A Nuclear Iran

The latest ranting from Iran's dictator, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, indicates two things:

(1) Iran is serious about building nuclear weapons as quickly as possible.

(2) A nuclear Iran is serious about using nuclear weapons on Israel and other "infidel" nations and peoples.

You would think that such a foreign policy openly based on the principle of mass murder would generate bad press. But Jonah Goldberg recently noted in a recent column titled Unlikely Firebrand that Time magazine's coverage of Ahmadinejad was profoundly unserious.

....let's at least note that so far Time is using the same tone it might use to talk about John McCain, Joe Wilson, George Clooney, or some other "soft-spoken" "unlikely firebrand" beloved by the media. (Time has referred to both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sen. Joe Lieberman as "unlikely firebrands"as well. To date neither has proposed genocide.)

But the problem, as Kennedy learned, is that evil men and dangerous forces don't take a timeout until we're ready to pay attention. And that's where Iran comes in. Seriously challenging Iran just strikes a lot of people as too much to fit on the American plate right now, so we prefer to call Ahmadinejad an "unlikely firebrand" instead of a murderous fanatic.

But whatever we call him, it won't change the fact that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons and that Ahmadinejad is a particularly kooky religious fanatic (possibly a member of the Hojjatieh, which seeks to foment global chaos in order to hasten the arrival of the messianic 12th imam).

In response to Ahmadinejad's comments, the world has responded with only slightly more outrage than it would if he'd called for trade barriers on pistachios. It's time to wake up.

And James Robbins warns of what the world will look like if Iran does succeed in obtaining nuclear weapons.

Scenario One, very familiar to U.S. war planners. Tehran closes off the Straits of Hormuz and subjects the world to energy blackmail, an “access denial” strategy. Currently the Coalition would respond by sending a flotilla to force an entry, probably accompanied by a punitive air campaign against every available worthwhile target in Iran. At present the regime would have no effective way to respond to that. But if they had nuclear weapons, particularly with long-range missiles or other delivery systems, our war planning would be immensely complicated. How close would we risk sending a Carrier Battle Group? How punitive would we pursue an air campaign, knowing that when we bomb Tehran the Iranians might have the capability to strike back, perhaps against domestic targets using terrorist surrogates? Can we count on our allies if Iranian missiles can reach Europe — they cannot now, but if they have nukes, how can we stop Iran from developing longer-range weapons?

There would be some negative consequences resulting from a preemptive toppling of Iran's dictatorship, just as there would have been negative consequences resulting from enforcing against Hitler's Germany the treaties ending World War One. But the consequences of doing nothing in the case of Nazi Germany after the invasion of the Rhineland were far worse than preemptive attack. Similarly with Iran, doing nothing is probably the worst of all the available alternatives. Preemptive war should not be ruled out.