Former CIA man Reuel Marc Gerecht reviews what's happening with Iran. Read this insightful article to better understand why things are what they are, and options for avoiding catastrophe.
It's a very good bet that the U.S. officials now running America's Iran policy would rather see the clerics go nuclear than deal with the world the day after Washington begins bombing Iran's atomic-weapons and ballistic-missile facilities.Posted by Alan at January 21, 2006 08:08 AM...
A more serious American-European approach to clerical Iran's quest for nuclear weapons would cast the administration more conspicuously as the bad cop. The entire EU-3 approach to Tehran, more thoughtful European diplomats will tell you, is premised on Washington's playing the imperfectly restrained cowboy: The Iranians need to know that over the horizon waits George W. Bush, the mad bomber. More often, senior American officials, and especially the president, need to remind Iran's ruling clergy, connoisseurs of machtpolitik--and the Europeans who are ever ready to appease them--that the United States is quite capable of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and simultaneously, if need be, launching airstrikes against the clerics' nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile facilities. The Iranians and the Europeans both thought the Americans were capable of such actions in 2003; the president and the vice president are surely capable, since many abroad view them as fundamentally unstable, of sending the signal that if the will exists, the United States will find the means. The objective is not to sound crudely bellicose, but to underscore that American patience is finite. The president used just the right language in his recent comments that the Islamic Republic's uranium enrichment program is "intolerable" and a "grave threat." Senior administration officials, and American ambassadors in the Middle East, should use such words more often, especially when any member of the ruling elite in Iran starts to thump his chest, envisioning Armageddon for Jews or anyone else.