I don’t usually post about political stuff or foreign affairs but all this talk about Iran and nuclear weapons has gotten under my skin lately so I thought I would share a few interesting articles about what’s been happening in Iran.
First off a statement from the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad :
TEHRAN, Iran – The president of Iran again lashed out at Israel on Friday and said it was "heading toward annihilation," just days after Tehran raised fears about its nuclear activities by saying it successfully enriched uranium for the first time.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Israel a "permanent threat" to the Middle East that will "soon" be liberated. He also appeared to again question whether the Holocaust really happened.
"Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation," Ahmadinejad said at the opening of a conference in support of the Palestinians. "The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm."
Ahmadinejad provoked a world outcry in October when he said Israel should be "wiped off the map."
On Friday, he repeated his previous line on the Holocaust, saying:
"If such a disaster is true, why should the people of this region pay
the price? Why does the Palestinian nation have to be suppressed and
have its land occupied?"The land of Palestine, he said, referring to the British mandated
territory that includes all of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, "will be
freed soon."
Read the rest here.
If that’s not scary enough read this article from a very liberal magazine, The New Republic,(To
read the whole article you will have to register, but the registration
is free. I really, really recommend that you read the whole thing.) which has this to share about President Ahmadinejad:
During
the Iran-Iraq War, the Ayatollah Khomeini imported 500,000 small
plastic keys from Taiwan. The trinkets were meant to be inspirational.
After Iraq invaded in September 1980, it had quickly become clear that
Iran’s forces were no match for Saddam Hussein’s professional,
well-armed military. To compensate for their disadvantage, Khomeini
sent Iranian children, some as young as twelve years old, to the front
lines. There, they marched in formation across minefields toward the
enemy, clearing a path with their bodies. Before every mission, one of
the Taiwanese keys would be hung around each child’s neck. It was
supposed to open the gates to paradise for them…These children who rolled to their deaths were part of the Basiji, a
mass movement created by Khomeini in 1979 and militarized after the war
started in order to supplement his beleaguered army.The Basij
Mostazafan–or "mobilization of the oppressed"–was essentially a
volunteer militia, most of whose members were not yet 18. They went
enthusiastically, and by the thousands, to their own destruction. "The
young men cleared the mines with their own bodies," one veteran of the
Iran-Iraq War recalled in 2002 to the German newspaper Frankfurter
Allgemeine. "It was sometimes like a race. Even without the commander’s
orders, everyone wanted to be first."The sacrifice of the Basiji was ghastly. And yet, today, it is a
source not of national shame, but of growing pride. Since the end of
hostilities against Iraq in 1988, the Basiji have grown both in numbers
and influence. They have been deployed, above all, as a vice squad to
enforce religious law in Iran, and their elite "special units" have
been used as shock troops against anti-government forces. In both 1999
and 2003, for instance, the Basiji were used to suppress student
unrest. And, last year, they formed the potent core of the
political base that propelled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad–a man who reportedly
served as a Basij instructor during the Iran-Iraq War–to the presidency …The chief combat tactic employed by the Basiji was the human wave
attack, whereby barely armed children and teenagers would move
continuously toward the enemy in perfectly straight rows. It did not
matter whether they fell to enemy fire or detonated the mines with
their bodies: The important thing was that the Basiji continue to move
forward over the torn and mutilated remains of their fallen comrades,
going to their deaths in wave after wave. Once a path to the Iraqi
forces had been opened up, Iranian commanders would send in their more
valuable and skilled Revolutionary Guard troops.This approach
produced some undeniable successes. "They come toward our positions in
huge hordes with their fists swinging," one Iraqi officer complained in
the summer of 1982. "You can shoot down the first wave and then the
second. But at some point the corpses are piling up in front of you,
and all you want to do is scream and throw away your weapon. Those are
human beings, after all!"
Okay now this was an
Iraqi officer. A soldier in the service of a pretty brutal and
murderous regime and he was shocked by these suicide warriors. The rest
of the article goes on to explain the history of this type of thinking
in Islam. It really is a must read.
We in the west tend to not take this type of stuff very seriously.
Surely they wouldn’t be willing to die or to send their children to die
for such nutty beliefs. But, at least, those of us who are Christians
should take their commitment seriously. Just like they have their
stories of martyrs so do we American evangelicals. I’d be willing to
guess that every evangelical in America has heard the story about the
Russian underground church which was visited by the KGB officers waving
machine guns. The KGB commander tells the gathered Christians, "In 5
minutes we are going to kill all of the Christians so those of you who
aren’t Christians should leave now." Quite a few people get up and
leave the church but some remain behind. After the exodus has stopped
the KGB officer says, " Good. Now that all the hypocrites are gone we
can have church." Ha, Ha, Ha. That is, of course, a story which
glorifies commitment unto death, i.e. martyrdom. The distinction
between our martyrs and theirs is that ours don’t usually set out to
take other people with them.
My point is only that we should take them seriously. They are as
committed to their nutty theology as we are to Christianity. And just
like we would like to think that we would be committed to Jesus, even
unto death, we should accept that they are committed to their nuttiness
even unto death.
Okay here’s another good article, this time from a very conservative
magazine, The Weekly Standard, trying to answer the questions, To Bomb or Not To Bomb,
i.e. Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities. This is a very sober article
that deals with both sides of the question pretty fairly. Here’s a
quote which states the biggest temptation for everyone in this
situation, i.e. the temptation to stick our heads in the sand, wish the
monsters away, and do nothing.
ALL OF THIS IS
FRIGHTENING. It reinforces the temptation to accept the status quo
rather than going on the offensive. Inaction is the default position of
"realists," which explains their staying power. However, one
significant terrorist attack by an Islamic Republic protected by
nuclear weapons, and many might view as necessary what had seemed
reckless. If the Iranians even carried out a "minor" terrorist act–for
example, blowing up a U.S. embassy and killing and maiming one hundred
officials–the United States in a post-9/11 world would have to unleash
hell against the clerical regime. To absorb such a hit without a
massive reprisal would be to invite much worse nuclear-protected
terrorism.If the Revolutionary Guard Corps, which oversees the
Islamic Republic’s nuclear weapons program, were to give a wing of al
Qaeda material for a dirty bomb, what would the United States do in
response? The regime’s past fondness for Ayman al-Zawahiri, the
occasional movement of al Qaeda members through Iran both pre-and
post-9/11, and the "arrest" and "detention" of some al Qaeda members in
the Islamic Republic to this day are, to say the least, disconcerting.
What would we do if we were pretty sure they’d ordered a terrorist
attack–say, 80 percent sure–but we were 100percent sure they had
nuclear-armed ICBMs?If either Rafsanjani or Ahmadinejad were
ever to follow through on their wild rhetoric against Israel with a
nuclear strike–and this is certainly a possibility unprevented by
either man’s ethics–then the path now deemed reckless might seem, even
to the dovish Europeans, in retrospect like a morally compelling course.
Okay, one last item of food for thought from one my favorite writers and opinionators, Mark Steyn,who
has a pretty good and at the same time funny, analysis of the problems
with Iran and our inability to muster the courage to face up to them.
Here’s a taste but please read the whole thing.
Back
when nuclear weapons were an elite club of five relatively sane world
powers, your average Western progressive was convinced the planet was
about to go ka-boom any minute. The mushroom cloud was one of the most
familiar images in the culture, a recurring feature of novels and album
covers and movie posters. There were bestselling dystopian picture
books for children, in which the handful of survivors spent their last
days walking in a nuclear winter wonderland. Now a state openly
committed to the annihilation of a neighboring nation has nukes, and we
shrug: Can’t be helped. Just the way things are. One hears
sophisticated arguments that perhaps the best thing is to let everyone
get ’em, and then no one will use them. And if Iran’s head of state
happens to threaten to wipe Israel off the map, we should understand
that this is a rhetorical stylistic device that’s part of the Persian
oral narrative tradition, and it would be a grossly Eurocentric
misinterpretation to take it literally.The fatalists have a point. We may well be headed for a world in
which anybody with a few thousand bucks and the right unlisted Asian
phone numbers in his Rolodex can get a nuke. But, even so, there are
compelling reasons for preventing Iran in particular from going
nuclear. Back in his student days at the U.S. embassy, young Mr.
Ahmadinejad seized American sovereign territory, and the Americans did
nothing. And I would wager that’s still how he looks at the world. And,
like Rafsanjani, he would regard, say, Muslim deaths in an obliterated
Jerusalem as worthy collateral damage in promoting the greater good of
a Jew-free Middle East. The Palestinians and their “right of return”
have never been more than a weapon of convenience with which to
chastise the West. To assume Tehran would never nuke Israel because a
shift in wind direction would contaminate Ramallah is to be as ignorant
of history as most Palestinians are: from Yasser Arafat’s uncle, the
pro-Nazi Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, to the
insurgents in Iraq today, Islamists have never been shy about
slaughtering Muslims in pursuit of their strategic goals.But it doesn’t have to come to that. Go back to that Argentine
bombing. It was, in fact, the second major Iranian-sponsored attack in
Buenos Aires. The year before, 1993, a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed
29 people and injured hundreds more in an attack on the Israeli
Embassy. In the case of the community center bombing, the killer had
flown from Lebanon a few days earlier and entered Latin America through
the porous tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.
Suppose Iran had had a “dirty nuke” shipped to Hezbollah, or even the
full-blown thing: Would it have been any less easy to get it into the
country? And, if a significant chunk of downtown Buenos Aires were
rendered uninhabitable, what would the Argentine government do? Iran
can project itself to South America effortlessly, but Argentina can’t
project itself to the Middle East at all. It can’t nuke Tehran, and it
can’t attack Iran in conventional ways.So any retaliation would be down to others. Would Washington act? It
depends how clear the fingerprints were. If the links back to the
mullahs were just a teensy-weensy bit tenuous and murky, how eager
would the U.S. be to reciprocate? Bush and Rumsfeld might—but an
administration of a more Clinto-Powellite bent? How much pressure would
there be for investigations under UN auspices? Perhaps Hans Blix could
come out of retirement, and we could have a six-month dance through
Security-Council coalition-building, with the secretary of state making
a last-minute flight to Khartoum to try to persuade Sudan to switch its
vote.
As they say, read the whole thing, here.
So what should we do? I don’t have any idea. What I do know is that
we want to believe that the Iranians don’t mean it. And I suspect that
they rally do. I also suspect that if the Iranians were to nuke Israel
most of the world would breathe a sigh of relief and say,"Well, we’re
glad that’s over with and by the way, poor Jews." Well Israel could
retaliate, they have nuclear weapons. Yeah, but the former president of
Iran, a man considered by the west to be more moderate than the current
president, has stated that while a nuclear attack on the tiny nation of
Israel would destroy Israel, the Islamic nations would be able to
absorb Israel’s retaliatory strike. Hey what’s the loss of a few
million poor Muslims to people who are willing to send their own
children on a walk through a mine field, especially while they’re
sitting in their German designed, Russian built, Chinese furnished,
bomb shelters. Well… at least we have them surrounded.