[Mb-civic] Don't go wobbly on Iran - Jeff Jacoby - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Don't go wobbly on Iran

By Jeff Jacoby  |  January 25, 2006  |   The Boston Globe

''IT IS not on the table. It is not on the agenda. I happen to think it 
is inconceivable."

That was British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in September, telling the 
BBC what he thinks about the use of military force to prevent Iran's 
homicidal theocrats from acquiring nuclear weapons. Last week Straw went 
further, declaring that even economic sanctions would be an 
overreaction. ''I don't think we should rush our fences here," he told a 
conference in London. Much better to turn the whole thing over to the UN 
Security Council, so long as any action it might take ''is followed 
without sanction." What he recommends, in other words, is a Security 
Council resolution with no teeth. That'll fix the mullahs' wagon.

To be sure, not every British politician has been so weak-kneed. Tory MP 
Michael Ancram has called for Iran to be -- brace yourself -- expelled 
from the World Cup tournament in June. Barring the planet's foremost 
sponsor of terrorism from soccer matches -- now there's Churchillian 
grit. Ancram says it will send ''a very, very clear signal to Iran that 
the international community will not accept what they are doing." Sure 
it will. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's rabid president, must break into a 
sweat thinking about it.

Not to be outdone by Great Britain in the going-wobbly department, 
Germany's foreign minister assured a television audience Sunday that 
Berlin ''will refrain from anything that brings us a step closer" to 
military action against Iran. Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned against ''a 
militarization of thinking" on how to keep one of the world's worst 
regimes from acquiring the bomb. ''Rather, we should see that we use and 
exhaust to the best of our powers the diplomatic solutions that remain 
available."

Fortunately, not everyone is off in Cloud Cuckoo Land when it comes to 
dealing with Tehran. The acting prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, 
put his government's position bluntly: ''Under no circumstances, and at 
no point," he said on Jan. 17, ''can Israel allow anyone with these 
kinds of malicious designs against us [to] have control of weapons of 
destruction that can threaten our existence." As the Jewish state has 
good reason to know, dictators who publicly vow to commit mass murder 
generally mean what they say -- and are generally not deterred by 
threats of ''diplomatic solutions."

Israel is widely assumed to be at work on plans to destroy Iran's 
nuclear program. Iranian rulers have repeatedly declared their intention 
to wipe Israel off the map, and Vice President Dick Cheney said publicly 
more than a year ago that Israel ''might well decide to act first" and 
attack Iran's nuclear facilities in its own self-defense.

But it isn't clear that Israel could pull off such an operation, which 
would be far more complex than its strike on Iraq's Osirak nuclear 
reactor in 1981. Unlike Osirak, which was a stand-alone facility, Iran's 
nuclear facilities are dispersed among dozens of sites. Many are hidden 
underground. ''To attack them all with cruise missiles and 
fighter-bombers," notes The Economist, ''would require an extended 
campaign and hundreds of sorties. Corridors would have to be cleared 
through Iran's air defenses and the Iranian air force destroyed." Israel 
could not hope to carry off such a sustained military effort against 
targets a thousand miles away. Which is why, if Iran's nuclear program 
is to be demolished by force, it will have to be done by the United States.

That ''if" is still a significant one. It is not yet unreasonable to 
hope that Tehran can be forced to back down by a combination of economic 
sanctions, political isolation, and diplomatic heat. The best solution 
of all would be regime change, brought about by Iran's restive 
population of dissidents and democrats (aided by clandestine American 
support of the kind that helped dissidents behind the Iron Curtain in 
the 1980s). But if a nonmilitary strategy is to have any chance of 
success, it must be very clear that military action is Plan B -- and 
that United States is quite prepared to wield that ''big stick" if Iran 
will not abandon its atomic ambitions.

The Bush administration -- and, increasingly, leading Democrats -- have 
been speaking out with growing urgency about preventing Iran from 
becoming a nuclear threat. What is not stressed enough is that Iran is 
not just a potential menace -- it is a clear and present danger right 
now. The radical Islamists in Tehran bankroll the world's deadliest 
terrorists. They foment violence in Iraq. They lied for 18 years about 
their nuclear activities. They persecute democratic activists and 
oppress women. They declare that their goals are ''a world without 
Zionism or America" and ''the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization." 
It was they who began the war we are in -- the global conflict between 
Islamofascism and the West -- with their seizure of the US embassy in 1979.

Fanatic, apocalyptic, totalitarian, the mullahs who rule Iran see their 
destiny as waging jihad and extending theocracy across the entire Middle 
East.

Under no circumstances can such enemies be permitted to acquire nuclear 
weapons -- or to doubt that we will do what we must to make sure that 
they don't.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/01/25/dont_go_wobbly_on_iran/
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