Iran - We dithered

Michael Ledeen says that we have blown our opportunity with Iran. Instead of formulating a policy to promote a regime change in Iran, our Iranian policy has been "wishful thinking."

Bit by bit we are getting to the inevitable showdown with Iran. This administration, like every other Western government, has hoped against hope that it would not come to this.

And now that the Europeans have "given up" talking to the Iranians, everyone resorts to bluster and threat:

We now hear cries for violent action from those once aptly characterized by Senator Henry Jackson as "born-again hawks," Democrats and Republicans suddenly willing to talk tough about sanctions and military strikes against Iran. This is only to be expected. Having failed to pursue serious policies in the past, we are left with distasteful options today, and the pundits' and solons' chest pounding shows it. They do not expect the "hard options" to be embraced; this is posturing to the crowd, this is political positioning of the most cynical sort.

About the threats of economic sanction or bombing the nuclear facilities, Ledeen writes:

You want sanctions? When have sanctions ever "worked" against hostile countries? Did they bring Saddam to heel? ...they have only altered the behavior of regimes that wanted to be part of our world, countries like South Africa and Chile. For the rest, sanctions cut primarily against the oppressed peoples of our tyrannical enemies, and the tyrants could care less. Sanctions..would do more harm than good. We should want to help the Iranian people, who are overwhelmingly pro-American, and bring down the mullahcracy, which is our outspoken, fanatical, and bloodthirsty enemy. No sanctions.

You want to bomb the nuclear facilities? Do you really believe that our intelligence community is capable of identifying them? ...And even if you believe that we have good information about the nuclear sites, are you prepared to deal with the political consequences, in Iran and throughout the region? Do we even know, with any degree of reliability, what those are? Look at the problems we now face in Pakistan, after a handful of innocents were killed in an assault against a presumed terrorist gathering. Then imagine, if you can, the problems following hundreds, or thousands of innocents killed in raids inside Iran. Are you prepared for that?

According to Ledeen, our best option at this point is what we should have been doing all along but failed to do. Support the revolutionary forces in Iran that would sweep the Mullahs from power.

Our failure to support revolution in Iran is already a terrible embarrassment, and risks becoming an enormous catastrophe. Almost everyone who writes about the chances for revolution takes it for granted that it would take a long time to come to fruition. Why must that be so? The revolutions in countries like Georgia and the Ukraine seem to have erupted in an historical nanosecond. Nobody foresaw them, everyone was surprised. Who imagined the overnight success of the Lebanese people? How long did that take? The entire region is awash with revolutionary sentiment, and nowhere more than Iran. Why assume — because no one can possibly "know" such things — that it would take a long time?

And even if you believe that revolution cannot possibly succeed before the successful completion of the mullahs' nuclear project, is that a reason to abandon the policy altogether? On the contrary, it seems self-evident that it would be even more urgent to support revolution in a nuclear Iran than earlier, doesn't it? So why not start now? The Iranian people may be ready. We won't know until we try.

On the other hand, we do know what will happen if we continue to dither, if we continue to act as if the United Nations could possibly have a decisive effect, and if we continue to put up with the sly appeasement of Iran that is practiced by the spent forces of Europe. Terror against our troops and our friends will increase; nuclear blackmail will become a commonplace in the Middle East; the fanatics of Tehran may very well fulfill their promise to wipe Israel from the map.

For years now, Ledeen has been calling for the US to support the Iranian dissidents in overthrowing the Mullahs. Now it looks as though that is about our only option. We stood in the wings while The EU3 (Germany, France and Great Britain) attempted to reason with the Mullahs. Now, we are at an apparent impasse. Iran will develop nuclear energy and according to the Army War College will develop a bomb.

Charles Krauthammer chimes in on sanctions:

The only sanctions that might conceivably have any effect would be a boycott of Iranian oil. No one is even talking about that, because no one can bear the thought of the oil shock that would follow, taking 4.2 million barrels a day off the market, from a total output of about 84 million barrels.

The threat works in reverse. It is the Iranians who have the world over a barrel. On Jan. 15, Iran's economy minister warned that Iran would retaliate for any sanctions by cutting its exports to "raise oil prices beyond levels the West expects." A full cutoff could bring $100 oil and plunge the world into economic crisis.

As if all this weren't gloomy enough, Kenneth Timmerman writes about one very unsavory Iranian revolutionary group that we want no part of.

Absent a revolution, we're screwed. With a revolution, we could get more than we bargained for. At this point, all we have is more "wishful thinking." Someday, in the not too distant future, we may look back wistfully on the "good old days" when our biggest worries were about partisan politics with liberals and a biased mainstream media.

We are screwed.