QandO

July 23, 2004

Collision Course with Iran
Posted by Dale Franks

What to do about Iran. It's a real puzzler, especially since the president, beleaguered by the progress in Iraq, or the perceived lack of it by his critics, seems keen to paint himself as a man offering four peaceful years.

I doubt he'll get 'em.

But, the problem of Iran isn't going to go away. We know now that Iran has ties to al-Qaida, and is providing safe harbor for some of its operatives. And, of course, there's the whole nuclear deal.

So now, Bush critics like the almost incomprehensible Maureen Dowd, are saying that Bush should have taken on Iran, instead of Iraq.

The most astute prophet of the administration's Middle East muddle is Sacha Baron Cohen, the hilarious British comedian whose Ali G character is an uninformed gangsta rapper interviewing unwitting VIPs.

Last year, Ali G asked James Baker, the Bush I secretary of state, if it was wise for Iraq and Iran to have such similar names. "Isn't there a real danger," the faux rapper wondered, "that someone give a message over the radio to one of them fighter pilots, saying 'Bomb Ira-' and the geezer doesn't hear it properly" and bombs the wrong one?

"No danger," Baker replied.

Well, as it turns out, the United States did bomb the wrong Ira-.

President Bush says he's now investigating al-Qaida-Iran ties, and whether Iran helped the 9/11 hijackers.

Whoops. Right axis. Wrong evil.

It's like Emily Litella — "What's all this fuss I hear about making Puerto Rico a steak?" — except the United States can't simply shrug "Never mind" because 900 American troops are dead.

Granted, Iran is a problem, and there's certainly much to be done about getting rid of the mullahs. But it's the height of hypocrisy for Dowd and her ilk to even bring it up in this fashion. The fact is, As soon as Bush made the "Axis of Evil" statement, Dowd's crowd could hardly contain themselves from frothing with anger over the very concept of an "Axis of Evil". Now, she's arguing for an invasion of Iran?

You've got to be freakin' kidding me. The Left wanted nothing whatsoever to do with an invasion of Iran or Iraq, so coming back and hitting the president with Iran, two years after the fact, is just laughable. If Bush had even mentioned he was considering such a move, the Left would've collapsed in an apoplectic fit. Which, come to think of it, is actually an argument in favor of such a policy. But I digress.

Actually, it's about the only argument in favor of such a policy. As Charles Krauthammer points out today, an invasion of Iran would be an entirely different matter than an invasion of Iraq.

The Iraq war critics have a new line of attack: We should have done Iran instead of Iraq.

Well, of course Iran is a threat and a danger. But how exactly would the critics have "done" Iran? Iran is a serious country with a serious army. Compared to Iraq, an invasion of Iran would have been infinitely more costly. Can you imagine these critics, who were shouting "quagmire" and "defeat" when the low-level guerrilla war in Iraq intensified in April, actually supporting war with Iran?

If not war, what then? We know the central foreign policy principle of Bush critics: multilateralism. John Kerry and the Democrats have said it a hundred times: The source of our troubles is Bush's insistence on "going it alone." They promise to "rejoin the community of nations" and "work with our allies."

Well, that happens to be exactly what we have been doing on Iran. And the policy is an abject failure. The Bush administration, having decided that invading one axis-of-evil country was about as much as either the military or the country can bear, has gone multilateral on Iran, precisely what the Democrats advocate. Washington delegated the issue to a committee of three — the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany — that has been meeting with the Iranians to get them to shut down their nuclear program.

The result? They have been led by the nose. Iran is caught red-handed with illegally enriched uranium, and the Tehran Three prevail upon the Bush administration to do nothing while they persuade the mullahs to act nice. Therefore, we do not go to the U.N. Security Council to declare Iran in violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty. We do not impose sanctions. We do not begin squeezing Iran to give up its nuclear program.

Instead, we give Iran more time to swoon before the persuasive powers of "Jack of Tehran" — British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw — until finally, humiliatingly, Iran announces that it will resume enriching uranium and that nothing will prevent it from becoming a member of the "nuclear club."

The result has not been harmless. Time is of the essence, and the runaround that the Tehran Three have gotten from the mullahs has meant that we have lost at least nine months in doing anything to stop the Iranian nuclear program.

The fact is that the war critics have nothing to offer on the single most urgent issue of our time — rogue states in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Iran instead of Iraq? The Iraq critics would have done nothing about either country. There would today be two major Islamic countries sitting on an ocean of oil, supporting terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction — instead of one.

Iran, as Krauthammer points out, is a serious country, with a serious army. No, they aren't anywhere near as good as our boys are, but then again, they probably wouldn't melt away into the countryside like the Iraqis did, either.

The same people who were yelling "Quagmire!" in Iraq on D+8, would've been wailing and gnashing their teeth like biblical prophets if they'd had to deal with an Iranian invasion.

There are two undeniable facts when it comes to Iran:

1. Instead of using military force against Iran, we have been steadily following the multinational route that is so revered by our friends on the Left. The result has been completely ineffective, leaving Iran closer now to having nuclear weapons than they were when the whole multilateral process started. The preferred policy of our Leftist friends has been an abject and utter failure.
2. If the Left had their way back in 2002, there would have been no invasion of Iraq, or Iran. In fact, there would've been no invasion of Afghanistan, either, for fear of the Brutal Afghan Winter™. No matter how the Left tries to dress it up by getting all bloodthirsty over Iran now, the fact is that if we'd followed their advice, the Taliban would still be shooting women in the head with AK-47s for impiety at public executions in Kabul's soccer stadium. Uday would still be stuffing Iraqi dissidents into industrial plastic shredders feet first, and the Iranian Mullahs would still be gathering fissionables for their weapons program.

Those two facts are undeniable, and anyone with a lick of sense will immediately recognize it, no matter how Maureen Dowd tries to dress it up and make it more presentable. You can dress a poodle up in puffy skirts and make it walk on its hind legs, too, but anybody with eyes to see can tell that it's still a dog, and not Marie of Romania.

As it happens, fortunately, we have several options for dealing with Iran that didn't exist in Iraq. The Iranian Mullahs, although brutal guys by anyone's reckoning, simply don't have the same kind of perverted totalitarian drive that Saddam Hussein's regime displayed. As a result, there is a fairly lively reform movement in the country. There is increasing domestic pressure to overthrow the Islamic Republic and replace it with a more secularized, democratic regime.

So, unlike Iraq, there is an indigenous opposition movement, both in and out of the government, to whom support can be given. We can destabilize the Mullahcracy in ways short of war.

In short, there are other options.

I suspect one reason why W has been following the multinational route in Iraq so far is that he wants to show the absolute bankruptcy of such a policy. At some point, he'll be able to say, "Look, we tried it your way and we got bupkis. A big fat goose egg. Now, we're gonna do it my way, and make it happen." And he can probably do it without one US soldier ever having to fire a single shot.

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