The Redhunter

To be clear, Ledeen is not advocating some namby-pamby "lets go though the UN" approach, where the we offer various carrots to the mullahs and threaten toothless sanctions. That, um, would be our current policy.

Read K-Lo's interview with him to find out what he thinks. The good news is that the Iranian people hate the mullahs, and stage fairly large demonstrations against it on a regular basis. We ought to be able to take advantage of that.

Some people quibble over how many centrifuges Iran has, and how fast they can produce fissile material. Ahmadinejad says he has 2,000, some inspectors say says no he doesn't, but other inspectors say he has enough to do the trick.

I say that what this tells us is that it's darn hard to know what's really going on, so if we're going to stop them we better get to work on it.

Hold the B-2s

Whereever Iran is on their enrichment program, we do have some time. How much is hard to say, but it's enough so that we can safely put off military action for awhile, perhaps even a few years. Victor Davis Hanson said as much last week when he concluded that our current policy towards Iran might just work,

...there are subtle indications that U.S. policy is slowly working, and that a strike now on Iran would be a grave mistake, in every strategic and political sense — not to mention the humanitarian one of harming a populace that may well soon prove to be the most pro-Western in the region.

His remarks were in the context of praising the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who almost along among continental European leaders takes the Iranian threat seriously. Sarkozy has even gone so far as to say that

An Iran with nuclear arms is, to me, unacceptable, and I am weighing my words…And I underline France's full determination to support the alliance's current policy of increasing sanctions, but also to remain open if Iran makes the choice to fulfill its obligations. This policy is the only one that will allow us to escape an alternative, which I consider to be catastrophic. Which alternative? An Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran.

As a practical matter any attack on Iran would be mostly a U.S. affair, but it would be invaluable to have French support if for no other reason than to watch the American left collectively grab it's chest and fall to he floor.

Hold the B-2's...But Keep Them Ready

No way no how can we allow the mullahs to obtain nuclear weapons. If it even looks like Iran is getting close to building bombs, we attack. Of course, it's going to be hard to know. It's hard to see into Iran as it is. The lesson of Iraq is that it's hard to know what's going on. With Iraq we got it wrong in the direction of thinking they had something they didn't. It would even worse though, to get it wrong the other direction.

I've written various scenarios about what might happen if they get the bomb, and even my best-case wasn't very good.

So in the end we have to hit Iran if nothing else works. An article a few months ago in the London Telegraph quoted John Bolton

"It's been conclusively proven Iran is not going to be talked out of its nuclear programme. So to stop them from doing it, we have to massively increase the pressure.

"If we can't get enough other countries to come along with us to do that, then we've got to go with regime change by bolstering opposition groups and the like, because that's the circumstance most likely for an Iranian government to decide that it's safer not to pursue nuclear weapons than to continue to do so. And if all else fails, if the choice is between a nuclear-capable Iran and the use of force, then I think we need to look at the use of force."

Be sure to check out the article, especially for it's excellent links at top. You'll also get some laughs, or cries, out of reading the comments, because Bolton's comments seem to have driven a good many leftists into paroxysms of rage.

Although the Bush Administration has done a miserable job at employing the "soft power" that strategists like Frank Gaffney and Michael Ledeen advocate, they might at least be taking long-term steps toward setting the legal basis for military strikes. Ralph Peters explained why a few weeks ago

The media missed a big one yesterday.

They ran with the story that the Bush administration will soon designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps - a major troublemaker in Iraq - as a terrorist organization. But they didn't look past the public-consumption explanation that the move lets our government go after the Revolutionary Guards' finances and the international companies that cut deals with Tehran's thugs.

The real reason for the move is to set up a legal basis for airstrikes or special operations raids on the Guard's bases in Iran.

Our policy is that we reserve the right to whack terrorists anywhere in the world. Now we have newly designated terrorists. And we know exactly where they are.

He may be right. Let's hope it doesn't come down to military strikes, because if it does it isn't going to be a 2 or 3 day affair, but one that lasts weeks, and will undoubtably involve naval action in the Persian Gulf as well. And let's not forget that Iran won't take it lying down. They'll unleash their terrorist proxy forces around the world, and we'll get hit with some nasty surprises. In the end, though, even this is better than an Iran armed with nuclear weapons.