“The era of procrastination, half measures , soothing and baffling expediency delays is coming to a close,” Winston Churchill wrote in witness to Adolf Hitler’s brazen 1936 remilitarization of the Rhineland. “In its place, we are entering a period of consequences.”
With the release of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency’s umptieth report on Iran’s passionate pursuit of an atomic bomb––a 1,000-page indictment replete with everything from satellite footage of the steel containers required for nuclear explosives testing to interviews with renegade scientists employed in transitioning Teheran from uranium enrichment to bomb assembly––Western civilization has clearly arrived at another “period of consequences.”
The 1936 response to those consequences – “soothing and baffling expediency delays” ending in 30 million deaths, a fifth of them Jewish, and the devastation of a continent––is being replicated 75 years later, with the Jews, this time in the person of Israel, reprising their roles as coal mine canaries. Over the last 12 months, Iran has enriched 4.5 tons of uranium, more than a third of its entire stockpile. With a little further enrichment––a largely mechanical process at this juncture––the Teheran regime will be in possession of enough fissionable material for three or four nuclear bombs. The technology for arming and firing an actual warhead may still be a year to 18 months beyond its grasp, but if Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei means to stand by his assertion that “the only solution to the Middle East problem is the destruction and annihilation of the Jewish state,” then he has the material at hand for the realization of that objective.
Bret Stephens, in an illuminating discourse on the IAEA report in the Wall Street Journal under the heading “Now for a real Iran debate,” makes the point that such a debate needs first to “abandon the conceit that there is a ‘third way’ between allowing Iran’s nuclear drive to proceed effectively unhindered or to use military force to stop it.” There is no “diplomatic grand bargain” in the offing with Teheran, as even Barack Obama must be ready to concede by now. Secondly, Stephens submits, any realistic debate on Iran must perforce recognize that “time is no longer on the West’s side. Further temporizing on our choice of evils means that Iran will get to make the choices for us.” As night follows day, Stephens predicts, the West will find that its “procrastination and half measures” have triggered a “nuclear death spiral involving Saudi Arabia, Turkey and soon-to-be-Islamist Egypt. If you think the Cold War was scary,” he warns, “imagine four or five nuclear adversaries in the world’s most unstable region, each of them at daggers drawn with one another.”
If there is anything more execrable than the West’s failure to act against this budding apocalypse, it is the mixture of delusion, deceit and duplicity behind which it attempt to conceal that failure.
Secretary of State Clinton is reported to be in deep consultation with America’s allies on “further steps” to pressure Teheran, but the report stopped short of specifying the “steps” under consideration. They will almost assuredly not include the one sanction that just might get Ali Khamenei’s serious attention, namely, a frontal assault on the Central Bank of Iran (CBI). There’s a bipartisan bill in the House of Representatives that would compel the White House to clamp the cuffs on the CBI if it were determined that the bank was funding terrorism, nuclear weapons development or Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard. A similar bi-partisan bill is being put together in the Senate.
In assigning Treasury Department Undersecretary for Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen the task of convincing America’s European partners to back a hit on the CBI, effectively shutting the spigot on Iran’s oil exports, the White House appeared to be moving in step with the Congress. But appearances proved highly deceiving. In an about face that left even the normally cheer-leading Washington Post gasping for breath, the administration dropped its case for sanctioning the CBI with the excuse that eliminating Iran’s oil from Western markets would play havoc with the global economy. To which the Washington Post replied: “If Iran is to be stopped without the use of military force, the president and the country should be willing to bear some economic pain. The alternative––allowing Teheran to go forward––would be far more costly.”
Where deceit is concerned, the prize for public opposition to a nuclear Iran and private financial aid toward that objective must go to Germany. Even as Chancellor Angela Merkel was drum-beating her determination to impose more stringent sanctions on the Islamic republic in the wake of the IAEA revelations, the Marriott Hotel in Hamburg was hosting an “Iran Business Forum” to “jumpstart [German] investment in northwest Iran.”
Adamantly opposed to sanctions of any kind on Teheran, Russia’s duplicitous, albeit losing effort to prevent the dissemination of the IAEA report can be even better understood in light of revelations that “renegade” Russian nuclear scientists have been in the pay of Teheran for years, instructing their Iranian counterparts on fabricating the high precision detonators essential to triggering a nuclear chain reaction.
Given Mr. Obama’s laser-like focus on another four years to “transform” America, he could probably lock up a second term with a U.S. Air Force strike on Iran or a combined U.S.-Israel Air Force operation, cleaning Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s nuclear clock in considerably less than 24 hours. Bye, bye everybody’s worst nightmare. The possibility can’t be ruled out, but banking on it would be giving hostages to wishful thinking. “While we might aspire to a situation where the righteous work will be done by others,” Strategic Affairs Minister and former IDF Chief of GeneraL Staff Moshe Ya’alon declared in a recent interview with Israel Army Radio, “Israel must act as if it can depend on nobody to protect it from the Iranian threat but itself.”
Those, chiefly in the media, but also among some mainly retired IDF brass, who contend that the price of destroying or derailing Iran’s nuclear locomotive is too high, would do well to take a second look at a national poll just released showing that 11 percent of Israelis (600,000 Israeli Jews) would seriously consider leaving the country were Iran to cross the nuclear weapons threshold. What do the nuclear Iran “containment” supporters imagine that 11 percent figure might look like the moment Iran tested its first bomb? Think double, maybe triple, maybe who knows. The point being that Khamenei and his deranged front-man, Ahmadinejad, don’t have to drop the bomb. Their mere possession of it could precipitate a massive flight out of Israel.
Given the total failure of the sanctions regime, a preemptive Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear death factories looks like a no-brainer compared to the estimated 1.5 million casualties IDF Research and Development projects would result from an atomic bomb or missile warhead hitting Gush Dan, including greater Tel-Aviv. It is to choose life, however high the cost, over the pit and the pendulum. That’s what the Bible reports God advising the Israelites to do, as they stood between Gerizim and Evel, respectively the mountains of life and death. (Deut 30:19)
Choose life. It’s still sounds like a pretty good idea.
