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Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Connecting Dots on Iran

Terrorism is a miltary tactic to accomplish political goals. It is not an end in itself but a means to an end. For over 30 years, Iran has been at the forefront of a war against the West. Iran seeks a global Islamic theocracy and therefore seeks the destruction of the West and Israel. Given its military inferiority, terrorism is the only tactic available to Iran. Over this time, Iran has directly attacked America when it seized our Embassy in Tehran during the hostage crisis, supported the enemy in present day Iraq, and directly or indirectly sanctioned or supported virtually every act of Islamic terrorism.

If Iran succeeds in developing a nuclear weapon, its ideology will not change but its tactics certainly will.

In a past post (http://dougreich.blogspot.com/2007/02/csi-iran.html) I listed several key points:

1) Iran openly and publicly states that it wants to destroy the US and Israel
2) Iran funds, supports, and trains terrorists who kill Americans and attack our allies
3) Iran is directly interfering in a US military conflict and has killed US soldiers
4) Iran publicly states that it is pursuing nuclear power
5) Iran has and is obtaining technologically advanced weaponry from Russia among others which it has made available to its proxy army (Hezbollah and others) to fight the Israelis
6) Iran's own president indulges in apocalyptic religious fantasies about himself being anointed by God to lead an era of "Islamic justice" at the "end of history"

Meanwhile, the US is spending billions of dollars and losing soldiers every day to remain militarily engaged in a country (next door to Iran) that barely has a government, little infrastructure, no organized army with which to threaten the US or its allies, all purportedly to police Iraqi's who are in the midst of a religious and ethnic civil war.

Now we can add to the list, that Iranians have illegally kidnapped 15 British sailors and are threatening to put them through a show trial. In that post, I also claimed that if Iran were to drop a nuclear bomb on the US, I'm not sure that we would respond. I can just hear Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barabara Boxer, the French, Russians, and Chinese et al. echoing the response of the fictional president on "24": "if they drop one more nuclear bomb, then we are..."

Below is a link to an article from March 18th, 2007 (before the Iranians kidnapped British sailors) in which Iran threatens to retaliate in Europe for alledged abductions and defections by high ranking Iranian miltary officers:


A few days later on March 23, Iran illegally seized 15 British sailors. So, if our soldiers being fed to "fighting cocks" is not enough for you - here is some more.

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps launched a campaign against the U.S.-led coalition in response to the defection and detention of senior regime officials, according to a newspaper report.

Last week, it was disclosed that Asghari, a former deputy defense minister who once headed Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards, was cooperating with Western intelligence and had brought top-secret documents and maps with him when he defected. The documents are believed to detail Iran's ties to terrorist and radical groups, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and military organizations in Iraq. Arab media reports said Asghari can also provide insight into Iran's nuclear-arms program.

The defector, who goes by the cover name Hamid Reza Zakeri, told Reuters in a telephone interview that al Qaeda had forewarned Tehran of the [9/11] attacks because it wanted Iran's help in sheltering its leaders afterwards.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070313/wl_mideast_afp/mideastconflictisrael_070313131220 Hundreds of members of the radical Palestinian Hamas movement receive military training in
Iran every year, the head of Israel's internal security service was quoted as saying on Tuesday.

The next link reminds me of the scene from "Team America" where Hans Blix ("Hans Bwix") is confronting Kim Jong Il by threatening to write another letter on behalf of the UN.
Former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has said that the US, Europe and the UN Security Council are "humiliating" Iran by demanding that it suspend uranium enrichment before negotiations and then dictating its rewards.



Iran will be able to develop enough weapons-grade material for a nuclear bomb and there is little that can be done to prevent it, an internal European Union document has concluded.

Note that the Europeans have concluded that nothing can be done to prevent Iran's production of a nuclear bomb. Of course, if all you do is engage in endless diplomacy with no threat of action and write nasty-grams from the UN that is probably true.

An Iranian government-sponsored body set up to probe the veracity of the Holocaust has challenged Europe to hand over documents about the mass slaughter of Jews in World War II.

Iran's leadership denies that the Holocaust occured which is not surprising given the daily vitriol spewed at Jews through the Islamic media as well as the endemic bigotry institutionalized in their educational system. Where has the left gone? Imagine the outrage (justly so) if any Western leader were to make such vicious and farcical arguments. This is especially hypocritical given that the Islamists riot on one day over caricatures of Muhammad (or sue for legal sanctions against its critics
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=worldNews&storyid=2007-02-07T174323Z_01_L07890928_RTRUKOC_0_US-RELIGION-ISLAM-CARTOONS.xml&src=rss&rpc=22) then publish the most heinous and racist attacks against Jews and Americans the next.


Uh, I think that the Spartans did fight the Persians at the Battle of Thermopylae and ultimately the Greeks did go on to defeat the Persians. I think it is interesting that Iran considers historical facts to be "insulting". I always consider facts to be true. This is a demonstration of pure collectivism in that the Iranian's see themselves as members of a historical collective (the Persian Empire) and that to "insult" (or factually portray) any part of the collective is to invite a scornful or violent response. Collectivism naturally results from religion as faith demands the relinquishing of the individual, independent mind to the dictates of faith usually as interpreted by the philosopher king, priest, imam, etc. depending on the religion. Once an individual abandons his mind, he will seek membership in a group to seek an identity, guidance, protection and pseudo self-esteem. If you don't accept this argument, see all of human history.


Unknown said...

George Santayana:

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Your rational for war is compelling. A simple research of the history of the region would dispell any notion thereof.

Even a cursory glimpse of recent history would suggest that wars are better faught with ideas. There were no invasions involved in our greatest victory of ideals; the cold war.

In the age of communication, this should be the tactic. Violence begets violence. For every muslim extremist that we kill, his or her brother, sister or neighbor becomes our enemy.

Why use your reason to argue for society's greatest failing.
Mans inhumanity to man.

Unknown said...

If you accept that we must kill the extremists. Then do you accept the theory that violence begets violence? How do we achieve a victory? Do we kill all the extremists and it ends? Do we kill enough so the remainder of Muslims know we are serious and curtail or change their beliefs?

You have many arguments that this is not just a small section of the Muslim population. Do you purpose to change their point of view by force? I can't imagine that a world war III over religion could be better than trying to contain the current threats and prove that our morality is right. We have the tools to do that now. We did not have them in the early 20th century.

In the 2oth century, the result of military actions:

civilian dead 49,000,000
military killed 95,000,000
wounded 144,000,000

These are researched and verifiable numbers, not including minor skirmishes.

War is a provable bad tactic, for it changes nothing.

The Rat Cap said...

Imagine you are in an alley and someone approaches with a knife and declares that he is going to kill you. You then pull out a gun and shoot him.

Did violence beget violence? Yes, in the short term until you killed him. Then the violence stopped.

Should you have fought this man with "ideas", i.e., tried to reason with him? Would if he is not open to reason but simply wants you dead? Are you not able to assert that you have a moral right to your own life and act in your own self-defense if under attack?

Similarly, if another nation objectively threatens the United States with force, we should respond with overwhelming force and defeat them.

Violence only begets more violence when one side is not decisive. If I am wrong, then how do you explain WWII? We literally annihilated the Japanese into submission and unconditional surrender. The result is modern Japan which is among the freest and most productive countries in history and an ally of the US. Conversely, we have done nothing but appease our enemies in the mid-east and engaged in "surgical" wars which have done nothing but embolden them. See:

Reasoning works with those that are open to reason. Force is the only alternative when one side is irrational. Faith and force are corrolaries, i.e., when one side is not open to reason then the only option is force. Why else has religion resulted in nothing but endless conflict for millenia. see: http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4922