"NO, MR. BOND. I WAN'T YOU TO DIE"

Michael Ledeen has been writing for years about the Iranian threat, making the point that Iran has been the fount of terrorism and anti American vitriol in the Mideast, since they declared war upon us 27 years ago. From a current article:

“Do you expect me to talk?” he yells. “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die,” Goldfinger replies.

You never realized Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton were auditioning to be the next Bond, did you? But that’s the scene they’re playing. They act as if they think the mullahs want, or would be willing, to reason together, but the mullahs don’t want us to be reasonable, they want us dead or dominated. And they’re pursuing their mission with the singleminded obsession that characterizes the true fanatic. There’s a dynamite story in the Israeli Hebrew-language newspaper, Yediot Aharanot, about the latest real information about their nuclear project. You know, the one they say is for peaceful energy generation, the one we’ve been pretending to negotiate about. Here are a few spicy excerpts:

Updated satellite photographs…which are published here for the first time, reveal unprecedented construction at all nuclear sites in Iran. Among other things, the imagery reveals extensive construction work going on at the centrifuge site at Natanz, including tunnels and bunkers; significant progress in building the heavy-water reactor in Arak; production of UF6 gas in Isfahan which, according to intelligence reports, is supposed to be enough for two atom bombs; and worrying information has also been received on advanced tests of a high-powered explosive that is designed for use in the fission mechanism.

Along with all these things, if anyone still has any doubts about the seriousness of Iranian intentions, the satellite photos reveal the deployment of numerous antiaircraft missile batteries, in a way that is perhaps unprecedented, around the nuclear sites. European intelligence information also points to the presence of Iranian scientists at the recent nuclear test in North Korea. All these things leave no room for doubt that Iran is closer than ever before to putting together the first Shiite atomic bomb.

We dither away, variously threatening sanctions and offering rewards if only the mullahs will give up their mad dream of atomic bombs and stop enriching uranium. They sometimes pretend to negotiate, and sometimes tell us to go to hell, but the enrichment program continues, along with the crash programs on other essential elements of a nuclear weapons project.

…extensive construction work has also been going on in Parchin recently. The photos reveal a series of underground tunnels and digging whose enormous scale is indicated by the amounts of earth dug up. The photos also show the area to which IAEA inspectors were not permitted access: special chambers that are used to test the assembly of a nuclear warhead’s explosives. Identical chambers were photographed over the years close to facilities where the Soviet Union developed and manufactured its nuclear warheads.

Read the whole thing, as they say. It’s an important article, in many ways a unique article because it’s so coldly analytical. It reveals that the Iranians are working on a plutonium device and an enriched uranium weapon, it reminds us that the Iranians are getting plenty of international cooperation, and, without the usual adjectives and breathless prose, conveys a proper sense of urgency.

All of which brings us to the policy question. We are now about to enter the seventh year of the Bush presidency, and there is still no Iran policy, aside from talking. Talking to ourselves, talking to the Europeans, talking to the Iranians themselves (don’t kid yourself, we’ve been talking to them all along). This article brutally and factually shows us that we’ve been talking too long and acting too little.

It really baffles me, this paralysis. It’s not unique to the Bush Administration; it’s been going on for 27 years. It has gripped Republicans and Democrats, lefties and righties, neos and paleos. It’s been talk, talk, talk, and never so much as fifty cents to the Iranian student movement, the Iranian trade unions, the Iranian teachers and journalists, even an amazing number of mullahs and ayatollahs, so many of whom hate the regime and are willing to risk their lives to bring it down. The nuclear program is not a problem all by itself, it simply adds urgency to the Iranian war, the war they have been waging against us all along, the war in which we stubbornly refuse to get engaged.

Faster, Please!

As Ledeen points out, there are some things that can/could have been done short of a military strike. Just yesterday, Mad-Mahmoud was booed and jeered by students. Iranian blogs indicate substantial internal opposition to the mullahs.

I've maintained since 9/11 that we had to "fight them there or fight them here, but we'll have to fight them," and I believed that Iraq wasn't the most direct way to The Source.

I figured that the Bush Administration expected that internal and domestic issues would bring the Iranians down, and that we should first attend to Saddam. But it's naive to think that a dictatorship that controls all the guns can be brought down without external assistance to internal dissidents. I naively thought we were doing this, covertly at least, but Ledeen claims otherwise.

Ledeen's made this indictment before. It looks like he's right.

War is Hell, and mistakes are made....coulda, shoulda, wooda is the coward's bitch, and I believe that an aggressive clearheaded strategy to destroy our enemy can still prevail in Iraq. It'll have to be much more deadly now than it had to be before, since so much time has been wasted but it's doable.

Leaving the field to the Iranians, however, makes no sense whatever. It's not "fog of war" mistake, but a fundamental misunderstanding of leadership.

That's a indictable error. Limited resources are relative. A united American has sufficient resources when political will and leadership rally us to the task.

In WW2, at the times of crisis and despair...Pearl Harbor and Bataan, the Fall of the Phillipines and Singapore...during the four year slog through Europe while millions died...President FDR engaged us in weekly "fireside chats," to rally the American people and maintain morale and commitment. There was an anti-War movement then, and it might have prevailed, had it not been for FDR's leadership.

That's why we all, Democrats and Republicans, farmers, workers, businessmen, young and old people owed him a respect and love that continued for the rest of the century. Nobody cared much about his errors or personal foibles, and policy differences ceased to be divisive. "Politics stops at the waters' edge," we agreed.

GWB has not done so. He's a reasonable CEO, a decider, and he's surely committed to the right things. But stating the goals and expecting his plan to be executed is not sufficient or effective in rallying the entirety of America to follow. Free Americans don't have to follow. They must be convinced and led to do the right thing.

Our current hour of crisis is a crisis of will and of soul; we need another source of inspiration. Right now it's got to be fear of the real world, as it is revealed to us daily, and that's good enough for me right now. But it's not going to last. The center we've built won't hold.

Richard Fernandez wrote this:

...Some kind of brain fog has descended upon Western Civilization, a species of madness or abstraction that makes victory against the enemy impossible, not simply because victory is inconceivable, but the very concept of an enemy or warfare has become unthinkable to the postmodern bureaucratic mind. It is the very thought of fighting a foe -- fighting under any circumstances, however justified -- that has become the ultimate taboo. War has been banished, not from reality, but from the list of allowable thoughts. It has become a Thoughtcrime and it is expunged from the Newspeak of our times. Welcome to our Perfect World. While it lasts."

Have you an answer to "while it lasts?"