A no less compelling case can be made that our national security would be well-served should dangerous despots like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khameni of Iran and North Korea’s Kim Jong Il were also hung by the neck until dead. It should be the object of American policy to help the long-suffering people of those two countries bring about regime changes that would lead to justice being served on such individuals.
We should do so not out of some fuzzy moral sentiment of the kind often sneeringly dismissed by so-called “foreign policy realists” like the Ford Administration’s Brent Scowcroft and James Baker. Rather, we should be working to bring about regime change in Iran and North Korea because it is vital to American security that tyrants who have made no secret of their wish to hurt this country – as Ahmadinejad likes to put it, “a world without America is not only desirable, but achievable” – are as unable to act on their ambitions as Saddam Hussein.
The alternative of allowing these threats further to metastasize is to ensure not only that the tyrannies in Tehran and Pyongyang be more dangerous in the future. They will help still other threats to become more formidable, as well.
Accordingly, when President Bush addresses the nation in the days ahead, laying out his vision for “the way forward,” he must explicitly remind all of us that we are in a war that is not confined to Iraq. If he chooses to “surge” into Iraq more troops, their mission must be part of a larger plan for defeating Iranian activities and proxies in that country, and working to rebuild what Tehran has helped destroy there.
At the same time, Mr. Bush must firmly reject the views of “stability” and accommodation with despotic regimes that we associate with President Ford’s time in office. Assisting the peoples of Iran and North Korea to end (with apologies to Mr. Ford) their “long national nightmares” inflicted by the Islamofascist mullahs and the Stalinist Kim dynasty, respectively, is essential to the survival of the Free World’s.
President Bush should provide such assistance in the comprehensive way his predecessor pursued the downfall of Soviet Communism – in sharp contrast to the Ford Administration which effectively sought to perpetuate it via “détente.” In fact, Reaganesque economic and financial measures led by the Treasury Department’s Under Secretary Stuart Levey are already having a salutary effect by constricting the cash-flow of both Tehran and Pyongyang. These steps need to be complemented by political warfare initiatives, information operations, expanded intelligence activity and, as appropriate, covert action.
In the spirit of “not a Ford but” the Gipper, and with a view to ensuring that more tyrants meet Saddam’s fate, George Bush should ask the Nation: “If not we, who? If not now, when?”