Iran: America’s Strategic Failure

Iran celebrates as Russia loads its nuclear fuel into the Russian built Bushehr reactor, Iran’s first atomic power station, the first nuclear power plant built in the Middle East and operational in September 2010. Spent fuel from this reactor can be used for nuclear weapons. Of course, Iran “agrees” to return all spent fuel back to Russia. Really? Fuel can be extracted from the reactor and enriched to make weapons grade fuel for constructing nuclear weapons. Does anyone believe that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards might surrender their missile programs?

Going forward, as Iran and Russia use each other to serve their own separate, strategic interests, Iran will not be coerced into a dialogue with the United States. So be it. Engaging an undefeated foe in negotiations is appeasement and it never works.

With Russia’s newly secured foothold in the Middle East and increased weapon sells to Muslim countries, along with Europe’s dependency on Russian energy exports, Western influence in the region will diminish. A stronger Muslim-Russian balance of power will increase.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration remains either unconvinced that an Islamic Iran wants a nuclear weapon and will seek to destroy Israel and other Western nations or lives under the false illusion that somehow sanctions will still work.

However, sanctions against Iran proved unsuccessful during the Bush administration just as sanctions and diplomacy have been an abysmal failure under Obama’s leadership. Although Obama is viewed by the Islamic world as one of their own due to his father and step-father’s Muslim tribal history and heritage, he is also perceived as weak and ineffective by his Islamic opponents and their allies.

As all of this unfolds, the Obama administration continues to pander to the Islamic Republic of Iran, consider Iranian intransigence:

• Iran launches the ‘Ambassador of Death’ in August 2010. It is a new unmanned jet bomber capable of carrying 4 cruise missiles, the stated goal of which is to deter Iran’s enemies from approaching a battle ready Iran.
• Iran test fires a new liquid fuel, surface-to-surface missile with advanced guidance systems in August 2010;
• Iran builds and installs 7,200 centrifuges to enrich uranium, thus adding to its stock of nuclear fuel according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, (the IAEA), in May of 2010;
• Iran takes aggressive military action against American and allied soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan;
• Iran hides its nuclear energy program according to a July 2009 IAEA report that states that Iran did not allow inspectors to verify Iran’s non-military use of nuclear energy;
• Iran supports Hamas and Hizballah, terrorist organizations that murder Israeli innocents and upset American interests in the region;
• Iran’s leader, Ahmadinejad, consistently threatens to “wipe Israel off the face of the earth.”
• Iran’s former Ayatollah Khomeini, hero to hundreds of millions of Muslims world-wide, confronted the West stating that jihad “means the conquest of non-Muslim territory. The domination of Koranic Law from one end of the earth to the other . . . the final goal . . . [a] war of conquest.”
• Iran’s current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei states: “Day by day, the reputation of liberal democracy and of America – the vanguard of liberal democracy in the world – is diminished in the eyes of the world. At the same time, the reputation of Islamic Iran grows. The peoples understand that the Americans are lying, when they claim to be defending human rights.” {MEMRI, Special Dispatch No. 1523}
• Iran is expected to sell nuclear weapons to other rogue countries and non-state organizations linked to international terrorism.
• Iran carried out a suicide bombing at the U.S. embassy in Beirut in which 63 Americans died on April 18, 1983. Hizballah, financed by Iran, claimed responsibility.
• Iran carried out a double suicide bombing using two truckloads of explosives driven into a U.S. marines barrack killing 240 U.S. marines as well as a French paratrooper base where 58 paratroopers were murdered a mile away on October 23, 1983.

Despite all of the above, the Administration appears ambiguous or in denial concerning threats from Islamic states and the terrorists they fund. On May 26th, 2010, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, John Brennan, delivered a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, stating that the United States cannot describe our enemy as “jihadists” or “Islamists” and that the enemy is not about terrorism. Later in August, Obama’s State Department Assistant Secretary, P.J. Crowley, reacted flippantly, laughing at press questions on Iran’s new weapons system called the “Ambassador of Death’ suggesting that the new jet bomber has a ‘funny name’.

Unfortunately, it remains a heavy handed trick of the politically-correct-crowd to whitewash Koranic law and claim that Islam is just a religion of peace.

Fourteen centuries of Muslim imperialist wars, jihad, understood and interpreted in the military sense of armed struggle for the defense and advancement of Muslim power and expansion, continues into the 21st century. Indeed, recorded Islamic history documents the spread of Islam from the Arabian Peninsula to Rome, Britain, France, Spain, Germany, and Russia as well as the building of the Ottoman Empire in which Islamic colonialism reigned from the 15th through the 20th century. Today, jihad remains not only a religious obligation, but Islam’s accepted path towards political power and expansion.

Irresponsibly, the U.S. Undersecretary of State for arms control was recently quoted in a London newspaper as stating that a ban on Israel’s nuclear weapons must also be linked to the possibility of eliminating any nuclear weapons held by Iran. In response, John Bolton, former United States ambassador to the United Nations, got it right when he noted that President Obama is harming Israeli security by agreeing to talk about a nuclear free Middle East in which Israel is stripped of her nuclear capability. Nuclear capability is Israel’s greatest deterrent against rogue Muslim Arab regimes whose populations embrace racism against Jews and want to see Israel eliminated.

Meanwhile, as Iran keeps telling the West that their nuclear plants are only for civilian purposes, the Obama administration makes the United States, Israel, and Europe an increasingly dangerous place in which to live.

A pre-emptive attack on Iran by the United States and/or Israel is the only option left for the security of the West.