Two Scholars on the Middle East: Dark Weather Approaching

Concerning the Middle East, National Review's Michael Ledeen and Victor Davis Hanson are indispensable, regardless of one's political leanings.

Ledeen: "Having kicked the Iranian can down the road for many years, having failed to purge the intelligence community the morning after 9/11, and having failed to support democratic revolution in Iran and Syria, we are between various hard and alarmingly sharp rocks."

Hanson:"Finally, the public must be warned that dealing with a nuclear Iran is not a matter of a good versus a bad choice, but between a very bad one now and something far, far worse to come."

There is another factor to this mess: the desperation of Iran's Mullahcracy. Dying and threatened regimes have a habit of eleventh hour atrocities. Iran's present government is facing its greatest threat from its own governed, despite having standing US armies on either side. It makes emotional sense that a regime hooked on jihad would send its new weapons to burn secularist enemy Iraqi or Turkish cities. It makes even more sense to ignite Tel Aviv, if it can find the range and deliver. Something, anything, to create a state of emergency as it had during the (first) war with Iraq, and thereby galvanize public support as it purges pro-American and pro-liberty elements within.

The pungent stupidity of President Ahmadinejad's public statements do not inspire confidence that Iran wishes to proceed on a rational level. And we let it happen; just stood by as we listened to our kinder, gentler "rational" media and critics as that nation built a nuclear weapons program, sponsored jihad, interfered with its neighbors and repressed its governed.

The bitterest irony is Iran's internal revolutionary forces: If we assist them now, the outcome will be definitely bad in the short term as Ahmadinejad's regime undergoes convulsions. Better now, before Iran has the nukes to prop onto its rockets.

Update: Via Drudge: "Earlier Sunday Iran said Israel would be making a "fatal mistake" should it resort to military action against Teheran's nuclear program and dismissed veiled threats from the Jewish state as a "childish game."" On the one hand, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi is probably correct: One doubts if Israel could locate and destroy the programme's sites during what would be a protracted and distant air campaign. On the other hand, provoking American involvement isn't gamesmanship, it is a matter of survival.

Posted by Ran at January 22, 2006 09:40 AM | TrackBack