The Redhunter

Here is my point: All hell is going to break lose in the world, and especially in the Middle East, if we have to bomb Iran.

Reuel Marc Gerecht has a very useful article in The Weekly Standard in which he reviews the arguments against bombing

* "If we bomb, we will kill off the internal Iranian opposition"
- Pretty weak, he says. The chances of a popular uprising overthrowing the regime is pretty small anyway.

* "If we bomb, the Iranians will rise in righteous indignation and a new generation of anti-American Shiite holy warriors will be produced (as if the Sunni terrorists weren't bad enough)."
- Some will, but it's more complicated than that, Gerecht says. Some or many will eventually turn against the regime. Further, we've heard so often that the "Arab/Muslim street" was about to rise up that it's all a case of the boy who cried wolf.

* "If we bomb, the international community will go ballistic."
- Yes they will. And this would be a problem. But would it be any worse than what we endured at the outbreak of the invasion of Iraq? Further many of these same countries will privately congratulate us.

* If we bomb, the mullahs will hit us in Afghanistan and Iraq.
- The administration is afflicted with "Iraq fatigue", he says, which is real and serious. But untimately, this should not affect our decision. Besides, for them to do so would risk annihilaton themselves. They would have to come into the open to do much worse, and it is in this sphere where we hold all the advantages.

* If we bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, we cannot fully verify the damage we've done without a land invasion. And Iranian terrorist reprisals against our troops, if sustained and deadly, might force us to consider the unthinkable: a large-scale land invasion of the Islamic Republic.
- This, Gerecht, is the "most stultifying concern." Bombing Iran would not be a one-time affair, whereby we could sit back after a week or so and let things be. This is not Libya 1986. We would be at war with Iran.

"All of this is frightening. It reinforces the temptation to accept the status quo rather than going on the offensive. Inaction is the default position of "realists," which explains their staying power."

Gerecht is certainly right. If you want to be frightened even more, read James Fallows piece in The Atlantic Monthly, in which he outlines the dangers of air strikes in even more stark terms. But all of this simply brings us back to our central question

Is it acceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon?

Because if the answer is truely "no", then the consequences of our bombing them do not matter.

"He doesn't Mean It"

Get ready, because you're going to hear variants of the "he doesn't really mean it" line in the months and years to come. "He's only saying it for public consumption" and the like.

Well, maybe and maybe not. It's easy to say that when you're not Israel. If you were, you'd whistle a different toon.

Then there's that Hitler thing. Do we really have to go through the 1930s again?

Steyn At His Best

Mark Steyn was at his best the other day

If you think, for example, the European Union and others have been fairly craven over those Danish cartoons, imagine what they’d be like if a nuclear Tehran had demanded a formal apology, a suitable punishment for the newspaper, and blasphemy laws specifically outlawing representations of the Prophet. ...

Anyone who spends half an hour looking at Iranian foreign policy over the last 27 years sees five things:

1. contempt for the most basic international conventions;
2. long-reach extraterritoriality;
3. effective promotion of radical Pan-Islamism;
4. a willingness to go the extra mile for Jew-killing (unlike, say, Osama);
5. an all-but-total synchronization between rhetoric and action.
...

So the question is: Will they do it?

And the minute you have to ask, you know the answer.

Iran, Now

The editors of National Review urge the Bush Administration to end their lethargy and to take the following actions

There are three things we should begin doing now. First, supporting Iranian labor unions. The Iron Curtain would not have fallen without Lech Walesa and Solidarity, and unions could play a similar role in Iran....

Second, we should do everything we can to help Iranian student groups. Roughly 70 percent of Iran's population is under 30. These youths are the most pro-Western segment of Iranian society — and they happen to be mad as hell at Iran's rulers....

(Third), We should massively increase our pro-democracy broadcasts into Iran, both by funding U.S.-based Farsi satellite-TV networks and by exercising a modicum of intelligence in our Voice of America programming.

"None of this is guaranteed to spark a revolution, but it has better odds than doing nothing" they conclude. We must hit them with air strikes, they say, if nothing else works. "This is not a good option", but allowing Iran to acquire nuclear weapons "is incalculably worse."

The Wisdom of the Ages

Perhaps the great Southern General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson said it best

"Never take council of your fears"

The key word is not fear. More than most, Jackson knew the danger of war, both on the strategic and tactical levels. The key word is council. Air strikes would entail much danger. We must be realistic; all hell would break loose in the Middle East. Therefore, they should be our last option. But they must remain on the table, because to talk them off would be to take council of our fears.