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Yesterday’s
The
Nuke Whisperer
Why
By Jay B Gaskill
“
“
producing more nuclear fuel at a much faster pace, the officials said.
“U.N. nuclear monitors have not
been allowed to examine the new centrifuge, which Iranian officials briefly put
on display at a news conference last month. But an expert group's analysis of
the machine -- based on photos -- suggests that it could be up to five times as
productive as the balky centrifuges
LINK:
Victor Davis Hanson:
“A nuclear Iran would
be analogous to the lunatic homeowner with a huge personal arsenal who
periodically threatens his neighbors with terrible retaliation should their
leaves drift over his property — without necessarily intending to spray anyone
with machine-gun fire. Who wishes to try to keep up property values, or even to
live, in such a neighborhood?’
See his full piece -- http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson043010.html
The Reality Check:
Moreover, the achievement of nuclear weapons capability will harden the domestic control of the ruling mullahs, setting back hope of regime liberalization for the foreseeable future.
In the meantime, our president appears to have moved into a
hostile relationship with our most stalwart democratic ally in the
Deeply naïve liberals (by contrast, Senator Joe Lieberman is a deeply realistic liberal) have softened the ground for a new, softer policy. Their ongoing legacy of toxic naiveté has infected the current Democratic Party leadership to the end that our new president might actually believe that diplomacy without teeth can produce results in the ground and that “Israel needs to be saved from herself” much in the same way his rhetoric suggests that America needs to be saved from its own history.
Behind this line of thinking lurks the delusion that all the world’s countries are run by elites whose decisions are determined by rational self interest calculations, and therefore can simply be reasoned with. The notion that all nations’ foreign policy and military ambitions calculations can be measured in terms of Dollars, Euros and Renminbi and Rial is the banker’s delusion. History is replete with examples of whole countries that enthusiastically spilled blood for overarching, non-economic goals. If nations always behaved like conservative bankers who all go to the same club, we would not have experienced the horrors of World War II, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and radical Islam would not be engaged in a suicidal jihad against the West.
Delusional naiveté has led this administration to the potentially disastrous miscalculation that the mullahs can be deterred by a nuclear balance of power.
This thinking also has the seductive quality of the “it’s no longer our worry” syndrome while ignoring the ripple consequences of our abandonment of close allies to the wolves: Aa destabilizing nuclear arms race ending, inevitably, in the retaliatory exchange of mushroom clouds and decimated cities, the destabilization of civilization itself, will follow.
Suppose we take away the element of fatal naiveté from all
this. The simplest remaining theory that
fits all the facts is chilling: POTUS actually prefers the reasonable and
probable outcome of his polices, to wit: the elimination of “the
In fact, this line of thinking is revealed a growing whisper
campaign within the Beltway, a narrative that talks in code of countries like
I choose not to parse this question too closely. Any “friend” so misguided as to enable your deadly enemy is functionally indistinguishable from the enemy itself, and has become allied with the forces that seek your extinction.
During the campaign, I proposed that Senator Obama was the chameleon candidate. That appears to be our best hope right now, because a chameleon can still change.
So... is our “nuancer-in-chief” just a naïve nuke-whisperer? I suspect that this will be seen in the unflinching, cold light of history as the kindest possible take on our new president’s evident vacillation on Iran and overt hostility to Israel. Yet results always affect historical narratives as if the outcome was known from the beginning by the players.
At some point, liberal caution becomes sympathy with the
enemy, which soon mutates into tool of the enemy which - heavens forbid-
becomes the
enemy.
We are not there...yet. Mr. Obama has not yet lost the game.
I am persuaded that only military action in the form of
concentrated, sustained air strikes against selected strategic targets in
I still hope and pray that our new president will ultimately approve the grimly necessary actions in time, but I am deeply worried.
We must stop and reverse the spread of nuclear weapons in the world’s most volatile region or suffer a calamity of epic proportions. Yes, there will be blowback. But the alternative, the reliance on ineffective sanctions and charm, will fail. And that failure will ignite a chain of events, a regional nuclear arms race and the eventual use of those weapons, killing millions and poisoning the planet for generations.
For President Obama, this presents the single major legacy choice of his administration, the one that will define his presidency forever. History will not be kind to the leader whose hesitation and ultimate inaction helped auger in a new hell on earth.
I cannot think about this pivotal historic moment without recalling some lines from Yeats prophetic poem, “The Second Coming”:
“...Things
fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy
is loosed upon the world,
The
blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony
of innocence is drowned;
“...a vast
image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my
sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
...a
shape...is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows
of the indignant desert birds.
[....]
What rough
beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches
towards
William
Yes, the “rough beast” is the specter of nuclear-armed radical Islam, the arrival of a new nightmare that will make the Cold War’s “tuck and cover” school drills and civil fallout shelters seem trivial by contrast.
The shocking car bomb incident in time Square (resolved
serendipitously and locally by
In a perfect world with perfect intelligence and a president with the tested toughness of, say, a Harry Truman, we could go to sleep at night secure in the knowledge that there really is a stern Plan B (something that holdover Sec-Def Gates has publicly challenged[1]) and that our fanatical adversaries in Iran are on notice. Sadly, we have two untrained “political officers” in key national security positions (homeland security[2] and the CIA[3]) and the all too typical Rodney King mindset running Foggy Bottom.
The next step is up to our new, as yet untested president. Tick..tick...tick....
JBG
[2] Homeland Security Chief, J. Napolitano, a former governor, has no professional national security credentials.
[3] CIA head, L. Panetta, a former congressman and political staffer, has no national security or espionage credentials. His nomination was actually opposed by key democrats for CIA head until assurances were made that the brilliantly qualified Stephen Kappes would serve as Panetta’s number two. Mr. Kappes announced his resignation from the premier spy agency this April.