Iran Is Right

With most of the political oxygen consumed by the fiasco of Obama nominating criminals to his cabinet and public attention directed mostly on the astonishing trillion-dollar pork package being pushed through under the guise of a "stimulus" plan, it's easy for Americans to forget that there is a Rest of the World out there.  But the Rest of the World hasn't forgotten, and they've been busy.

At least when beginning his disastrous first two weeks, President Obama was aware of the importance of foreigners too.  His very first media interview wasn't with his dear friends and sycophants at ABC, CBS, MSNBC, or even CNN, nor was it with their print equivalents at the New York Times and Washington Post.

No, the new Leader of the Free World first wanted to speak to the billion people in the deeply unfree world of Islam, via a chat with the satellite network al-Arabiya.  They reported Obama's remarks:

"My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy," Obama told Al Arabiya's Hisham Melhem in an interview broadcast Tuesday morning.

This might come as news to our soldiers fighting Islamofascist terror all round the globe, but Obama didn't leave it there.  The president also took the opportunity to do a little spanking of enemies.

Unfortunately, the enemies he spanked were Americans:

I think the most important thing is for the United States to get engaged right away. And George Mitchell is somebody of enormous stature. He is one of the few people who have international experience brokering peace deals.  And so what I told him is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating -- in the past on some of these issues --and we don't always know all the factors that are involved. So let's listen. [emphasis added]

When you say you want to listen, it's usually not too long before somebody starts talking.  Sure enough, just a few days later, Iran availed themselves of this notable opportunity.  What the mullahs had to say is very well worth a listen.  Breitbart reports :

"This request means Western ideology has become passive, that capitalist thought and the system of domination have failed," Gholam Hossein Elham was quoted as saying by the Mehr news agency. "Negotiation is secondary, the main issue is that there is no way but for (the United States) to change," he added... Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad launched a fresh tirade against the United States, demanding an apology for its "crimes" against Iran and saying he expected "deep and fundamental" change from Obama. US President Barack Obama's offer to talk to Iran shows that America's policy of "domination" has failed, the government spokesman said on Saturday. [emphasis added]

Rack up yet another convert to the throngs of Obama's well-wishers, calling for Hope and Change!

However much you may disagree with Ahmadinejad, you have to admit that he has a point: when you hear someone in a disagreement calling for talks in an atmosphere of mutual respect, that person is not usually the winner.  We didn't call for mutually respectful talks with Hitler's Germany or Tojo's Japan; we mashed them into the ground until they cried "Uncle".  We weren't pointing to the negotiating table; we hammered them until they were.

Look beyond the crowing of the Islamist totalitarians, though, and you can see a much more fundamental truth.  Exactly as the spokesman Elham said, Western ideology has indeed become passive.

Doing?  Or Talking?

There was a time, not so long ago, when Westerners could move around the world freely and in perfect safety.  This was because the whole world knew that if you messed with an American or a Brit, you could shortly expect the arrival of a British battleship or the U.S. Marines.  As a result of Teddy Roosevelt's famous "big stick", we didn't have to actually use the big stick all that often.

Thanks to the Second World War, England doesn't have much of a stick anymore; thanks to Reagan, we still do.  For the past thirty years, though, Iran has tested the limits every chance they get.  They invaded the American embassy and took U.S. diplomats hostage for more than a year... and nothing happened.

More recently, they illegally kidnapped British sailors in international waters, releasing them only after (so they claim) receiving an official letter of apology and confession of guilt.  Again, Iran paid no price for this outrage, quite the contrary.

During much of this time, Iran has been seeking to secure its power by developing nuclear weapons.  There's no need to go down the list of U.N. resolutions and protests from the IAEA concerning their quest; Iran is quite public about what they're doing, and years ago declared their "inalienable right" to produce nuclear fuel.  Ever since, the West has continued to talk, while Iran has continued to work hard at getting the Bomb.

Now this month comes the next-to-last step, as AP reports:

Iran sent its first domestically made satellite into orbit, the president announced Tuesday, a key step for an ambitious space program that worries the U.S. and other world powers because the same rocket technology used to launch satellites can also deliver warheads.

By the laws of physics, a rocket that can put a satellite into orbit can also drop a payload onto any spot on earth.  Put another way, Iran now possesses what was once called an ICBM - an intercontinental ballistic missile - and, should they wish to, can now paint a bull's-eye on New York, Los Angeles, the White House, or any other place they please.

What's our president's response to this threat?

I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems.  I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems.

Not only is President Obama not wielding the big stick of Roosevelt, he has broken it over his knee, ground it up into little bits, and is walking forward with his hands up.  Who can blame Iran for asking for an "apology?"  They might just get it!

And when they do, they'll know for sure what everybody watching already believes: they can do whatever they darn well please and nobody in the world is going to stop them.

What will be the end result?  Dick Cheney put it plainly in a recent interview with Politico:

Cheney said "the ultimate threat to the country" is "a 9/11-type event where the terrorists are armed with something much more dangerous than an airline ticket and a box cutter - a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind" that is deployed in the middle of an American city. "That's the one that would involve the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, and the one you have to spend a hell of a lot of time guarding against," he said.  "I think there's a high probability of such an attempt. Whether or not they can pull it off depends whether or not we keep in place policies that have allowed us to defeat all further attempts, since 9/11, to launch mass-casualty attacks against the United States."

President Obama, our new Decider, has made his decision: we will not be keeping in place "policies that have allowed us to defeat all further attempts, since 9/11, to launch mass-casualty attacks against the United States."  He's kindly told the Iranians this; and they're responding as you'd expect.  They aren't hiding anything; they're telling us exactly what our weaknesses are, exactly what they plan to do, and that they are absolutely confident that they'll get away with it.

They're right.