Iran: Test Case for Europe

Only weeks after banning rock and roll, threatening Israel and Europe, and claiming legitimacy to rule the world, Iran's mad mullahs are going nuclear: "Iran removed U.N. seals on uranium enrichment equipment and resumed nuclear research Tuesday, defying demands it maintain a two-year freeze on its nuclear program." U.N. nuclear watchdog chief Mohammed El Baradei said "Iran intends to begin "small-scale" uranium enrichment work," which is "the critical step in making material for nuclear weapons — a move European diplomats and officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency have tried to prevent over the last three years."

Naive liberals are appalled--not by nuclear proliferation but the prospect that America or Israel might resort to air-strikes: "do not attack Iran, even if this means allowing Iran to develop its own nuclear weapons." The hard left even condemns (as a neo-con cabal) last September's IAEA resolution finding Iran violated its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

"Fascism is at the door," says journalist John Pilger, but he's referring to Bush and Blair. Pilger and most progressives are blind to Islamic fascists. For example, though decrying Christians motivated by The Book of Revelation, liberals overlook Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent reliance on "Mahdi," the forthcoming "12th Imam" who -- under Shi‘ite doctrine -- will restore religion (guess which) and justice (stoning, beheading, cutting off hands) and "rule before the end of the world." Apparently, Mahdi is progressives' preferred prophet, advertising atheism’s authorized apocalypse.

But don't panic about Iran--the Bush Administration is "in close contact with the Europeans and others about how to move forward." Those incorruptible guardians of good on the UN Security Council have the situation well in hand, as Lawhawk observes:

Not a security council resolution with the threat of force backing it but rather a harshly worded statement perhaps. Or five separate statements that say the same thing because appearing on the same page might give the wrong signals to the Iranian nutjobs who are in charge.

Reuters reports "The United States had been looking for a strong joint statement but finally settled on separate statements with the same message -- that Iran should not resume nuclear fuel research." Five wrist slaps--Take that! you tent-bound terrorists!

Ok, ok, panic. With Iran aiming at armageddon, Europeans and Blue-Staters still ignore radical Islam's detest for democracy and rejection of religious freedom. Remembering the 1930s, NRO's James Robbins cautions, "We second-guess the radical program at our peril; it would not be the first time that evil hid in plain sight." By failing to recognize, renounce and roll-back evil, we jeopardize civilization itself. Having festered for so long, and with even the Pope skeptical about internal reform, radical Islam -- and Iran in particular -- may require more than words.

Which is why three knowledgeable observers recently proffered advice for Europe. NRO's Victor Davis Hanson lyrically addressed over-arching issues:

Even in this debased era of multiculturalism that misleads our youth into thinking no culture can be worse than the West, we all know in our hearts the truth that we live by and the lie that we profess — that the critic of the West would rather have his heart repaired in Berlin than in Guatemala or be a Muslim in Paris rather than a Christian in Riyadh, or a woman or homosexual in Amsterdam than in Iran, or run a newspaper in Stockholm rather than in Havana, or drink the water in Luxembourg rather than in Uganda, or object to his government in Italy rather than in China or North Korea. Radical Muslims damn Europe and praise Allah — but whenever possible from Europe rather than inside Libya, Syria, or Iran. . .

Your idealistic approach to health care, transportation, global warming, and entitlements have won over much of coastal and blue America, who, if given their way, would replicate here what you have there. Yet the worry grows that none of this vision of your anointed is sustainable — given an aging and shrinking population, growing and unassimilated minority populations, flat growth rates, increasing statism, and high unemployment.

If America, the former British commonwealth, India, and China, embraced globalization, while the Arab Middle East rejected it, you sought a third way of insulating yourselves from it — and now are beginning to pay for trying to legislate and control what is well beyond your ability to do either.

Abroad you face even worse challenges. In the post-Cold War you dismantled your armed forces, and chose to enhance entitlements at the expense of military readiness. I fear you counted only on a tried and simple principle: That the United States would continue to subsidize European defense while ignoring your growing secular religion of anti-Americanism.

But in the last 15 years, and especially after 9/11, heaven did not come to earth, that instead became a more dangerous place than ever before. Worse, in the meantime you lost the goodwill of the United States, which you demonized, I think, on the understanding that there would never be real repercussions to your flamboyant venom.

Austin Bay summarizes the state of play with Iran:

Those who think the current Iranian leaders' pursuit of nuclear weaponry is a theatrical performance (primarily designed to solidify domestic political support or shake down Arab and European governments for loans and aid) should consider the rhetoric of Iran's hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust denier -- he calls Hitler's mass murder of European Jews a "myth." On a regular basis, Ahmadinejad and his cohorts enthusiastically tout the capabilities of Iranian ballistic missiles. Unfortunately, unchecked fanatics like Ahmadinejad have a tendency to move from words to war.

Stephen Green sees it similarly:

Look. I know you guys are post-Christian, and you sneer at us for our Six Flags Over Jesus mega-churches and all our public solemnity and stuff. And then we go and pick on you for turning your religious heritage into nothing more than tourists attractions, if not actual theme parks. So let's just call that one a draw, and agree to disagree. . .

I know you think we're all religious nuts over here, but Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the real deal. We're trying, however imperfectly, to bring a little freedom to the Islamic world. Ahmadinejad says he wants to wipe Israel off the map. How's that for nuts? He's not making any idle threat, either, like launching "a thousand-year Reich" or promising "liberty, equality, fraternity." Iran wants nukes. Iran has an advanced nuclear program. We'd like to stop them, without using military means.

Austin Bay suggests an end-game:

The real solution is regime change in Tehran. The EU and the United States have talked about supporting the mullahs' political opponents, but they have not walked that walk with sufficient financial aid, political support, media support and -- yes, it may be necessary -- weapons. Iran's tyrants believe they can finesse diplomatic discourse and ride out a military strike. They fear they cannot quell a popular, pro-democracy rebellion.

Should Europe balk at muscularity, Green has an alternative:

Looking at your atrophied militaries, maybe that's too much to ask. So instead, how about if you could provide a little multinational moral support to the endeavor? Then again, we've all seen what counts as moral backbone in Brussels and Paris and Berlin – so let's set our sights a little lower. How about you guys just sit back and shut the hell up while the pros do what needs to be done? . . .

Yours is the kind of diplomacy that pleads. Ours is the kind that threatens.

You've had your chance, and gotten nowhere. We'd like to see what we can do. All we ask is that you play to your strength and admit defeat already. We'll take it from here.

Conclusion: Pundits both left and right are anxious--about diverse threats. Though the mid-East is improving, today's liberals seem blind to the hazard of a nuclear Iran allied to Russia and China. A liberal himself, Norm Geras questions lefty vision:

Tyranny, Nazism, fascism. And from where do these dangers come, according to the voices of alarm? Always from the elected governments of democratic, liberal and pluralist societies; and the scale and urgency of the dangers are as terrible as they are notwithstanding the institutional checks against them and the democratic traditions and oppositional resources that exist within the societies they menace. About other types of political movement and regime that are less than hospitable to freedom (and that's putting it gently), about other threats and dangers, the same voices are rather less excitable.

I agree with Stanley Kurtz:

We are at war. We are not losing the war, but if Iran goes nuclear we will be. Iran is acting because it knows that Europe is weak, and because it sees the United States as paralyzed by domestic opposition to the war. . . Reflecting on the question of a military strike, it seems that the main argument against it is political: Dovish Europeans, the America’s Democratic Party, and Middle Eastern countries will be angry at us for resorting to military means. This strikes me as a bad reason to hold back. The doves will be discredited when we see what comes of a nuclear Iran. But by then it will be too late.

(via Instapundit, LGF, Lawhawk, NIF)