Friday, December 08, 2006
|
|
"Iran Is A True Menace"
|
|
Posted by:
Hugh Hewitt at
10:01 AM
|
|
The Baker-Hamilton-Chamberlain Report is already past its shelf-life, and scenes of Baker testifying lead to a click quicker than a real estate investment infomercial. Very few serious people will be citing it this weekend, much less next month, and the legacy of the ISG may be the end of such commissions. Justice O'Connor and General Meese, at least, ought to be asking themselves how they allowed Secretary Baker to rope them into this smash-up, and General Meese at least might want to consider how to notice his many friends that, believe it or not, he kept it from being worse.
Scott Johnson has a single paragraph summary of the ISG which is all it needs:
If Iran picks up the pace of its 27-year old war against the United States, a healthy serving of Israeli territory seems to be the answer. If Syria resumes its murderous Lebanon campaign, a healthy serving of Israeli territory seems to be the answer. If Baghdad is dissolving in sectarian violence, a healthy serving of Israeli territory to third parties seems to be the answer. If a healthy slice of Israeli territory can't be offered to satisfy Hezbollah and Hamas, they can be ignored.
Meanwhile, unrest is growing in Iran (and not just the students),and if indeed Iran's maximum leader is headed for this world's exits, that means an already roiling Iran will enter a period of potential instability. Put down the ISG Report, Mr. President, and figure out a way to help the good guys --the majority of the Iranian people-- throw off these despots. Surely if Iran can use the porous border to send trouble into Iraq, a reverse flow can be arranged. Ditto Damascus.
The government of Iran may be our enemy, but its people surely aren't.
And the ISG may be defeatist in attitude and appeasement oriented, but the American people aren't.
UPDATE: The German government has condemned the anti-Holocaust nutters assembling in Tehran. Could a high profile U.S. official, say the Secretary of State, do the same in a high profile way? Today? From the AP via the International Herald Tribune:
"We condemn all past and future attempts of anyone who gives a platform to those who relativize or question the Holocaust," Foreign Ministry spokesman Jens Ploetner said.
The Iranian president has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map," and the Tehran conference appeared to be part of Ahmadinejad's public campaign against the Jewish state.
UPDATE 2: Another small problem for the Alice-in-Wonderland ISG:
Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh told thousands of Iranians on Friday that his Hamas-led government will never recognize Israel and will continue to fight for the "liberation of Jerusalem."
Hamas has pocketed more than $120 million in Iranian aid since winning power last March. Did the ISG even mention that connection?
The obvious entente between Iran-Hezbollah-Syria-Hamas is not a result of Israel. It is a result of shared ideology and the need to maintain power. The lost opportunity of the ISG was to focus on the nature of the menace, not the manifestation of its capacity to cause chaos in Iraq.
On yesterday's program, the American military's Kipling, Robert Kaplan, argued that the ISG Report could have been worse. I responded:
If in 1938, a panel of distinguished Brits had gotten together and said "The pressure on Austria is unacceptable, the threats to Czechoslovakia must stop, Italy must withdraw from Ethiopia, and negotiate its territorial claims in that part of the world, et cetera, et cetera. But let’s all understand Hitler can be negotiated with." Would such a report have been as bad as it could have been? No. But would it still have been a dangerous and terrible thing? Yes. That’s the analogy. Why am I wrong?
And I had this exchange with Ralph Peters:
HH: When we undertook the bombing of the Serbs, because of their ethnic cleansing, was their level of threat to the United States, and their level of violence greater or lesser than that which the Iranians are now exercising towards us, and towards their ethnic enemies?
RP: The Serbs didn't even register on the scale. Iran is a true menace.
Had the ISG done its job it would have used its platform to drive home to the American public this key fact: "Iran is a true menace.
It did not. Instead it used its rare opportunity to somehow convey that, at the heart of the problem, is not an Shia Islamist ideology of radical expanision allied with al Qaeda's death cult, but Israel.
This is like blaming Edvard Benes for Gernany's occupation of Czechoslovakia.
Iran is a resources rich country of 69 million people (up from 39 million in 1970) led by fanatics not easily if ever deterred. (Syria has a population of 19 million.) Germany was a resources rich country of 70 million in 1939 when it launched its wars of aggression in its world region. At some point the U.S. will have to confront the "true menace," and not by offering up its neighbors or its object of hatred, Israel.
|
|
Then by your own admission there is no such thing as a war crime. We should not have tried Japanese military leaders for such at the end of the war. The only crimes against humanity in WWII were done by the Germans and only against their own people.
Milosevic is innocent of war crimes, and genocide against one's enemies is justified.
We can torture POW's for information, and our soldiers if captured should expect to be tortured (perhaps incrimental amputation) to extract information.
Or am I mising something? |
|
einhverfr,
your logic and sensational conclusions about the activity of spies leading to invasions is high schoolish. iran and syria are rogue terrorists states as even acknowledged by the UN on occassion.
i repeat, "if we are in a war vs terrorism and the states that sponsor it--as stated by president bush four years ago--why are the leaders and their closest advisers of syria, iran and sudan still alive. these are the acknowledged primary terrorist states in the mideast."
those are the president's words not mine. we are either in a war or we are not. you don't belive we are in a war as reflected in your statements. i believe we are so i want total war or none. simple as that. win with every means possible.
as for kaddafi you need to review history. had he been killed the results would have been even better. kill the leaders of sudan, iran and syria and the world will be better for it. when they replace these leaders with new terror leaders kill them also. total unrelenting devastation.
this report sums it very clearly:
https://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2006-winter/no-substitute-for-victory.asp
either wage war to win or don't fight at all....... |
|
How exactly did the attack on Qaddafi change anything? Libya remained a roque state, not much changed, etc. It wasn't until Libya decided that a piece of the EU market was worth cooperating with international mandates that things changed.
My suggestion is this. We should have an idea of what Iran and Syria want from us. We can name our price and leave them to decide whether it is worth it. And we can leave the door open to cancel the deal if they fail to live up to their sides of the bargain. |
|
So if a state gives safe harbor to individuals who poison an individual with a radioactive poison, and then demand that other dissidents are turned over for them to cooperate with the investigation, shouldn't we be invading them instead? Or at least slapping them with heavy sanctions and declaring them to be a state sponsor of Terrorism?
Why are we in Iraq actually? What terrorist attacks did Saddam sponsor? (Those terrorist training camps that Powell said were there, according to his own maps were in areas controlled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.)
We are in Iraq because we want somewhere in the region to put our troops and leaving them in Saudi Arabia gives bin Ladin too much propaganda material. Does this strike anyone as being a good move in the War on Terror? |
|
"I've asked myself the same thing Patrick
If we have decided to ignore international law, what is stopping us from taking names, logging coordinates, and launching regional strikes?
The only answer I can come up with is that we must still have some kind of sentimental fondness for (what remains of) our own legitimacy."
we are losing this war because of delusional thinking such as yours. they are harboring terrorists. they are legitimate enemies. i could care less about our image. my only concern is to defeat and kill our enemies in this war on terror by any and all means. total war or none at all.
|
|
|
Class, please note the context in which HH uses his favorite word. "Serious" is his code for "true-believing kool-aid drinkers who think that the Iraq war was a good idea and GWB is a great leader". Hence, the ISG report is "not serious" or "not taken seriously by serious observers." However, over-using a word in a particular way does not make it the accurate usage. |
|
When I say we should negotiate. I guess I mean that we should negotiate in the style of Teddy Roosevelt. Yes, I know that Roosevelt was pretty much hated by the Republican leadership of his day, but in negotiations he was a master.
Nothing typifies his attitude better than the way he handled the Coal Miners Strike of 1902. In essence when the mine asked Roosevelt to intervene, suggesting that a coal shortage in the winter would likely cause the deaths of many Americans, his response was classic:
You are right-- I cannot allow Americans to die because of your labor dispute, so I will send in the National Guard. But don't misunderstand me. If I do this, the Guardsmen will mine the coal at government expense and you will not see a dime for that coal. Nor will the striking miners get pay either. So I suggest you work it out.
In essence, he threatened to temporarily nationalize the coal mines. Needless to say, the mines and unions worked things out in a real hurry.
I am in favor of doing the same sort of thing with Iran. Find out what they want form us (probably a security guarantee). Name our price in terms of their good behavior. And suggest that we can cancel the deal at any time that they fail to live up to the bargain. Let them decide whether it is worth it. And yes, this should include terms about funding attacks inside the Green Line of Israel ('69 borders), nuclear fuel enrichment, and every other concern we need to have met. If they want it, we can name our price. Let them decide whether it is worth it. And hopefully gain some leverage over their participation in many conflicts in the area. |
|
You wrote:
"In fact, this whole commission idea was a signal to the terrorists and dictators in the world that America doesn't have to be respected, that our media will undercut our government every time, and if they don't the Democrats will."
You have put your finger on the cause of most of our foreign policy failures since 1970. If the media doesn't do it the Democrats will. |
|
a very simple question.
if we are in a war vs terrorism and the states that sponsor it--as stated by president bush four years ago--why are the leaders and their closest advisers of syria, iran and sudan still alive. these are the acknowledged primary terrorist states in the mideast. we know where they reside at night, we know where they are virtually all the time. why haven't they and the leaders of hamas and hezbollah been targeted for execution on the same night at the same time without notice?
why are they allowed, by us, to get up every morning and spew death and mayhem against us and all the things we hold near and dear? why are they being allowed to win this war?
if we are in a war why are we afraid to win? Reagan knew what he was doing when he put a missile down kaddafi's chimney--how did we forget this lesson? that missile you may recall killed his wife and child. Muammar was never heard from again....... |
|
People need to stop looking to the Holocaust for the justification for Israel's existance. Israel is here today, and it is not right to go back and say that we are going to get rid of it for historical reasons. All of what I say is verifiable and I encourage people to look it up themselves.
The roots of the modern state go back to WWI and the Balfour declaration. Unfortunately, Israel is a state born out of persecution (there is a theory that I suspect is right, that the Balfour declaration passed Parliament because many MP's didn't want so many Jews in Britain). Understanding that British Palestine was marketed as the Homeland for the Jews out of antisemitism is an important step in understanding why the situation is so messed up today.
WWII, however, saw very strange developments. A large number of Zionist Jews formed a number of militias aimed at gaining independance from Britain. In addition Avraham Stern formed the ELHI brotherhood, a terrorist organization even by their own admission which aimed to create a fascist Jewish state under an iron dictatorial fist (which is pretty close to their own words). They consisted mostly of Jews but had some Arabs among their members as well, and and they carried terrorist attacks against dual-purpose targets, aiming to kill both British military and civilian alike.
Stern wrote, among other things, that Hitler was harmless, that he merely professed to hate Jews, and that the real enemies of the Jews were the likes of Churchill. He further praised Hitler's rounding up of the Jews as being good for everyone as at least in this condition the Jews had their own governments, police, etc. and didn't have to deal with everyone else.
After Stern was killed by British agents, the organization was headed by a triumverate which included the youn Yitzach Shameer.
In 1942, having exhausted avenues for gaining support from Mussolini, ELHI sent an envoy to the German embassy in Beruit, seeking no less than an alliance with the Third Reich, and offering to set up a subservient regime in exchange for millitary assistance. This alliance never happened.
For his great treachery of seeking an alliance with the same power that killed so many Jews, Shameer was punished by eventually rising to the highest levels of Israeli government. In fact I can think of no other government where someone who espoused unusually strong Nazi sympathies was able to attain so high an office after this time. Oh well, as if politics made sense.....
Yet you see this same self-destructive nature in Israeli politics today. Why would the state of Israel accept help from a group of antisemetic right-wing Christians who want to see the Jews return to Israel so that the Second Coming can happen and those who don't convert can be destroyed? Makes about as much sense as Zionists asking Hitler for help, but the latter actually happened... |
|
Largely agree. We need to realize that we have few friends in the Iraq war and fewer still are from the region (even Turkey has not been very supportive).
And you are absolutely right that we need to stand up to those who claim to be our allies in the region and yet undermine us (such as the Saudis).
But I wonder if there is enough mutual interest on which we can build a relationship with Iran such that we can actually gain some leverage over the sorts of activities they support. Certainly a security guarantee provided that they forego uranium enrichment, refuse to fund attacks inside the Green Line of Israel, and so forth might be a good start. If they decide not to, then the security guarantee is off. They want it? That is the price. Simple, and not based on trust.
I have yet to figure out Khamenei. I don't really know what he wants. I suspect that Ahmedinejad is someone who can be talked to but this means little when a shadowy figure in the corner has veto power in retrospect. |
|
Iran is a funny place. It is the closest thing to democracy that can coexist with a religious state. And if we can't control Iraq, what would we have done with Iran (a country much larger, more populous, and more diverse)?
The fact is, Iran is a threat but we can either try to reduce that threat through hard negotiations or we can learn to live with it. I assume the Bush Administration and the sort of individuals who hang around this site would prefer the latter, but I would ask... What are we prepared to do if Iran gets a nuclear bomb?
Certainly the political reality is we can't invade now. Certainly the reality is we won't be able to invade then. Seems like we will have to live with a nuclear Iran. Certainly the economic and political realities are that we can't launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against their cities. And don't you think that Iran is prepared for air strikes?
The sad thing is, we are in a position to negotiate here and most readers on this board don't know it. We have troups with bases on three of their borders (Iraq, Aghanistan, and Turkey). Right, invasion isn't an answer, but don't you think that if we gave conditions to Iran that, so long as they lived by them, we would agree to further their security, would be met with at least a somewhat receptive ear?
But we have to do this now. In fact we should have done this 2 year ago. If we wait until 2009, the chance will have been lost an we will be in a position of weakness. We will leave, Iran will send troups in to replace us in Iraq (and help bolster the government we created), and they will be the main winner of the Iraq war.
Mark my words. The time to talk is now while we are still strong. |
|
"Bubba to you", shouldn't that be "Ali Bubba"?
The report is a good indicator of why Bush 41 didn't get a second term.
I've been reading books about the history and current developments in the Sunni-Shia divide, and I'm convinced that our best bet is to support the elected government in Iraq, and to give moral support to the preaching of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.
There are Shiite groups that we shouldn't trust, of course. Hizbollah, for instance, and the Khomeinist regime in Iran. But traditionally Shias have supported a type of separation of religious clerics and government, because they view political power as too corrupting. As far as the Iraqi Sunnis go, we should let the Saudis know that if they keep funding these insurgents and trying to put the Shiites back in a subservient position in their own country, they might not be pumping so much oil, and parts for their F-16s will be held up for a while.
Probably the most offensive thing about the ISG report is its arrogance in assuming that all our words about the Iragi government being democratic were hogwash and that we have the right to overthrow it and replace it with another Jerry Bremer.
The whole concept of losing this war shouldn't even be under discussion, and bugging out before the Iraqis can take over the job would be an admission of failure. In fact, this whole commission idea was a signal to the terrorists and dictators in the world that America doesn't have to be respected, that our media will undercut our government every time, and if they don't the Democrats will. The fact that Europe and the U.N. have already sent that message, is not a reason for us to do the same. It's a reason for us to stand our ground and let the Saudis, Syrians and Iranians know that further meddling in Iraq will result in something really destablizing for their own regimes. After 9/11 I watched a program with Bernard Lewis as a guest. His comments made me realize the importance of dealing with Middle Easterners with a strong hand. He said that these people respect resolve more than anything else, that we shouldn't be requesting things from them but notifying them of what we expect. As Mark Steyn points out, there is no compassion with these people. They interpret all this discussing and consulting as weakness.
Bush may hold a weak hand, but he's still CinC, and the executive branch still determines foreign policy. If he backs down now, he'll be a failure as a president. If he sticks to his guns, even if the Congress tries to block everything, he'll be vindicated, because the elections weren't about the war and foreign policy as much as they were about disgust with the Republicans in Congress. At least that's how I'd go about preparing for 2008. Lame ducks are also immune to political threats. |
|
|
Just saw a MSNNBC poll that had Bush at 36% approval. Pretty pathetic. Respondents approval for the 2007 Congress, 26%. Pelosi has along way up to go. |
|
Hugh,
Didn't you just say the other day on the radio that there is no use in whistling pass the report?
"Very few serious people will be citing it this weekend, much less next month, and the legacy of the ISG may be the end of such commissions."
That sounds like whistling to me.
Bushers just scored a record 70% disapproval rate in a zogby poll. Don't mislead your audience. Bush is going to implement most, if not all, of the ISG's recomendations else the Democrats are going to crucify him. He is pretending to stand up to Baker right now, so that the 30% of people who still wave his flag won't all go kill themselves in a fit of despair.
|
|
|
Shelby mirrors Hugh's article or Hugh mirrors Shelby's article in todays Wall Street Journal. All I can say is oh my God, what a take down of the realists, appeasers and defeatists. My take on both articles is that there isn't the fortitude to do what it takes to win this war so America will experience another 9/11 which will most likely be more deadly (10,000 dead)to know what's at stake. It's good vs. evil. One side will disembowel a teacher for educating women or blow up children as homicide bombers to make a religous point. The other will sacrifice it's best and brightest to secure freedom for people who most likely live thousands of miles from that persons own backyard. all this becuse it's the right thing for humanity. Our reward may be in heaven because here on earth we get hate and vile from some of those who protect. |
|
I would certainly be pleased if Rice condemned the anti-holocaust nutters. There is no controversy. The holocaust occured. Discussing the "controversy" of whether or not the holocaust occured makes about as much sense as discussing the "controversy" of whether or not evolution occured.
|
|
|
|