakistan netted the single greatest collection of intelligence materials since 9/11. At the time -- and since -- the Obama message was that al Qaeda was all but destroyed and that it was time to wind down the war on terror. As Obama said, when two years ago he asked Congress to repeal the Authorization For Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed in the wake of 9/11, this war on terror "must end."

However, the wealth of materials captured in the bin Laden raid told a different story. They told of a vastly expanding threat from al Qaeda, the Taliban and the ISIS, as well as complicity by Iran. Those facts contradicted the Obama administration's narrative, so not only were they kept from the public eye, but in what can only be seen as treasonous insanity, they were walled off from analysis by our intelligence community for at least a year, and have had only limited availability since. Yes, read that last line twice and let it sink in.

After a pitched bureaucratic battle [that lasted about a year], a small team of analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency and Centcom was given time-limited, read-only access to the documents. The DIA team began producing analyses reflecting what they were seeing in the documents.

At precisely the time Mr. Obama was campaigning on the imminent death of al Qaeda, those with access to the bin Laden documents were seeing, in bin Laden’s own words, that the opposite was true. Says Lt. Gen. Flynn: “By that time, they probably had grown by about—I’d say close to doubling by that time. And we knew that.”

This wasn’t what the Obama White House wanted to hear. So the administration cut off DIA access to the documents and instructed DIA officials to stop producing analyses based on them.

Even this limited glimpse into the broader set of documents revealed the problems with the administration’s claims about al Qaeda. Bin Laden had clear control of al Qaeda and was intimately involved in day-to-day management. More important, given the dramatic growth of the terror threat in the years since, the documents showed that bin Laden had expansion plans. . . .

The WSJ article goes on to argue for making all of the documents from the bin Laden raid publicly available. I'd be satisfied if they'd just make them available to our intel analysts. This incident highlights both how and why Obama's foreign policy has been a complete disaster for our national security. Obama's policies are completely out of touch with reality. Obama values ideology and political power more than he does our national security. And while our nation can recover from the economic disaster that the Obama regime has been, it is far less certain that we can recover from the damage Obama has done to our national security,

In 2008, I wrote a post supporting John McCain's presidential bid on the issue of national security. I argued that McCain could be expected to make national security decisions respecting "Iran, Iraq and terrorism" based on the long term interests of our country while Obama would make such decisions based on ideology and polls. I think history has proven my point with a terrible vengeance, but it is a hollow 'I told you so.' Even I never expected this degree of disaster. As Victor Davis Hanson recently stated, "Obama’s morally confused foreign policy is making the world more dangerous by the day."

To list --

- Obama squandered our victory in Iraq because he, and indeed, the entire left wanted history to consider our war there illegitimate. Iran now increasingly holds sway in Iraq and our true allies in Iraq, the Kurds, are in desperate straits.

- Obama's decision to unilateraly end our military engagement in Afghanistan threatens that country with the same fate as Iraq.

- Obama refused to intercede in Syria at the start of their civil war. While Obama fiddled, pro-Western forces in Syria were overcome by the Sunni radical groups. Syria is now a war for spoils between the Wahabbi radicals of ISIS and the mad mullahs of Iran.

- Obama's war in Libya against Qaddafi, who at least maintained the neutrality of that country, has opened up Libya for exploitation by ISIS and al Qaeda.

- Obama fully supported the Muslim Brotherhood administration of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt as they used authoritarian tactics to reshape that nation into a permanent theocracy. The Obama administration still maintains ties with the Muslim Brotherhood while having a very cool relationship with Egypt's secular leader, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who, it should be noted, is the only national leader, Islamic or otherwise, to call for a reform of Islam.

- Obama refuses to even acknowledge Islam's role in the Islamic terrorism that is reshaping our world. That refusal to engage in the war of ideas guarantees that Islamic terrorism, perhaps apocalyptic given the ever increasing likelihood of a WMD attack, will never be defeated.

- Obama's entire foreign policy, based on fantasy and, we now know, a simple refusal to acknowlede uncomfortable facts, has allowed for the rise of ISIS, an utterly animalistic group that has now have proclaimed a caliphate in the areas of Syria and Iraq where they hold sway. In addition, the ISIS now hold parts of Libya. The ISIS threatens to destabilize other Sunni countries in the already unstable Middle East.

- Obama, who named as one of his many insane, utopian goals, a world without nuclear weapons, has significantly reduced our nuclear arms capacity That nuclear capacity is what has kept the peace in Europe, the Pax Americana, of the past near seventy years.

- Obama unilaterally changed our national defense posture from being able to fight in two theaters of war simultaneously -- our defense posture since WWII -- to being able to fight in one. This was certainly not based on any threat assessment. It was based on his desire to use more of our nations wealth to fund his domestic programs.

- Obama has made "climate change" one of the top priorities of our nation's defense establishment, diverting significant resources from our nation's defense.

- Under Obama, defense spending has become our nation's lowest priority, and, according to a 2015 Heritage Foundation analysis, our military capabilities are significantly declining. Add to that is Obama's decision to use our military to advance the social policies of radical feminists by allowing women into the combat arms without even the pretense of a study to determine how this would effect, let alone enhance, our war fighting capability.

- Obama, who promised in his 2008 campaign and again in his 2012 campaign that he would stop Iran's nuclear program, has broken a sanctions regime that had finally brought the Iranian theocracy to its knees. Iran is the quintessential bad actor in the world. The mad mullahs of Iran have been at war with U.S. interests, and often times the U.S. itself, since almost the first day Iran's theocracy was proclaimed in 1979. The mad mullahs pose the single greatest threat to our and the world's long term security. Yet Obama appears on the cusp of cutting a deal with Iran to allow them to continue their nuclear enrichment - and thus their march towards a nuclear arsenal.

- Obama, by allowing Iran to continue its nuclear program, is igniting a nuclear arms race in the Middle East as Saudi Arabia and other nations start their own nuclear programs for self defense. The only thing more frightening than Iran with nuclear weapons is Iran and the Wahhabists of Saudi Arabia with nuclear weapons.

- Obama, when presented with a rare strategic opportunity during Iran's Green Revolution to perhaps topple or at least alter the trajectory of Iran's bloody and lawless theocracy, wholly ignored the opportunity until the mad mullahs had almost completely regained control.

- Russia has already invaded the Ukraine, and several NATO nations are concerned, probably not unreasonably, that Russia might invade and that NATO, led by the U.S., will not respond.

- North Korea is continuing to build and refine its nuclear arsenal. And its Dear Leader is beating the war drums, telling Army commanders this week to prepare for a Great War of Reunification against the U.S. and South Korea.

- China is rapidly expanding and modernizing its military capabilities far beyond that needed for regional defense. China is also becoming more bellicose and aggressive in its dealings with its neighbors.

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The world today is a far more dangerous place for America than it was in 2008, when Obama took office. We can't stop Obama's continued degradation of our national security between now and 2017, but let us hope we can slow it, at least in regards to Iran's march to a nuclear arsenal. Otherwise, our nation will not recover from the damage Obama has done and may yet do.

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Obama's Suicidal Complicity In Iranian Nukes

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.

Sec of Defense Robert Gates, 2007

As bad as the news is today in the domestic arena (FCC, Illegal Immigration, IRS, HHS), the actions of the Obama regime in the international arena are orders of magnitude worse. For while all the destruction Obama has wrought in the domestic arena can, theoretically, be fixed, the same is not true of his duplicitous and suicidal dealings with Iran, where the stakes are so high and so time sensitive that to get it wrong is to court apocalyptic disaster.

Iran is the penultimate rogue state. I won't recount all the facts, you can read them here. Suffice it to say that Iran, a theocracy being run as a violent, crony capitalist police state, is as dangerous to the world as a rabid dog is to everyone within range of its fangs. Its leaders are every bit as irrational, triumphalist, expansionist and evil as was Hitler. To allow the mad mullahs to obtain a nuclear arsenal is beyond unthinkable. A nuclear armed Iran presents an immediate existential threat to Israel as well as to all of Western civilization. Moreover, Iran's drive for a nuclear aresenal is already setting off nuclear proliferation in other Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia, the nation whose toxic brand of Islam, Wahhabism, is the core ideology at the heart of ISIS, al Qaeda and virtually all Sunni Islamic inspired terrorism of our era. Imagine if you will, nuclear weapons diffuse throughout the deeply unstable Middle East. The hands of the doomsday clock will soom be spinning at the speed of a fan, and death on a massive scale virtually inevitable.

None of this is new. It is why, for years, our nation has tried to end Iran's nuclear program, and do it short of war. It is why there have been six U.N. Security Council Resolutions demanding an end to Iran's nuclear enrichment program. One would think that Obama and the left, who worship at the altar of international law, would demand that Iran do just that, end the program. That is the only viable option.

But Obama has, with the surety of Neville Chamberlain vis a vis Hitler in 1937, believed from the start that Iran's theorcracy are rational actors, people with whom he can negotiate. He sees the mad mullahs as potential partners in Middle East peace. And to that end, he has dismantled the crushing regime of economic sanctions the Bush regime built, block by block, in an effort to stop Iran's enrichment program short of war. And now, Obama is negotiating a deal with Iran that will allow their enrichment program not merely to continue, but "will put Iran on a glide path to the acquisition of nuclear weapons over a period of years."

Charles Krauthammer sounds the warning bells today:

The news from the nuclear talks with Iran was already troubling. Iran was being granted the “right to enrich.” It would be allowed to retain and spin thousands of centrifuges. It could continue construction of the Arak plutonium reactor. Yet so thoroughly was Iran stonewalling International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors that just last Thursday the IAEA reported its concern “about the possible existence in Iran of undisclosed . . . development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”

Bad enough. Then it got worse:

News leaked Monday of the “sunset clause.” President Obama had accepted the Iranian demand that any restrictions on its program be time-limited. After which, the mullahs can crank up their nuclear program at will and produce as much enriched uranium as they want. Sanctions lifted. Restrictions gone. Nuclear development legitimized. Iran would re-enter the international community, as Obama suggested in an interview last December, as “a very successful regional power.” A few years — probably around ten — of good behavior and Iran would be home free. The agreement thus would provide a predictable path to an Iranian bomb. Indeed, a flourishing path, with trade resumed, oil pumping, and foreign investment pouring into a restored economy.

Meanwhile, Iran’s intercontinental-ballistic-missile program is subject to no restrictions at all. It’s not even part of these negotiations. Why is Iran building them? You don’t build ICBMs in order to deliver sticks of dynamite. Their only purpose is to carry nuclear warheads. Nor does Iran need an ICBM to hit Riyadh or Tel Aviv. Intercontinental missiles are for reaching, well, other continents. North America, for example.

Such an agreement also means the end of nonproliferation. When a rogue state defies the world, continues illegal enrichment, and then gets the world to bless an eventual unrestricted industrial-level enrichment program, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is dead. And regional hyperproliferation becomes inevitable as Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and others seek shelter in going nuclear themselves.

Wasn’t Obama’s great international cause a nuclear-free world? . . .

The deal now on offer to the ayatollah would confer legitimacy on the nuclearization of the most rogue of rogue regimes: radically anti-American, deeply jihadist, purveyor of terrorism from Argentina to Bulgaria, puppeteer of a Syrian regime that specializes in dropping barrel bombs on civilians. . . .

Do read the entire article. Krauthammer goes on to prudently recommend we reimpose sanctions on the mad mullahs and demand they stop enrichment. If we do not, if we allow Obama to complete this madness, we sign the death warrant of Western Civilization.

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Nukes, Iran, Proliferation & Obama's Fantasy World

The single greatest threat to Western Civilization - including Israel - is a nuclear armed Iranian theocracy. Indeed, it is a synergistic threat, since not only is it inherently dangerous, but as long as it lasts, it is driving nuclear proliferation throughout the many highly unstable nations of the Middle East. On April 18, Saudi Arabia - the country responsible for the violent and triumphalist Wahhabi/Salafi dogma of al Qaeda - announced the opening of the "King Abdullah City for Nuclear and Renewable Energy." According to the Financial Times:

Although all discussions have focused upon civilian uses of the technology, analysts note that Saudis and the other Arab Gulf states do not want to lag further behind Iran and Israel in developing nuclear technologies.

That ought to give you nightmares. Indeed, it is at least as threatening as the rabid theocrats in Iran having nuclear weapons. The same article notes that the UAE has already inked plans for building four nuclear reactors on their territory.

Despite the fact that the EU-3 had tried diplomacy with Iran over its nuclear program for seven fruitless years, Obama promised during the election campaign to sort out the Iranian problem by personally engaging the theocracy, as if the mere magic of his voice would turn aside the most imperialistic, amoral and bloodthirsty regime to plague this earth since the Nazis (and for the specifics to support that charge, see here and here). One could chalk up Obama's promise to woo Iran as mere cynical campaign rhetoric - but the fear was always that this man had no understanding of history, no grasp of the dangers at hand, a grossly overblown sense of his abilities, and no idea how to deal with the theocracy.

For the past fifteen months, Obama has opened his arms to the theocracy, hoping for a grand bargain. Every time he has reached out, Iran has merely doubled down on their enrichment efforts, apparently assessing that Obama would not have the stomach to stop them. Obama has treated the theocracy as a legitimate government, he defunded U.S. programs aimed at regime change and promotion of democracy, he has ignored the theocracy's acts of war against the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan, he ignored the massive protests for democracy inside Iran for months and, as of yet, has done nothing beyond uttering a few words to support the protests. Indeed, for a long time, Obama dared not even to criticize the regime's bloody repression of the protests. Lastly, Obama promised biting sanctions against Iran if diplomacy failed. Obama's diplomacy has failed and yet, still today, there are no new sanctions. All the while, the theocrats in Iran churn ever faster towards a nuclear arsenal while simultaneously improving their missle capabilities. The latest estimate is that the mad mullahs will be able to field rockets that can reach the U.S. by 2015.

It was a few days ago that a top-secret memo from Sec. of Defense Gates, reported by the NYT, made clear that the Obama regime is completely out of its depth. Gates's complaint was that the Obama administration has no Plan B in the event htat the mellifluous tones of Obama and tepid sanctions do not work to stop Iran's march to a nuclear arsenal. That is just jaw-dropping in its ramifications. It means that all of our fears about Obama were true. This man has no grasp of reality, no understanding of history, and no plan to deal with Iran's existential threat to our nation and the world.

Moreover, tellingly, this is not Obama at the 11th hour telling his military to prepare, its his Sec. of Defense providing what one unnamed official described as a "wake up call" to Obama. And so it would seem that the many options short of overt force, such as assisting the rebellion inside Iran, or even measured use of force, such as a naval blockades of Iran, are not even on Obama's drawing board. And while Obama has his head neck deep in the sand, every day our options lessen and the costs to stop this regime grow higher. Indeed, it was only a few days ago that an Iranian IRGC member turned CIA spy urged Obama to do something before the effort to stop Iran's regimes costs the lives of countless Iranians.

Instead of dealing with Iran, Obama is pushing for a world without nuclear weapons, as if the genie can be put back in the bottle and then we will all live in a world of peace and harmony. As I have written many times before, most recently here, this is not merely the most ridiculous of fantasies, it is must rank as one of the most dangerous. Is there anyone that thinks that, but for our nuclear deterrent, we would not already have fought WWIII against either against Russia or China - or both? WWII involved the deaths of over 60 million people and destroyed whole economies for decades. How many lives would WWIII have cost? The reality is that nuclear weapons are so cataclysmic that they do provide an effective deterrence.

The Obama Administration has countered criticism on this issue by saying that Reagan sought nuclear disarmament. True, but there is a very substantive difference between Reagan the realist and Obama the fantasist. Reagan sought a reduction of arms, not a "world without" nuclear weapons. Reagan wanted to build a defense against nuclear weapons - Obama has reduced funding for such a defense and, indeed, negotiated a new START treaty with Russia contingent on our not pursuing further such a defense. Reagan strengthened our conventional arms - Obama is cutting them. As James Carafano pointed out a few days ago in the Washington Examiner:

Like Reagan, Obama believes America must lead the way to nuclear disarmament. Unlike Reagan, he believes this requires an assertion of “moral” leadership, to be demonstrated simply by reducing our nuclear stockpile and refusing to modernize the U.S. arsenal. It’s a false premise…

Reagan recognized that the ultimate goal of arms negotiations is to make the world safer, more stable and more free. To eliminate the need for large nuclear arsenals, he went about eliminating the dependence — both ours and others’ — on massive nuclear attack as the guarantor of security.

Thus, the first items on Reagan’s agenda were building up U.S. conventional forces and introducing missile defenses. That allowed his negotiators to approach arms control agreements from a position of strength.

Obama has it backward. He started with cutting back on defense — especially in acquisition programs. Bye-bye, F-22.

He also cut missile defense, starting with systems to protect the homeland. But even that wasn’t enough to make the Russians happy.

“The problem is our America partners are developing missile defenses,” objected Prime Minister Vladimir Putin last December. “Our partners may come to feel completely safe.” That sounds like a leader who still thinks that maintaining the threat of nuclear attack is a good idea. If not, why is it a “problem” for Americans to feel safe?

Reagan understood his adversaries. Obama does not.

Yet another example of Obama's foray into fantasy was his recent change to our decades old nuclear use doctrine as part of Obama's Nuclear Posture Review. In an utterly bizarre twist, Obama took the ambiguity out of our doctrine - thus allowing any country that meets the IAEA guidelines for their nuclear program to conduct a chemical or biological attack on the U.S. in the fullness of knowing that the U.S. will no longer retain the option of responding with nuclear weapons. Under what possible scenario does that make us or the world safer? In what alternate reality does this make of us a moral example? This was a decision the NYT reports that was made over the objection of Sec. of Def. Gates. And as Voldka Pundit says, in a more thorough examination of this changed policy, "[i]f you didn’t already question Obama’s judgement, now would be a good time to start."

And then we come to Obama's recent nuclear summit where he asked countries such as Canada and Mexico to provide more security for their nuclear materials and to consider switching over to light water reactors. It was a real "peace in our time" moment. While not worthless - efforts to provide for greater nuclear security are always welcome - it was, in the grand scheme of things, the practical equivalent of a person, seeing their house engulfed in flames, choosing to urinate on the house rather than get the fire department over to put out the four alarm fire. Hailing this as a major achievement while ignoring the truly existential problems of Iran and Middle East nuclear proliferation is a suicidal game of smoke and mirrors. This from Charles Krauthammer:




See also Krauthammer's column on the nuclear summit, as well as Mark Steyn's always humorous take.

Ultimately, the only way to stop Iran's nuclear efforts - and to stop nuclear proliferation throughout the Middle East - is to make Iran pay too high a price for their continued efforts. Obama has never come to grips with the fact that the theocracy's goal number one is not to see Iran prosper, but to see the Khomeinist revolution exported as far as possible, regardless of the cost in blood. This is not a rational regime by Western standards. It is not a regime that will react to anything other than a threat to the regime's hold on power - and that is something the regime has demonstrated it will do ruthlessly and with extreme brutality against internal threats.

What all of this means is that the only possible way to achieve our goal of ending Iran's nuclear threat is to threaten or use sufficient force to end or endanger the regime. It is the only thing that has moved the theocracy each time we have threatened or used it in the past (see here), it is the only thing that will move them in the future. And the threat or use of force must be sufficiently strong and of such destructive potential that it similarly impresses the point on other regimes in the Middle East. That is the pure and simple reality that Obama finds difficult to grasp and is doing his best to ignore.

On a final note, I see that the Democrats can rest easy on the political spin - Allahpundit is apparently doing their job for them over at Hot Air.

No need to put all the blame on Obama here, though. Bush knew what it would mean to hand this issue off to a Democratic president and he went ahead and did it anyway. Invading Iraq necessarily left him with fewer military options against other threats; now the bill is coming due. As for Europe, Russia, and China, here’s the Times’s almost poignant description of the White House’s naivete: “Administration officials had hoped that the revelation by Mr. Obama in September that Iran was building a new uranium enrichment plant inside a mountain near Qum would galvanize other nations against Iran, but the reaction was muted.” The fact that western powers had been waltzing with Iran over its nuke program for fully seven years at that point might have given them a clue that no action would be taken, but that’s “smart power” for you.

So Bush is partly to blame because it was foreseeable that our progressive Democrats cannot be expected to act in defense of our country? That involves a rewrite of history and wholly inappropriately absolves the Democrats of personal responsibility. It ignores all of the efforts of Obama and others, including drafters of the 2007 NIE, to tie Bush's hands on the issue and insure that the problem of Iran would be handed over to the next President. This issue could have been dealt with in 2007 at a minimal cost in blood and gold. We are now in 2010, the hand off is complete, and Obama is at the helm. Yet as Obama engages in fantasy, we seem to be moving ever father away from a resolution and the situation grows ever more dire. Let's hope the "wake-up" call from Gates gets Obama's attention.

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Deadlines & Opportunities Unforgivably Missed

December 31, 2009 was the deadline Obama gave the mad mullahs to respond to his more than generous offers regarding their nuclear program. The Iranians did not accept. And now, after years of negotiations and after years of one missed deadline after another, we have yet another deadline - this one from Ahmedinejad:

Iran warned on Saturday the West has until the end of the month to accept Teheran's counterproposal to a UN-drafted plan on a nuclear exchange, or the country will start producing nuclear fuel on its own.

The warning was a show of defiance and a hardening in Iran's stance over its controversial nuclear program, which the West fears masks an effort to make nuclear weapons. Teheran insists the program is only for peaceful, electricity production purposes and says it has no intention of making a bomb.

"We have given them an ultimatum. There is one month left and that is by the end of January," Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said, speaking on state television.

To add to that, our current administration, animated seemingly as much by the spirit of William Borah as by Neville Chamberlain, had floated plans to send John Kerry to Iran to give one last chance at talks. If there is still anyone who believes that talks and carrots have any chance whatsoever of convincing the mad mullahs to stop their march towards a nuclear weapon, they are more out of touch with reality than Timothy Leary on a LSD bender. But no matter, we learn today that the mad mullahs have officially withdrawn the welcome mat, denying Kerry a visa. For once, the mad mullahs have done something most Americans can support.

A recent NYT report states that the Obama administration has been successful in convincing the Israelis to stay their plans to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. This will buy Obama time to do whatever dithering it is he now intends to do. That "dithering" is spelled out by the NYT:

As President Obama faces pressure to back up his year-end ultimatum for diplomatic progress with Iran, the administration says that domestic unrest and signs of unexpected trouble in Tehran’s nuclear program make its leaders particularly vulnerable to strong and immediate new sanctions.. . .

Sanctions against Iran have a history at this point, and that history is of being wholly ineffective. Neither Russia nor China will agree to the type of economy crippling sanctions that might have a chance of working. And any sanctions that actually bite will, unless carefully circumscribed, bite the Iranian people as a whole. Given that Iran is not all that far from revolution at the moment, that would not be a wise idea. That said, there is a very small silver lining in this otherwise very dark cloud bank:

The White House wants to focus the new sanctions on the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the military force believed to run the nuclear weapons effort. That force has also played a crucial role in the repression of antigovernment demonstrators since the disputed presidential election in June.

At least Obama is trying to surgically target sanctions at Iran's praetorian guard, the IRGC. That said, it would seem that the administration is going to pursue sanctions not as an adjunct to seeking regime change, but instead of.

Although repeated rounds of sanctions over many years have not dissuaded Iran from pursuing nuclear technology, an administration official involved in the Iran policy said the hope was that the current troubles “give us a window to impose the first sanctions that may make the Iranians think the nuclear program isn’t worth the price tag.

One, it makes no logical sense to think that the unrest in Iran has slowed down the march to a nuclear weapon in the slightest. Merely because Khameini is giving out orders to crush protests does not mean Natantz shuts down or that nuclear scientists at an IRGC base in Qom stop working on a nuclear trigger. Two, Obama is apparently ideologically set against supporting regime change in Iran. The article quoted above suggests that his administration sees the unrest in Iran as merely an opportunity to get the regime to forgo its nuclear operations. Yet it is only regime change that will end the threat to the world posed by the mad mullahs. Both the history of this most evil of regimes and their apocalyptic and triumphalist ideology tell us that anything that might slow down their march towards a nuclear weapon will do so, if at all, then only temporarily.

It also appears from the NYT article that the administration is leaking information that suggests we have a bit of breathing space because Iran's nuclear program is experiencing problems. This also from the NYT:

While outsiders have a limited view of Iran’s nuclear program, the Obama administration officials said they believed that the bomb-development effort was seriously derailed by the exposure three months ago of the country’s secret enrichment plant under construction near the holy city of Qum. Exposure of the site deprived Iran of its best chance of covertly producing the highly enriched uranium needed to make fuel for nuclear weapons.

In addition, international nuclear inspectors report that at Iran’s plant in Natanz, where thousands of centrifuges spin to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel, the number of the machines that are currently operating has dropped by 20 percent since the summer, a decline nuclear experts attribute to technical problems. Others, including some European officials, believe the problems may have been accentuated by a series of covert efforts by the West to undermine Iran’s program, including sabotage on its imported equipment and infrastructure.

These factors have led the administration’s policy makers to lengthen their estimate of how long it would take Iran to accomplish what nuclear experts call “covert breakout” — the ability to secretly produce a workable weapon.

“For now, the Iranians don’t have a credible breakout option, and we don’t think they will have one for at least 18 months, maybe two or three years,” said one senior administration official at the center of the White House Iran strategy. The administration has told allies that the longer time frame would allow the sanctions to have an effect before Iran could develop its nuclear ability. . . .

Iran’s insistence that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes only is roundly rejected by Western officials and, in internal reports, by international nuclear inspectors. Yet Washington’s assessments of how much progress Iran has made toward a weapon have varied greatly over the past two years, partly a reflection of how little is known about the inner workings of the country’s nuclear programs. . . .

After reviewing new documents that have leaked out of Iran and debriefing defectors lured to the West, Mr. Obama’s advisers say they believe the work on weapons design is continuing on a smaller scale — the same assessment reached by Britain, France, Germany and Israel.

In early September, the American ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Glyn Davies, warned that Iran had “possible breakout capacity.” Administration officials say that Mr. Davies’ assessment was technically accurate, yet the new evidence suggests that Iran is less likely to use its uranium stockpile to assemble one or two bombs, a move officials say would be likely to provoke an Israeli strike.

The administration’s current view of Iran’s nuclear program was provided by six senior administration officials advising Mr. Obama on his strategy, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the subject. The administration’s review of Iran’s program, which they said was based on intelligence reports, information from allies, and their own analysis, did not amount to a new formal intelligence assessment.

In interviews, those officials as well as European officials engaged in the Iran issue and private experts described Iran’s nuclear program as being in some disarray.

The biggest disruption came in late September when Mr. Obama, along with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain, publicly exposed Iran’s covert effort to build an enrichment plant near Qum.

Western intelligence agencies had been studying the underground plant from afar for nearly a year, and two European officials say that Iranian nuclear spies recruited by Europe and Israel provided some confirming evidence about the purpose of the plant. . . .

International inspectors who were granted access to the underground site in October found that the plant was about a year away from operation and that it was designed for just 3,000 centrifuges — not enough to produce the large amounts of fuel needed for commercial reactors, but sufficient for the stealthy production of highly enriched bomb fuel. (By comparison, the Natanz plant, which is ostensibly for producing reactor fuel, is designed for 54,000 centrifuges.) . . .

Both administration officials and experts say that another factor slowing Iran’s nuclear development is that it is working with older centrifuge technology that keeps breaking down.

By the recent count of inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency, there were 3,936 centrifuges running at Iran’s enrichment plant in the desert at Natanz — down from a peak of 4,920 centrifuges in June.

Administration officials say Iran began producing almost all of its own centrifuge components after discovering that the United States and other Western countries had sabotaged some key imported parts, and they have made a series of manufacturing errors.

R. Scott Kemp, a Princeton University physicist, said that another factor was in the basic design of the centrifuges, obtained from Pakistan nearly two decades ago. “I suspect design problems,” Mr. Kemp said. “The machines run hot and have short lives. They’re terrible. It’s a really bad design.”

If Mr. Kemp and others are right, it suggests that Iran has a long way to go before it can make good on its recent vow to open 10 new enrichment plants. Iranian officials have said publicly that those plants will use a new version of the centrifuges. But Paul K. Kerr, a nuclear analyst at the Congressional Research Service, said research on the new generation of centrifuges had apparently proved “less successful” than the original, primitive design.

Another possible problem for Iran is the Western sabotage efforts. In January, The New York Times reported that President Bush had ordered a broad covert program against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, including efforts to undermine electrical and computer systems that keep the nuclear program running. The Obama administration has been silent about the progress of that program, one of the most heavily classified of the United States government.

We may have some additional time, we may not. The only thing for sure is that the threat posed by Iran to the U.S., Israel and the world will not end until this most evil of regimes is removed from power. Obama's sole focus should be on supporting the nascent revolution in Iran in every way possible. Nothing I have seen yet suggests that he will do anything of the sort. A critical moment in history will pass unexploited, and we will pay for it dearly in the long run with blood and gold.

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No Kidding Sherlock

In 2007, Thomas Fingar, Kenneth Brill, and H. Van Diepen drafted a scandalous and incredibly harmful piece of fiction - the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) On Iran's Nuclear Program. Despite its name, it was not an intelligence estimate. It was a piece of partisan advocacy designed to tie the hands of the Bush Administration. As I wrote in some detail at the time, every one of those authors' major findings - that Iran's nuclear weapons program had ended years earlier, that their ongoing program was civilian in nature, that the Iranian regime would respond to negotiations with a mix of carrots and sticks, that they were rational, that the threat of force was not a viable option, etc. - were unfounded and, indeed, contraverted by all of the known facts. We would later learn that they were also contraverted by facts known then to our intelligence agencies - namely that Iran was constructing a secret nuclear enrichment plant whose size was only appropriate for military use. No matter. The NIE was embraced wholeheartedly by the left. But now . . . . now . . . . what do you know. The Obama camp has some suspicion that, perhaps, the 2007 NIE may have been wrong.

Mr. Obama’s top advisers say they no longer believe the key finding of a much disputed National Intelligence Estimate about Iran, published a year before President George W. Bush left office, which said that Iranian scientists ended all work on designing a nuclear warhead in late 2003.

There are times when saying "I told you so" brings naught but cold comfort. This is one of them. The stakes are too high. We have wasted two years while Iran's nuclear program has progressed ever nearer the point of weaponization and the rest of the Middle East has been drawn into pursuing their own nuclear arsenal. As I wrote about a month ago, Thomas Fingar, Kenneth Brill, and H. Van Diepen have much for which to answer. As do the Left who uncritically embraced the NIE fiction, prioritizing attacks on the Bush Administration over our national security.

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Obama's Options

According to the NYT, North Korea's nuclear test leaves Obama with "few options." How about these for a start - restore funding for the missle defense program and restart the Reliable Replacement Warhead program. As we enter a world with nuclear proliferation among the world's most unstable regimes, they kind of make sense.

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Defenseless - The Obama Budget

Obama sent a record budget to Congress, proposing billions in funding for every left wing cause imaginable, then claimed yesterday that he is fiscally responsible for asking for cuts amounting to 1/2 of 1% of his total budget. It is shameless to the point of parody. But scratch the surface of the budget and the savings and you quickly go from parody to ominous.

The bulk of Obama's proposed savings are coming from our Defense budget, the one place where significant increases in funding are necessary. And to make matters worse, among those handful of billions Obama intends to save, a goodly part of it comes from deep cuts in our missile defense program. This in a world that is getting more, not less, dangerous, and with our military desperately in need of expansion and refit. Obama is ignoring the exponential growth of the nuclear threat and he is reordering our defense spending priorities in the same manner that France did prior to 1939.

You can read at Hot Air the story of the Obama budget and Obama's mind-numbingly ridiculous assertion of fiscal responsibility for his proposing of $17 billion in budget cuts. And Bizzyblog points out that even the $17 billion in cuts is all smoke and mirrors. I will not add to that. My concern is with the defense side of the coin - and a small coin it has become.

Our military is in dire straights in terms of size and equipment. The following is from an article by MG Robert Scales discussing our military readiness posture in April, 2007. It was, at the time, critical, and there is nothing that I have seen since to suggest a significant change to that posture.

We have learned from painful experience in Iraq and Afghanistan that tomorrow's ground forces must be re-equipped with many more fighting vehicles that are light, mobile, easily transported and capable of keeping more soldiers protected for longer periods. Properly equipping the Army to win the long war will be very expensive. But we have fought 12 wars in the last 30 years and all but one has been decided on the ground. We will fight another one sooner than any of us would like. If we are to break the cycle of underfunding followed by rapid re-funding that has caused so much human tragedy, we must start now and must build a new Army for tomorrow rather than put yesterday's Army back on the shelf.

- MG Robert Scales, discussing the degraded state of Army readiness as of April, 2007. Indeed, as he points out, but for the Reagan era, our military had suffered significant underfunding for decades - under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

You will recall that a central argument of Obama and the left for bringing the Iraq War to an immediate surrender was because our military was undersized and the Iraq war was taking a tremendous toll on our equipment. The fact of a degraded military was certainly true, though the answer to that was not to surrender in Iraq, it was to make a big increase in defense spending. Bush and the Republican administration through 2006 attempted to fight two wars without increasing the defense budget to realistically account for equipment degradation and shortfalls. This remained true when the left took over Congress in 2006.

Now that the left has the reins of power, the one thing that Obama is not doing is making any increases in defense spending. Indeed, instead of rearming the military so it is prepared for the most difficult of confrontations - a conventional war - Obama is making huge cuts in expensive weapons systems that we will need for such confrontations in the future. He is instead, through Sec. of Def. Gates, reordering priorities in order to fight the much less costly "last war." You can read the itemization of cuts here. Secretary of Defense Gates seems fully complicit in this - and if his performance at Senate Hearings the other day are any indication, then he is both acting as the front man for specific Obama policy he is willing to be less then honest in furtherance of that policy. I am very surprised by that.

But that is an aside. The long and short of it all is that, instead of keeping us on a track so that we maintain superiority on the conventional battlefield, Obama is ordering our military to focus on unconventional warfare - i.e., the "last war." While it gives Obama the luxury of not having to sink billions into defense, the "last war" theory of military preparedness has ever been a trap for nations. For example, one need only to look to France in the late 1930's. They prepared for the next war expecting a replay of the last one - and thus, they based their defense around fixed fortifications of the Maginot Line. The line was breached by a new form of warfare - blitzkrieg - using superior weapons. France fell in days.

And it is not as if we face a paucity of conventional war threats. China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran are the four most obvious of those threats at the moment, but who knows where the next threat will come from. Indeed, Iraq was a conventional threat in 2002. But our conventional warfare capabilities then were so superior that they quickly folded - as indeed, they had near a decade earlier. Moreover, we now know that the Soviet Union considered attacking the West in the 1980's. Kim Il Sung put North Korea on a war footing about a year or so prior to that. Both pulled back. Why they did so is simple to assess - they had a very realistic respect for our capabilities to fight a conventional war. To paraphrase - it was "peace through superior firepower." But take away the perception of that superiority and, as surely as night follows day, the enemies of the West will not feel so constrained.

If we remain fully prepared for a conventional war, we can still also be prepared for unconventional conflicts. The reverse is not true. And thus, if we give away our conventional warfare superiority, we do so at great cost. Nor will it be something that can be at all easily resurrected. Combat systems today take years to develop and then years to ramp up production. The decisions made today will be with us for decades to come.

Compounding this situation by orders of magnitude is Obama's unfathomable decision to cut spending for missile defense. One of the cuts about which Obama so spuriously crowed yesterday was almost a 15% cut - 1.2 billion dollars - in the budget for the Missile Defense Agency. Can there be any possible justification for this? This is a system that grows more critical by the day. Pakistan is on the edge of takeover by the Taliban. North Korea wants to sell its technology to the highest bidders. Iran is continuing with their nuclear program and it has kick started proliferation throughout the Middle East. With that in mind, nothing could be more important to the defense of our nation and the free (for the moment) world than a robust missile defense.

Obama's cuts in defense are not rationale. ACORN is set to receive vast amounts of funding, while our military capabilities are to degraded. It leads one to wonder whether Obama is simply cynical and opportunistic, or is he really as naive and unrealistic as his budget priorities make him appear? Or is it a toxic mix of all four?

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Waiting For The Iranian Shoe To Drop (Updated)

Of the major foreign policy issues facing Obama, Iran ranks at least equal to Pakistan in near term criticality. As Obama gives signals of weakness and acquiesnce, Iran is significantly increasing its deadly operational tempo throughout the Middle East. And that in addition to a nuclear weapons program that threatens to lead to nuclear proliferation on a nightmare scale. Obama's response is to seek more talks - now unconditional - with even the threat of force apparently off the table. It is the stuff of deadly fantasy.
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Iran's government is a hyper-aggressive theocracy whose goals are to spread the Khomeinist Islamic revolution throughout the Middle East and the world, to destroy Israel, and to drive the U.S. out of the Middle East. Those goals are non-negotiable and Iran's mad mullahs have proven utterly beyond any civilized limits in their pursit of these goals. In the history of Iran's theocracy, the only things which have ever caused the mad mullahs to alter their deadly trajectory have been the actual or threatended use of force.

As Sec. Def. Robert Gates summed up the nature of the theocracy a year 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." The Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence has testified that Iran is the "central banker" for terrorism throughout the world. I have blogged on Iran repeatedly and itemized many of the terrorist acts by the Iranian regime. The list is as valid today as it was when I wrote it - with the exception that Iran has now become even more aggessive in its deadly pursuits with the ascension of Obama to the post of U.S. President. Amir Taheri, writing at the WSJ today, explains:

Convinced that the Obama administration is preparing to retreat from the Middle East, Iran's Khomeinist regime is intensifying its goal of regional domination. It has targeted six close allies of the U.S.: Egypt, Lebanon, Bahrain, Morocco, Kuwait and Jordan, all of which are experiencing economic and/or political crises.

Iranian strategists believe that Egypt is heading for a major crisis once President Hosni Mubarak, 81, departs from the political scene. . . .

Last month, Egypt announced it had crushed a major Iranian plot and arrested 68 people. According to Egyptian media, four are members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Tehran's principal vehicle for exporting its revolution.

Seven were Palestinians linked to the radical Islamist movement Hamas; one was a Lebanese identified as "a political agent from Hezbollah" by the Egyptian Interior Ministry. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah, claimed these men were shipping arms to Hamas in Gaza.

The arrests reportedly took place last December, during a crackdown against groups trying to convert Egyptians to Shiism. The Egyptian Interior Ministry claims this proselytizing has been going on for years. Thirty years ago, Egyptian Shiites numbered a few hundred. Various estimates put the number now at close to a million, but they are said to practice taqiyah (dissimulation), to hide their new faith.

But in its campaign for regional hegemony, Tehran expects Lebanon as its first prize. Iran is spending massive amounts of cash on June's general election. It supports a coalition led by Hezbollah, and including the Christian ex-general Michel Aoun. Lebanon, now in the column of pro-U.S. countries, would shift to the pro-Iran column.

In Bahrain, Tehran hopes to see its allies sweep to power through mass demonstrations and terrorist operations. Bahrain's ruling clan has arrested scores of pro-Iran militants but appears more vulnerable than ever. King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa has contacted Arab heads of states to appeal for "urgent support in the face of naked threats," according to the Bahraini media.

The threats became sensationally public in March. In a speech at Masshad, Iran's principal "holy city," Ali Akbar Nateq-Nuri, a senior aide to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, described Bahrain as "part of Iran." . . .

Iran-controlled groups have also been uncovered in Kuwait and Jordan. According to Kuwaiti media, more than 1,000 alleged Iranian agents were arrested and shipped back home last winter. According to the Tehran media, Kuwait is believed vulnerable because of chronic parliamentary disputes that have led to governmental paralysis.

As for Jordan, Iranian strategists believe the kingdom, where Palestinians are two-thirds of the population, is a colonial creation and should disappear from the map -- opening the way for a single state covering the whole of Palestine. . . .

Arab states are especially concerned because Tehran has succeeded in transcending sectarian and ideological divides to create a coalition that includes Sunni movements such as Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, sections of the Muslim Brotherhood, and even Marxist-Leninist and other leftist outfits that share Iran's anti-Americanism.

. . . Tehran plays a patient game. Wherever possible, it is determined to pursue its goals through open political means, including elections. With pro-American and other democratic groups disheartened by the perceived weakness of the Obama administration, Tehran hopes its allies will win all the elections planned for this year in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

"There is this perception that the new U.S. administration is not interested in the democratization strategy," a senior Lebanese political leader told me. That perception only grows as President Obama calls for an "exit strategy" from Afghanistan and Iraq. Power abhors a vacuum, which the Islamic Republic of Iran is only too happy to fill. . . .

But that is hardly the end of it. Iran is also resuming operations in Iraq, a country Iran has long sought to turn into another Lebanon, with Shia militias controlling the country and under the control of Iran. In Iraq, with the U.S. having announced an imminent withdrawal and moving out of the cities, you may recall a series of suicide bombings last week aimed at Shia civilians. Those bombings had all the hallmarks of a resurgent al Qaeda - except it now seems clear that these bombings were carried out at the direction of the Iranian Qods Force. This from the Long War Journal:

[Three] suicide bombers targeted Iranian pilgrims in Baghdad and Diyala. Three suicide attacks resulted in scores of dead Iranians as the bombers detonated near Shia religious shrines. The Iranian government blamed the US and Israeli intelligence for the attacks.

. . . But the US has found evidence of Iranian-backed Mahdi Army leaders conducting attacks that were designed to mimic al Qaeda suicide bombings.

. . . US military officers believe that Iran is ramping up its operations inside Iraq after its surrogates suffered a major defeat at the hands of the Iraqi military during the spring and summer of 2008.

. . . The US and Iraqi military believe the Special Groups are preparing to re-initiate fighting as their leaders and operatives are beginning to filter back into Iraq from Iran. On Feb. 4, Lieutenant General Lloyd Austin, the deputy commander of Multinational Forces Iraq, said that Iran continues to arm, fund, and train the Special Groups, and that munitions traced back to Iran continue to be uncovered in Iraq. Recent intelligence and the finds of new Iranian caches "lead us to believe that Iranian support activity is still ongoing," Austin warned.

Read the entire article. None of this should come as a surprise since the deeply repressive Iran is mortally threatened by an Iraq on its borders that operates with an open democracy and adherence to the apolitical "quietest" school of Shia'ism.

Dwarfing all of this is the problem of Iran's determined drive towards the creation of a nuclear arsenal. It is significantly destabilizing the Middle East and, as I wrote previously:

. . . [It] 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.

Obama and the left did their level best to insure that President Bush refrained from even the threat of force against Iran. This is Obama's problem now. Unfortunately for us, Obama's only answer is to embrace soft-power pacifism as the only American option. Highlighting this was Sec. of Def. Gates testifying before Congress the other day to the effect that the military option is off the table as likely ineffective and that the strategy the Obama administration intends to pursue are sanctions and talks to convince the mad mullahs that their nuclear program will "spark an arms race that would leave the Islamic republic less secure." As Michael Ledeen comments:

Gates’ other two statements–first, that sanctions are a better bet, and second, that we have to “convince” the mullahs that nukes are actually bad for them–are even sillier. I don’t think sanctions have ever deterred an enemy from actions they deemed valuable, and I don’t know a single serious person who believes that we’re going to talk the Iranians into abandoning their quest for the bomb.

Ledeen suspects, based on some other obviously questionable statements made by Gates in his testimony, that Gates deliberately watered down the facts and his assessments so as not to upset the Iranians while a massive back channel effort is underway to bring them to the negotiating table.

The problem with this approach of walk softly and carry no stick is that, just as did Britain and France in the 30's, we are setting the stage for an ever more deadly - and seemingly inevitable - confrontation with a hyperaggressive power and we do so at a point when that power can still be deterred with force or the threat of force. On this, I am in total agreement with Newt Gingrich, who comments on all of the above plus Obama's perceived coldness towards Israel:

Former US House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Sunday blasted the Obama administration for setting itself on a collision course with Israel and endangering the Jewish state.

"They are systematically setting up the most decisive confrontation that we've ever seen," the leading Republican politician told The Jerusalem Post, referring to news reports about the administration's approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"There's almost an eagerness to take on the Israeli government to make a point with the Arab world," he said, speaking to the Post ahead of his speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual conference.

He called US President Barack Obama's program of engagement on Iran a "fantasy," and his Middle East policies "very dangerous for Israel." He summed up Obama's approach as "the clearest adoption of weakness since Jimmy Carter." . . .

Read the entire article.

Update: Soccer Dad has done a post comparing the Israeli and U.S. views on Iran with, as always, the Palestinian issue making a cameo appearance. I think Soccer Dad's conclusions are spot on:

American interests in the Middle East are threatened by Iran. The United States must marshal its allies to fight Iranian designs. The Israeli view of the situation - that Iran is the major source of instability in the Middle East - is largely in agreement with the State Department's latest analysis. So the question is whether the Obama administration will allow itself to be distracted by pretending that pressuring Israel will make handling the Iranian challenge easier or whether it will heed the State Department's analysis and give priority to the Iranian threat.

Read the entire post. My sense is, unfortunately, that the Obama administration is wholly invested in the latter option.

Robert Avrech, at Seraphic Secret, has posted on Israel's preparations for an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. As he points out, this will not be a repeat of the small sortie that undertook a similar mission against Iraq. It will be a large and complex operation, and he forecasts few consequences beyond a worldwide, and very private, sigh of relief:

The Israeli strike on the Persian nuclear facilities will not be a small operation of a three or four F16's. It will be a robust strike with massive cyber attacks on the Persian air-defense systems, dozens of attack jets, rescue planes, AWAC's, and almost certainly special forces on the ground in Iran directing air strikes. The world will publicly condemn Israel, but in private these same people will breathe huge sighs of relief. The only people who want the Persians to go nuclear are—what a shock—the Persians, and rabid leftist Jew-haters who hide behind the fig-leaf of, ahem, academic anti-Zionism.

Read the entire post. Our window of opportunity to fan the flames of regime change in Iran before they acquired a nuclear weapon passed long ago. A nuclear Iran is too great a danger to literally the entire civilized world to allow. It would be the equal of Hitler having a nuclear arsenal at his disposal on January 1, 1939. Moreover, the proliferation nightmare Iran has already kickstarted throughout the Middle East likewise cannot be allowed to continue. Obama's plans for "aggressive diplomacy" will only be used by the regime to buy time to strengthen its position. Either we should lead a strike against Iran's nuclear facilities or we should give full support to such an Israeli action.

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