Nobody (Outside Tehran) WANTS War

Hey, look!  Hans Blix and his UN weapons Apple Dumpling Gang are back in business!

UN nuclear inspectors will visit Syria this month to investigate allegations that the country was building a nuclear reactor at a site attacked by Israel last September, officials said.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s fact-finding mission is expected to take place from June 22 to 24.

Information about the Israeli bombing of the site did not come to light until April when U.S. officials informed IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei that it believes the facility was a nuclear reactor.

Sounds like Boy Assad has finished scrubbing Dayr az-Zawr, the former site of his North Korean-supplied nuclear facility.  And maybe he's also finished hiding the Iraqi WMD that his late "big brother" Saddam sent him for safekeeping six years ago.

Will a "clean bill of health" from the uncharacteristically-suspicious-of-late IAEA put them back to sleep vis-a-vie Assad's Iranian superiors?  Logically it shouldn't.  Heck, how can a mere three-day inspection verify or discover much of anything?  But since when has logic ever had anything to do with the "international community's" appeasment mania where the mullahs are concerned?

Some of you may draw from that comment - or my avalanche of posts on this topic over the past four years - that I "want" a war with Iran.  Certainly that's the mindset libs attribute to all "neocons" (though, for the record, I have ALWAYS been a "con," so the "neo" prefix really doesn't apply, no matter how big a Matrix mark I am).  It's what CNN clearly thought recently departed former CENTCOM commander Admiral William Fallon - the high-ranking Bushophobic mole in the Bush High Command - would say, Scotty McClellan-like, when he granted them an interview just this morning.

Imagine their disappointment when they got this answer instead:

PHILLIPS: Let’s talk about this article. It was the catalyst. It was the last straw. Tom Barnett made it appear that you were the only man standing between the president and a war with Iran. Is that true?

ADMIRAL FALLON: I don’t believe for a second President bush wants a war with Iran. The situation with Iran is very complex. People sometimes portray it or try to portray it in very simplistic terms we’re against Iran, we want to go to war with Iran, we want to be close to them, the reality is in international politics that many aspects to many of these situations and I believe in our relationship with Iran we need to be strong and firm and convey the principles on which this country stands and upon which our policies are based. At the same time demonstrate a willingness and openness to engage in dialogue because there are things we can find in common.

You know what?  I believe him.  You know what else?  I don't think Bush "wanted" a war with Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime, either.  And guess what: I agree with that, too.

The core point of the lamentably defunct Bush Doctrine was never to seek out "wars of choice" for glory and honor and plunder and whatever other cartoonish motivation neoBolsheviks attribute to those who take national security seriously.  It was to inject some desperately needed hard-headed realpolitik into American foreign policy in a post-9/11 world.  It was to throw off the deadly "diplomacy-only" complacency/obsession that had gotten three thousand American civilians killed in cold blood and, in an age of WMD proliferation, would send a whole lot more into the mass graves right behind them if we didn't start looking at the world and its myriad threats as it, and they, really are.  It was to recognize that we're ALREADY at war at the enemy's initiative, and the path to not just victory but even national survival itself lay in engaging this enemy at our own initiative and bringing the full military power of the planetary hegemon we're supposed to be to bear to eliminate them and the apocalyptic threat they pose once and for all.

Afghanistan was the initial counterattack against al Qaeda and their Taliban hosts.  Iraq was the elimination of a secondary terror regime and acquisition of the geostrategic staging area in the heart of the Middle East for the conclusive military campaigns to liberate Syria and the principle enemy and target: Islamic Iran.

Grieviously, as I've lamented on many a past occasion, President Bush opted to try and win the war by only fighting half of it.  As if, during World War II, the Western Allies had stopped after liberating all of North Africa from the Nazis and begged Hitler for peace negotiations instead of invading Western Europe and finishing the job.  While we have finally thwarted Iranian and al Qaeda subversion in Iraq, we have wasted the past five years on foolish, futile diplomacy with the mullahs that they have openly ridiculed and heaped contempt upon and used the time to build their nuclear weapons capabilities, which have progressed to the point that the mullahs could churn out their first homemade warhead before the year is out - something I made mention of nine months ago.

The real problem isn't that anybody "wants" or doesn't "want" war; it's that not even the "neocons" have the stomach to accept its inevitability.  Even the biggest so-called "hawks" speak in terms of using diplomatic "isolation" and "sanctions" to "force" the mullahs to abandon their nuke-quest.  If this sounds like precisely the "strategy" that the "international community" pursued for twelve years against Saddam Hussein to absolutely no avail, and which he was using to rebuild his WMD stocks and develop nuclear weapons, AND which he had just about bribed his way into getting lifted altogether, congratulations, you're becoming a "warmonger."

I don't say that we're already at war with Iran because I want it to be so; I say it because it is true, and I would rather win than lose when the cost of losing is measured in hundreds of thousands or millions of innocent American (and Israeli) lives.  I look back at the lesson of the 1930s, how a little military pre-emption by the British and French could have averted a second global conflagration in as many generations, and then behold Adolph Hitler with nukes rising up in Persia, and watch helplessly as we repeat all the same mistakes.

Seriously, can there really be found ANYTHING in common between ourselves and a regime that continues to issue public declarations like this?:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predicted on Monday that Muslims would uproot “satanic powers” and repeated his controversial belief that Israel will soon disappear, the Mehr news agency reported.

“I must announce that the Zionist regime (Israel), with a sixty-year record of genocide, plunder, invasion and betrayal is about to die and will soon be erased from the geographical scene,” he said.

“Today, the time for the fall of the satanic power of the United States has come and the countdown to the annihilation of the emperor of power and wealth has started.”

Seventy years ago there was another raving anti-Semitic lunatic who bwa-ha-ha'd his intention to exterminate the Jews and conquer the world.  Nobody paid attention, in Europe or America, even after the outbreak of hostilities.  Only when Hitler had conquered the Continent and was fire-bombing British cities into rubble did the "international community" finally accept that it was in a war for its very survival and start fighting it that way.

Today everybody laughs at his spiritual descendants in the mullahgarchy and their blustering frontman.  But in as little as three months, they'll gain the capability of backing up their "president"'s words.  What if they, and he, aren't bluffing?  Shouldn't we proceed on the assumption that they're deadly serious?  And shouldn't we be as well by taking decisive steps to ensure that we never have to find that out the hard way?  Is not an ounce of prevention truly worth a pound of "cure"?

Particularly when talk with this enemy is not just cheap, but utterly worthless.