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| An interesting analysis. |
ETWolverine |
09/06/06 |
GLOVES OFF ON IRAN
By JOHN PODHORETZ
September 6, 2006 -- GEORGE W. Bush just delivered what may be the most important speech of his presidency since he went before the United Nations on Sept. 12, 2002, and declared his intention to seek regime change in Iraq.
The time has come, the president all but said yesterday, to take the gloves off with Iran.
"The world's free nations will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon," he said flatly. He prefaced those words by saying that efforts were being made to find a diplomatic solution to the problem. Nonetheless, Bush has now said in the strongest sentence he has yet spoken on the matter that Iran will not go nuclear. He is unconditional about it.
In a carefully crafted speech, Bush laid out the parallels between the extremists of al Qaeda - Sunni Muslims - and the Shia extremists led by Iran. While they both use fiery rhetoric that may be easy to dismiss in certain quarters as an Islamic cultural affect, they are also uncommonly specific about their strategies and goals to achieve their aims.
Using captured documents, he showed how Osama bin Laden and the head of al Qaeda in Iraq have laid out with great precision their strategy to weaken and exhaust the United States and the free nations of the world - a strategy that is having some effect after three-plus hard years fighting in Iraq.
When discussing bin Laden's writings, Bush compared them to those of Lenin and Hitler a decade before they took power. The president pointed out: "History teaches that underestimating the words of evil and ambitious men is a terrible mistake." Then, almost immediately, he jumped from bin Laden to Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
"Iran's leaders," he said, "have also declared their absolute hostility to America. Last October, Iran's president declared in a speech that some people ask - in his words - 'whether a world without the United States and Zionism can be achieved. I say that this goal is achievable.' Less than three months ago, Iran's president declared to America and other Western powers: 'Open your eyes and see the fate of Pharaoh. If you do not abandon the path of falsehood, your doomed destiny will be annihilation.' "
Bush continued: "Less than two months ago, [Ahmadinejad] warned: 'The anger of Muslims may reach an explosion point soon. If such a day comes, America and the West should know that the waves of the blast will not remain within the boundaries of our region.' He also delivered this message to the American people: 'If you would like to have good relations with the Iranian nation in the future, bow down before the greatness of the Iranian nation and surrender. If you don't accept to do this, the Iranian nation will force you to surrender and bow down.'"
Bush wants the world to understand that he sees the nation of Iran as different only in degree from bin Laden and the terrorists in Iraq, not different in kind. We are to take Ahmadinejad's rhetoric seriously. We are not to dismiss his threats as flowery rabble-rousing but as honest statements of intent.
And if you do that, then the conclusion is inescapable that the world must do everything it can to prevent Iran from joining the nuclear club. "Armed with nuclear weapons," Bush said, Islamic extremists "would blackmail the free world, and spread their ideologies of hate, and raise a mortal threat to the American people. If we allow them to do this, if we retreat from Iraq, if we don't uphold our duty to support those who are desirous to live in liberty, 50 years from now history will look back on our time with unforgiving clarity, and demand to know why we did not act. I'm not going to allow this to happen - and no future American president can allow it either."
So there it is. A week after Iran declared its intention to continue uranium enrichment, the president of the United States has said in no uncertain terms that it will be stopped - that the failure to stop it would lead history to judge him, us and the world in the harshest possible terms.
Like most people, I've presumed for the past few years that our commitment in Iraq and the extreme difficulty of targeting the proper sites had basically foreclosed a serious military option in Iran. Certainly the hesitant and cautious behavior of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the past few months suggested as much.
Now it seems to me that, barring a miraculous change of heart on the part of the Iranian regime, a military strike is all but inevitable. Bush himself will view his own presidency as a failure if he doesn't act.
So act he will.
jpodhoretz@gmail.com
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Do you think we are headed in the direction of military action in Iran, or is this just rhetorric. Remember, we are talking about GWB... not exactly a guy who is afraid to use the military.
I happen to agree with Podhoretz' analysis. Bush tends to mean what he says and say what he means. If he says that "The world's free nations will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon," the I am willing to guess that he means it.
What is your opinion?
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Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 09/06/06 1:49 pm:
FYI :
In my response I statedIf you took the US military out of the region there is no doubt that Iran has the most powerful military . When Isaid that I purposely excluded the Israeli military because I was narrowing the region to only the Gulf State . In no way do I suggest that the Iranians have anywhere's near the Israeli capabilities.
Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 09/06/06 3:03 pm:
Ronnie Reagan is currently in Eastpac .The Enterprise is in the Arabian Sea. Clarification/Follow-up by ETWolverine on 09/06/06 3:14 pm:
Then Big E it is. Works for me.
Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 09/06/06 3:16 pm:
agreed ; and it would not take much time for Reagan to join the scrum .To find current deployments check out this site .My biggest concern is a 2 year gap between the JFK decommission and the commissioning of the G.H.W. Bush .
Clarification/Follow-up by excon on 09/06/06 3:43 pm:
Hello again, El:
Yeah, we got a bad assed Navy (you know I was a sailor). But...... Let's say we take the Persion Gulf....... Then what?
excon Clarification/Follow-up by ETWolverine on 09/06/06 3:52 pm:
Excon,
You know those 2200 Marines I mentioned... they can be pretty useful in a ground assault.
And those guided missile frigates and guided missile destroyers? The cool thing about guided missiles is that they can be guided to any target, sea or land.
The submarines are missile subs with big-ass missiles too. Those might be fairly useful.
And then there is the carrier with all those really cool planes that shoot missiles and drop bombs and stuff. Those could probably do some damage, don't you think?
In fact, if you really look at the modern Navy, it is a force that can be involved in sea, air and land operations, and are a major force-multiplier in any combat situation.
And none of this even takes into consideration the really nasty stuff that the special operations guys of CTF-56 are capable of.
I'm not really all that worried about what Bush can throw at Iran if it comes to that. The 5th Fleet alone can put enough fire on target to smash anything that Iran can come up with.
Elliot
Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 09/06/06 3:53 pm:
ex ;you know we could easily severely degrade their ability to threaten their neighbors and also cripple their nuclear program without much effort . What you are talking about is the extensive use of land troops and that would only be necessary if our intent was to conquer and occupy .I suggest we take the Reagan approach with Iran ....wack em and let them figure out how to rebuild .Perhaps that alone would be sufficient to wake up the very dormant freedom movement in the country .
My problem is that I do not think the American people will commit to this effort without the Mahdi-hatter doing something stupid (which I actually think he will before years end ). I have already laid out the case that we are already in a shooting war with them but I do not think that would be sufficient to muster American support ;and some moonbats would never jump on board unless they were able to plant a nuke in an American city .(even then I'm not sure that their position wouldn't be that Iran was justified )
Clarification/Follow-up by excon on 09/06/06 9:12 pm:
Hello El and tom:
Understood. But degrade is not defeat. That's only going to be round 2. Round 1 just ended. Hezbollah was degraded, but they live to fight another day - and they will - maybe next time they WILL have nukes. Not because they developed them, but because they bought 'em from Pakistan.
I'm not interested in a sparing match. They win in a sparing match.
excon
Clarification/Follow-up by ETWolverine on 09/07/06 11:28 am:
First of all, Pakistan isn't going to sell nukes to anyone, because they know what the USA will do to them if they become guilty of nuclear prolifertaion.
Second, I don't care if Iran survives or not, just as long as they don't have nukes. When Israel took out the Osirak nuclear plant in Iraq in 1981, they weren't interested in destroying Iraq, just in making sure they didn't become a nuclear power. The same applies to Iran today. If we can bring regime change there, fine, I'll support it. Buit the main goal is to take out their nuclear capabilities. If we do that, we win, and Iran becomes just another third rate dictatorship again. And the Navy is fully capable of pulling that mission off.
Elliot
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