Scott Spiegel

Iran’s leadership is working feverishly to develop nuclear weapons, and has been doing so for the past two decades.  President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei have repeatedly pledged to use whatever means they have at their disposal to wipe Israel off the map.

Just about everyone except Israel’s right-wing politicians and John McCain has been denying, distorting, or downplaying these hard truths for years.  Even though the U.S. State Department has listed Iran as the biggest state sponsor of terror for decades, and even though evidence has been piling up that Iran is working to acquire weapons, President George W. Bush did nothing to encourage military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities during his eight years in office, even after the attacks on 9/11.  President Barack Obama is not likely to deviate from this course.

Israel has been undermining Iran’s progress via indirect channels, including deploying the sophisticated Stuxnet worm, which sabotaged Iran’s uranium enrichment centrifuges and set their capabilities back a year or two; and authorizing a covert assassination program to take out top Iranian nuclear scientists.  These strategies have been helpful, but they only buy so much time.  They are not enough to prevent Iran from succeeding at its ultimate goal.  Economic sanctions are also not enough to halt Iran’s work.

The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is about to release its most detailed report yet documenting Iran’s secret nuclear weapon development at a site near Tehran called Parchin, its uranium enrichment at a facility in Natanz, and its installation of centrifuges at Qom.  All of this activity has been going on, despite Iran’s lies that its technology will be used only to generate electricity.

The IAEA’s report includes evidence that Iran is in the final stages of assembling and deploying nuclear weapons, including developing an atomic bomb trigger device, altering long-range missile warheads to fit nuclear payloads, setting off test explosions, and running computer simulations of nuclear explosions.  All of these experiments are, of course, just essential for the benign task of keeping Tehran’s hairdryers operating.

The IAEA’s unequivocal evidence incorporates satellite photographs and detailed plans obtained by U.S. spy services revealing technological expertise offered by nuclear states hostile to the U.S., including Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea.  Iran has repeatedly denied UN requests to inspect Parchin to verify Iran’s putatively peaceful intentions and to interview Iran’s top nuclear scientists.

Despite the impending release of the IAEA’s report, the otherwise useless and softheaded agency is not expected to condemn Iran for its activities or directly accuse Iran of developing nuclear weapons.  China and Russia, as permanent members of the UN’s Security Council, are likely to oppose new sanctions against Iran, never mind military strikes.

Recently Israel has been hinting at its intention to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.  Any sane person who doesn’t want the craziest, most dangerous regime on the planet to have the most powerful, destructive weapons in the world in its arsenal should be cheering Israel’s attempt to prevent this Armageddon from arriving.  Instead, most of the free nations of the world—to say nothing of its dictatorships, quasi-dictatorships, and communist states who loathe Israel and the U.S.—will likely scream hysterically if Israel launches so much as a spitball into Iran.

Liberals at home and abroad will cry that Iran is another Iraq, that Iran’s nuclear program is as apocryphal as Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of WMDs.  Regardless of the fact that there were legitimate reasons to go to war with Iraq besides weapons of mass destruction, the evidence of weapons development is much stronger for Iran than it was for Iraq.  In addition, Iraq is a small fry compared to Iran, which has been channeling millions of dollars to terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza for decades.

Obama is not likely to do anything to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.  Certain Republican presidential candidates—i.e. Ron Paul—seem positively giddy over the possibility of Iran acquiring the means of defending itself against big, bad bullies like Israel.  The U.S. must elect a candidate in 2012 who understands the threat Iran poses and is willing to say so repeatedly, unprompted, in interviews and debates.

In the meantime, Israel remains the U.S.’s front line in the war on terror.  This means that Israel may fight some of our common enemies before these foes advance to our terrain—and that if we support Israel, we may spare ourselves American casualties.

But the longer this charade goes on of pretending Iran means what it says when it’s convenient—that they seek only peaceful uses for nuclear power—and doesn’t mean what it says when it’s inconvenient—that it doesn’t really want to destroy Israel—the more difficult it will be to destroy its nuclear facilities, and the more collateral damage will be racked up when the task is finally accomplished.  Iran’s position strengthens the longer we wait.  Iran’s mullahs are hoping to run out the clock.

The U.S., if it doesn’t have the will to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities, should at least provide any help it can—military, monetary, and moral—to Israel in its attempt to do so.  This is an existential crisis that affects Israel’s ability to remain a viable state in the short-term—and the U.S.’s ability to remain a credible world power in the long-term.



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• Iran: Heading toward a nuclear show-down? (bbc.co.uk)
• Russia issues stark warning against Iran attack (msnbc.msn.com)
• Israel vs Iran: One step closer to ‘the irreversible’? (rt.com)
• Report: IAEA to say Iran nearing nuclear capability – Ynetnews (ynetnews.com)
• Iran said to be capable of making nuclear bomb in months (cbc.ca)

Liberals mocked George W. Bush’s “Forward Strategy of Freedom,” sneering that it was corny and idealistic, wouldn’t work, and didn’t suit exotic, backward, brown people who wouldn’t know what to do with liberty if it fell in their laps.

In the years since U.S. forces ousted the Taliban in Afghanistan and deposed Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the world has beheld a remarkably long line of popular uprisings in Middle Eastern and Eastern European states that has thoroughly vindicated Bush’s approach.

Four months after U.S. Marines took Baghdad in Operation Iraqi Freedom, a quivering-in-his-boots Muammar Gaddafi acknowledged Libya’s responsibility for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and paid billions in compensation to relatives of victims, and to those of the UTA Flight 772 bombing and the Berlin discotheque bombing.

Three months later we witnessed the Rose Revolution in Georgia, in which the public protested against rigged parliamentary elections, removed President Eduard Shevardnadze, and installed reformist Mikhail Saakashvili.

In 2004 we watched the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, in which protestors kept Viktor Yanukovych from assuming office as Prime Minister after fraudulent elections and instated pro-reform Viktor Yushchenko.

In 2005 we observed the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, in which citizens rioted to protest the assassination of pro-Western former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the presence of tens of thousands of Syrian troops, and the rule of a pro-Syrian government.

Days after the Cedar Revolution, we had the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, in which protestors ousted corrupt President Askar Akayev.

In 2009 we monitored the Green Revolution in Iran, in which thousands of citizens rioted over the rigged presidential election that kept Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power.

In December 2010 we saw the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, in which protestors ousted secular autocrat Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the first ever peaceful removal of an Arabic leader.

Earlier this month in Yemen, protestors marched in Sanaa and called for the removal of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.  Protestors in Albania demonstrated against Prime Minister Sali Berisha.

Over the past week, millions of protestors in Egypt have rioted in Cairo, Alexandria, and Suez, demanding the ouster of autocratic leader Hosni Mubarak and the release of hundreds of political prisoners.  Mubarak has since fired his cabinet and claimed he will not run again after serving out the final year of his current term, but has not responded to protestors’ demands.

Egyptian protestors modeled their protests after Tunisia’s, which in turn were made possible by the chain of protests and regime changes leading back to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Given Egypt’s size and prominence in the Arab world, deposing Mubarak would likely spur a wave of protests against other autocratic regimes in the region.

So what has Obama’s response been to all of this activity in his first two years in office?

Why, his response has been to cozy up to Soviet-influenced Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, illegitimate Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, Islamist Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, genocidal Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and autocratic Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak.

Obama has been courting tyrants in fulfillment of the self-defeating strategy of “engagement” with the world’s most brutal, unreformable despots.

Unfortunately, he has offered less encouragement for those trying to overthrow these despots.

When Iranians rose against the mullahs and were slaughtered in the streets, Obama dawdled a week before raising an eyebrow over the carnage.

When Tunisians rose against their autocratic government, Obama waited until the deposed president had safely fled to Saudi Arabia, then preached “calm.”

Now Obama’s tepid response to Mubarak has been to murmur, “What is needed are concrete steps to advance the rights of the Egyptian people”—as if Mubarak and the rest of the world didn’t know that.  Obama has failed to call for Mubarak’s resignation, free elections, or a pro-liberty government, or to spotlight Egypt’s abysmal human rights record, out of fealty to the fallacious notion that Egypt is a reliable U.S. ally and must be appeased.

There are grave concerns over what types of leadership would replace those deposed in Tunisia and Egypt, including Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood that would try to creep in and institute Sharia.  But the original demonstrators—not the riffraff who want to loot and steal, not the convicts released from jail, not the Brotherhood—were grassroots and pro-liberty.  The impulse of any genuinely pro-freedom Egyptian protestors is to be commended, not discouraged.

I have a problem with anyone who would tell everyday Egyptians that they’re not allowed to protest because their “allies” aren’t sure whether a new government would be better or worse than the current horrid one.  Anyone who could look in the eyes of courageous Egyptians who want to live in freedom from censorship, repression, and fear of their government and tell them to shut up and go home does not care whether Egyptians ever have freedom.

Contrary to popular opinion among many conservatives, Obama has not been doing enough to encourage and guide such popular revolutions while in office.  The U.S. should be standing up for freedom-seeking protestors and working with regional players to capitalize on power vacuums to ensure that pro-liberty governments take office.

Sadly, Obama’s approach to the flurry of popular uprisings has been, not to condemn tyrannical governments and encourage pro-liberty regimes, but to waffle on regime change and coddle dictators.

Every time Obama fails to stand up for liberty abroad, he discourages oppressed peoples from toppling the tyrants who rule them.

Obama’s policy is the opposite of Bush’s.  It is a Backward Strategy of Oppression.

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Related articles

• Egyptian regime begins to reveal its strategy (guardian.co.uk)
• Egyptians angry at U.S. for not backing protests (sfgate.com)
• Million to march in Cairo protest (rt.com)
• Egyptians wary of U.S.’s shifting position on Mubarak (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Freedom’s March: Egypt at the Tipping Point (american.com)

Warning: Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson, and Balloon Boy are nowhere to be found in this list!

1. Iran Election Upheaval – Brave protestors took to the streets of Tehran and Twittered to the world shocking pictures and videos of civilian beatings and shootings by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, despite the inability of our Commander-in-Chief to raise an eyebrow over the carnage for a week.  As “President” Ahmadinejad continues to mock the West’s demands that Iran halt its uranium enrichment, the outrage of the emboldened and mobilized protest movement has the potentially farthest-reaching consequences of any event in 2009.

2. Health Care Reform Debate – Simultaneously the most outrageous and boring story of 2009.  On the one hand, we listened all year in disbelief as conservative think tanks unearthed fresh horrors in evolving versions of the bill; on the other hand, we listened to Democrats recite tired lies about “45 million uninsured” and “bending the cost curve” and “Nancy Pelosi approving a surtax on Botox.”  As Obama supporter Camille Paglia admitted, “By a proportion of something like 10-to-1, negative articles by conservatives were vastly more detailed, specific and practical about the proposals than were supportive articles by Democrats, which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed with emotion and sneers.”

3. Climategate – In which more pages of e-mails and computer code than in all the healthcare reform bills combined were leaked to the press, revealing climate “scientists” fudging data, threatening to delete data, and doing everything but counting pregnant chads to make the results come out the way they wanted.  Here’s a deal for Michael Mann, author of the discredited “hockey stick” graph of global temperature over the past few millennia: if “trick,” “hide,” and “decline” no longer mean what they once did, then neither do “dire,” “peer-reviewed,” or “consensus.”

4. Afghanistan Surge – General McChrystal begged President Obama in private and in public to give him the troops he needed to implement the counterinsurgency strategy Obama had hired him to carry out back in March.  After four months of dawdling, Obama gave McChrystal 75% of his revised request—which was 50% of his initial request—with no rationale provided for his bargain basement offer.  If this is how Obama treats the “good war,” I’d hate to see what he does to the bad one.

5. Tea Party Movement – Rasmussen released a poll in December showing that in a three-way generic race among Democratic, Republican, and Tea Party candidates, the Tea Party contender would beat the Republican by 5 points.  Despite the left’s ludicrous charges of racism and desperate use of lewd sexual terms never adopted by any Tea Party patriot, the biggest mass uprising against government spending and abuse of power since 1773 grew angrier and more forceful as the year went on, and will only be further inflamed by the Senate’s Christmas Eve passage of the health care spending act.

6. Stimulus Bill Passage – It would give you a concussion if it fell on you, even if dropped by Obama at the nadir of his bow to the King of Saudi Arabia or the Emperor of Japan.  Four months after its urgently required, life-or-death passage, only 5% of stimulus funds had been spent, a detail the administration papered over by simply lying about funded projects.  Naturally, this summer Democrats began clamoring for another stimulus package.

7. Sonia Sotomayor Confirmation – Proof that Democrats were never the party against racism—they were once the party that supported racism, and now they’re the party that supports reverse racism.  If Our Wise Latina’s speeches on biological differences between the races had been half as incendiary, the media would be consoling us that she might have been rejected for the Supreme Court if what she had said had been any worse; yet the fact is, if her words had been twice as offensive, wimpy Republicans in Congress would probably still have voted to confirm her.

8. Ft. Hood Shootings – The first terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, which was allowed to happen for the same reason as 9/11—the politically correct refusal to identify the danger of Islamism and its adherents’ wish to obliterate us and our allies for promoting freedom.  The most damning detail was Major Nidal Hasan’s PowerPoint presentation to a group of army scientists on the Koran’s injunction to decapitate infidels—to which the army responded by giving Hasan a promotion in Texas to get him out of their hair.

9. Pakistan Helps the U.S. Fight the Taliban – The Pakistan Army finally stepped up to the plate, no thanks to Obama’s dithering over the U.S.’s own commitment in the region.  Pakistan began Operation Path to Deliverance, in which they managed to send the same number of troops Obama finally agreed to as part of General McChrystal’s surge (30,000) to South Waziristan to beat back insurgents.

10. New Jersey/Virginia Gubernatorial Elections – Last year, liberals hooted that Republican primary candidates were avoiding George W. Bush like the plague, but the joke’s on them—their messiah is turning into the kiss of death in just his first year of office.  Obama’s multiple campaign stops for would-be governors Corzine and Deeds did nothing to assist them, and possibly even hindered their candidacies.

President Obama said last week that he doesn’t want the U.S. to be seen as “meddling” in the recent Iranian presidential election.  In his view, vocally supporting the protesters is comparable to the CIA’s coup against Mossadeq in 1953.

That old bald eagle Zbigniew Brzezinski believes Obama has struck the “perfect tone”: Zbig thinks we should refrain from antagonizing the Iranian leadership and avoid a showdown.

Joe Klein’s thoughtful message for John McCain, who has been requesting that Obama take a tougher stance on Iran: “Be quiet.”  According to Klein, supporting the protesters is mere “self-indulgence.”

Joe Scarborough thinks it’s ridiculous that we know what’s best for women’s rights in Iran.  Peggy Noonan writes, “America so often gets Iran wrong…  So modesty and humility seem appropriate stances from which to observe and comment.”

What planet are these people from?  The would-be appeasers’ argument seems to be thus: We should not offer clear, unwavering, forceful encouragement to the Iranian protesters.  If we do, Iran’s leaders will accuse the U.S. of being behind the demonstrations—you know, the ones that no one in the West predicted, the ones that happened after the election results no one foresaw, the ones that few Western journalists are close enough to eyeball, let alone instigate.

My question for the ersatz pacifiers: So what?  Who believes the mullahs?  Nations of the free world don’t.  The protesters who spontaneously organized don’t.  The mullahs don’t—they were already making their misstatements long before our Equivocator-in-Chief changed his mind this week and raised an eyebrow over the carnage.

Memories of the 1979 Revolution, including citizens’ taking to the streets and rooftops to chant, are having a greater impact on present-day protesters’ behavior than anything any American has said.  Iran’s leaders are paying more attention to circumstances in the U.S. than are protesters—as in their specious comparison of Iran’s election to the 2004 Bush-Kerry contest.  (It was Ahmadinejad who co-opted Obama’s “Yes, We Can” slogan for his reelection campaign.)

So if the mullahs blame us no matter what we do, why is it mandatory that we shut up?  Are we afraid that if we support the protesters, the mullahs might despise us even more viciously and biliously than they do now?

The “Let’s stay out of this” argument also seems to be based on the premise that a first-world country’s expression of support for the protesters is condescending and makes the Iranians look backwards and childlike.

I’ll tell you what’s condescending: believing that Iranians aren’t smart enough to figure out that (1) 39 million votes cannot be counted in two hours, (2) Ahmadinejad did not crush Mousavi by the exact same percentage in every demographic group in all 30 provinces, (3) Mousavi-leaning urban centers did not have enough ballots sent to them on purpose, and (4) Iranian elections have been rigged to within an inch of their lives for the past 30 years.  All of that I think the Iranian citizenry is capable of figuring out on its own.  Thousands of Iranians were savvy enough to bring pens to the voting booth out of fear that the ones supplied by the government would be filled with disappearing ink.

The Iranian protest movement has been brewing underground for decades, mostly among college students and graduates, and women’s groups.  I don’t recall any accusations of our having meddled in Iranian universities’ gender studies curricula recently.

The “Mind your own business” line of reasoning is reminiscent of the old charge that we shouldn’t go to war against Iraq (in 2003) or Afghanistan (in 2001), because we’ll only stir up anti-American sentiment; or the notion that we shouldn’t help Israel, because jihadists’ real hatred of America stems from our support for that country.

In fact, we should vocally support the protesters in Iran, because that stance gives us credibility when we fight our own battles.  When fools like Ahmadinejad (and Obama) declare that we have no right to decide which countries get nukes and which don’t, we must be able to respond confidently, “Yes, actually, we do—it should be free nations that support individual rights and aren’t run by lunatic dictators, which includes the U.S., Britain, Israel, and our allies; and not Iran, North Korea, Syria, or any other place of our choosing.”  If we support movements for freedom where they occur, rather than ignoring them, then our stance gains consistency and credibility to reformists in hostile regimes who are potentially open to our ideas.  Those are the only people we should even dream of catering to.

Critics of supporting the protesters are right about one thing: one does not “impose” democracy on a nation.  Consequently, I think if protesters in Iran actually objected to American ideals more than theocratic values, we would have heard more people chanting “Death to America” than “Death to the Dictator” these past two weeks.  Protesters would presumably not have embraced Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube with the same gusto if they had felt that the country that invented these tools were hampering them with “cultural imperialism” or some other made-up crime.  (Undoubtedly there is a minority crackpot fringe arguing that YouTube’s relaxing of its restrictions on videos with graphic content is “inciting” the Basij to commit more acts of violence.)

Certainly it is helpful that this is a homegrown revolution, and yes, statements against the Iranian government carry more weight when they come from Iranian citizens who could be jailed or killed than from Americans safely speaking half a world away.

Here’s how we actually did encourage the protesters in Iran—by turning their next-door neighbor, Iraq, into a democracy.  Our transformation of Iraq has given Iranians hope that a government that protects liberty can work in an Islamic country in the Middle East.  So yes, we did influence the protesters—in a phenomenally helpful, productive, and material way, at great cost to ourselves.  Why shouldn’t we underline our message by supporting the protesters?