Why is the Iranian dwarf taunting the American giant? 189
Wednesday night, the Iranian parliament began drafting a bill prohibiting foreign warships from entering the Gulf without Tehran’s permission. … Saudi Arabia has warned the Obama administration that Iranian leaders mean what they say; their leaders are bent on provoking a military clash with the United States at a time and place of their choosing, rather than leaving the initiative to Washington. To this end, Iranian officials are ratcheting up their belligerence day after day.
If this report is accurate, either Iran is eager to be at war with the United States, or the mullahs do not believe that anything they do will put them in danger of military retaliation by the Obama administration:
The armies of Saudi Arabia and fellow Gulf Cooperation Council states stood ready Thursday Jan. 5, for Washington to stand up to Iranian threats and send an aircraft carrier or several warships through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf. Riyadh has been leaning hard on the Obama administration not to let Tehran get away with its warning to react with “full force” if the USS Stennis aircraft carrier tried to reenter the Gulf or Iran’s pretensions to control the traffic transiting the world’s most important oil route. …
America’s failure to rise to Iran’s challenge will confirm its rulers in the conviction that the US is a paper tiger and encourage them to press their advantage for new gains.
The assessment of British military experts was that the question now is: Who will blink first? Will the US follow through on the Pentagon’s assertion that the deployment of US military assets in the Persian Gulf will continue as it has for decades? Or will Iran act on its warnings and block those waters to the entry of American warships?
President Barack Obama can’t afford to cave in to Iran, especially while campaigning for reelection in Nov. 2012; Tehran, for its part, has made too many threats to easily back down. The entire region is now on tenterhooks for the next move, with US, Iranian and Gulf armies on the highest war alert. American and Iranian war planners both accept that their advantage lies in surprising the enemy – without, however, catapulting the Persian Gulf into a full-dress war.
How that trick can be pulled off we eagerly wait to see.
What if the mullahcracy of Iran were to learn in the very near future that not only is the Twelfth Imam not about to return and make the whole world Islamic, but instead they have been bombed into the 21st century? It could mean the beginning of the end of Islam. And who knows but that tens or even hundreds of millions of Muslims long for a force majeure to shoot them into the light of the present day?
In anarchic Libya, militias are engaged in a power struggle with each other. In Egypt the religious parties are engaged in a power struggle with the military. To what extent, we wonder, is the “Arab Spring” a struggle between those who want to enter the modern world as shaped by the West and those who want to remain in the unchanging darkness of the Islamic past?
We think that if Iran were hit so hard now that all its nuclear and military installations were incapacitated – by Israel or the United States, better still by both acting together – not only would the threat of nuclear attack from that belligerent country be averted, but the strike would send a shock wave through every Islamic state, every mosque, every terrorist group, and the heart of every West-hating Muslim. It could halt, or at the very least strongly discourage, every form of jihad, violent or stealthy, open or insidious.
The Muslim world would stand appalled.
It would be the victory for civilization that civilization urgently needs.
Is Obama – the pro-Islam weakling in charge of the American giant – likely to hit Iran? Not willingly. But maybe force majeure is about to move him too.
