Caroline Glick writes in the Jerusalem Post:

Iran will likely be the first US adversary to test Obama. And Obama will have no idea what to do. While Obama has stated repeatedly that a nuclear-armed Iran is a "game-changer," Obama’s own rule book for international relations has no relevance for dealing with Iran’s game.

Obama views international relations as a creature of American will. If America is nice to others, they will be nice to America. But the fact of the matter is that regimes like Iran hate the US regardless of how it behaves. The only question with strategic relevance for Washington is whether the Iranians also fear the US. And Obama has given them no reason to fear him. To the contrary, he has given them reason to believe that under his leadership, the mullahs can defeat America.

AMERICA STANDS to elect its new president in times of nearly unprecedented dangers. Iran is on the threshold of nuclear weapons. Thanks to the Bush administration, North Korea now feels free to vastly expand its nuclear proliferation activities. Oil rich states like Venezuela, Russia and Iran recognize that with global oil prices decreasing, now is the time to strike before they are impoverished. And the international economic turmoil will cause Western nations to recoil from international confrontations and so embolden rogue states to attack their interests.

Concerning our entry immediately below: 

 If John McCain wasn’t silenced by his self-esteem and imprisoned in his own propriety, this is the sort of speech he could make to win the election:  

‘I have to tell you about an extremely serious development. I and Senator Obama have been confidentially informed by US intelligence that IRAN WILL HAVE A NUCLEAR BOMB by this coming February. We are asked not to make this specific threat public, on the grounds that we would be spreading alarm, but it is too serious to keep from you, and Americans and the whole world ought to be alarmed. It is more than likely that Iran will use its nuclear bomb against Israel. If it does, an international crisis will instantly arise comparable to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor…’

He would then go on to say in explicit terms that whoever is Commander-in-Chief when this happens will need to be someone who has already been tested in crisis, not someone who thought that Iran is a small country that can be talked out of developing and using nuclear weapons, who wants to disarm America of its own nuclear defense, and has no experience whatever of international crises or military engagement.  

For all his mistakes and weaknesses, John McCain has one great strength. He is a military man who understands international conflict, and can and would shoulder the responsibility of America, the world’s only superpower and defender of freedom,  to oppose the aggression of evil powers, with force when necessary.  

As we do not believe that there is a god to save us, we can only look to our fellow man, and the only man in a position to avert this threat – by becoming Commander-in-Chief – is John McCain.  If he is President, Iran will hesitate. If Obama is President, Iran will not hesitate.

Can John McCain comprehend what is happening and what he should do about it?

If he cannot, we should be more than alarmed. We should be terrified.         

 From Debkafile:

US intelligence’s amended estimate, that Iran will be ready to build its first bomb just one month after the next US president is sworn in, is disclosed by DEBKAfile’s Washington sources as having been relayed as a guideline to the Middle East teams of both presidential candidates, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama. The information prompted the assertion by Democratic vice presidential nominee Joseph Biden in Seattle Sunday, Oct. 19: “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy.” (McCain retorted Tuesday, Oct. 21: “America does not need a president that needs to be tested. I’ve been tested. I was aboard the Enterprise off the coast of Cuba. I’ve been there.”)

Israel has (nearly) run out of time. 

 John Bolton writes in the Wall Street Journal:

North Korea has now achieved one of its most-prized objectives: removal from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. In exchange, the U.S. has received "promises" on verification that are vague and amount to an agreement to negotiate the critical points later.

In the Bush administration’s waning days, this is what passes for diplomatic "success." It is in fact the final crash and burn of a once-inspiring global effort to confront and reverse nuclear proliferation, thereby protecting America and its friends.

Delisting the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) as a terrorist sponsor represents a classic case of prizing the negotiation process over substance, where the benefits of "diplomatic progress" can be trumpeted in the media while the specifics of the actual agreement, and their manifest inadequacies, fade into the shadows.

In the weeks before being delisted, North Korea expelled international inspectors, first from its Yongbyon plutonium-reprocessing facility and then from the entire complex. It moved to reactivate Yongbyon and to conduct a possible second nuclear-weapons test, and prepared for an extensive salvo of antiship and other missile capabilities. All of this the Bush administration dismissed as North Korea’s typical negotiation style.

The irony is that the DPRK need not have gone to the trouble. President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice were apparently ready to cave in without the show of force, and indeed rushed to announce the terrorism delisting during a three-day weekend. Thus, while the North’s macho display was irrelevant, the conclusion Pyongyang will draw is that bluff and bluster worked.

So now Pyongyang has what it wants, and Washington has a vague, inadequate invitation to more verification palavering. In any complex negotiation, implementation is the real test, and nowhere is this more painfully evident than in arms-control agreements.

North Korea is the world’s most accomplished serial violator of international agreements, beginning with the Korean War Armistice Agreement it signed in 1953 and including every other significant subsequent DPRK commitment. Most pertinent here, these breaches include repeated promises to give up its nuclear capabilities, beginning with the 1992 Joint North-South Declaration and the ill-fated 1994 Agreed Framework….

Having bent the knee to North Korea, Secretary Rice appears primed to do the same with Iran, despite that regime’s egregious and extensive involvement in terrorism and the acceleration of its nuclear program. Watch for the opening of a U.S. diplomatic post in Tehran within days after our Nov. 4 election, and other concessions on the nuclear front. Hard as it is to believe, there may be worse yet to come.

 

 From Fox News:

As Somali pirates brazenly maintain their standoff with American warships off the coast of Africa, the cargo aboard one Iranian ship they commandeered is raising concerns that it may contain materials that can be used for chemical or biological weapons.

Some local officials suspect that instead of finding riches, the pirates encountered deadly chemical agents aboard the Iranian vessel.

On Aug. 21, the pirates, armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, stole onto the decks of the merchant vessel Iran Deyanat.

They ransacked the ship and searched the containers. But in the days following the hijacking, a number of them fell ill and died, suffering skin burns and hair loss, according to reports.

The pirates were sickened because of their contact with the seized cargo, according to Hassan Osman, the Somali minister of Minerals and Oil, who met with the pirates to facilitate negotiations.

"That ship is unusual," Osman told the Long War Journal, an online news source that covers the War on Terror. "It is not carrying a normal shipment."

The pirates reportedly were in talks to sell the ship back to Iran, but the deal fell through when the pirates were poisoned by the cargo, according to Andrew Mwangura, director of the Kenya-based East African Seafarers’ Assistance Program. 

 Power Line provides this extract from Caroline Glick’s brilliant article on the importance of Sarah Palin’s speech that she would have delivered Tuesday at the protest against Ahmadinejad had she not been ‘dis-invited’, and a link to the whole article.  It’s a must-read.

In the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick assesses the damage done by the Democrats’ refusal to allow Governor Sarah Palin to participate in what would have been a bipartisan condemnation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs’ regime in Iran. It’s a pretty long essay and should be read in its entirety; here are a few excerpts:

American Jews have good reason to be ashamed and angry today. As Iran moves into the final stages of its nuclear weapons development program – nuclear weapons which it will use to destroy the State of Israel, endanger Jews around the world and cow the United States of America – Democratic American Jewish leaders decided that putting Sen. Barack Obama in the White House is more important than protecting the lives of the Jewish people in Israel and around the world.

On Monday, the New York Sun published the speech that Republican vice presidential nominee and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin would have delivered at that day’s rally outside UN headquarters in New York against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and against Iran’s plan to destroy Israel. She would have delivered it, if she hadn’t been disinvited.

Palin’s speech is an extraordinary document. In its opening paragraph she made clear that Iran presents a danger not just to Israel, but to the US. And not just to some Americans, but to all Americans. Her speech was a warning to Iran – and anyone else who was listening – that Americans are not indifferent to its behavior, its genocidal ideology and the barbarity of its regime. …

Palin’s speech was a message of national – rather than simply Republican – resolve against Iran’s nuclear weapons program and its active involvement in global and regional terrorism. She made this point by quoting statements that Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton has made against the Iranian regime. …

It was a remarkable speech, prepared by a remarkable woman. But it was not heard. It was not heard because the Democratic Party and Jewish Democrats believe that their partisan interest in demonizing Palin and making Americans generally and American Jews in particular hate and fear her to secure their votes for Obama and his running-mate Sen. Joseph Biden in the November election is more important than allowing Palin to elevate the necessity of preventing a second Holocaust to the top of the US’s national security agenda.

A disaster far more devastating even than universal economic collapse is underway, and our governments, our pundits, our professoriat, the most powerful of our movers-and-shakers, are averting their eyes from it, pretending it is not happening.

Europe is dying. Unless it is prevented by some as yet unproposed and almost unimaginable means, its greatness is coming to an end. The shadow of Islam, an ideology out of the Dark Ages, is advancing over it day-by-day, mile-by-mile, state-by-state. The European nations are dwindling and Islamic peoples are replacing them.  Perhaps because the disaster is too dreadful to contemplate,  we distract ourselves with imaginary urgencies like climate-change, racism, feminism, gay marriage, and, with the loudest hullabaloo, the zealous promotion of the very cause that is destroying us: ‘multiculturalism’, the pretence or fatal illusion that there are other civilizations not just equal to but worthier than our own, and that to them we must give way.

What is threatening is nothing less than the Second Fall of Civilization.  European governments are doing nothing to stop it happening.  In various ways they are expediting it: admitting millions of Muslims as immigrants; permitting the establishment of sharia courts, sharia-compliant finance, Saudi-supported madrassas that teach the fundamentalist Wahhabi creed, and the building of thousands of mosques; bestowing tax-payers’ on Muslim groups without control over how it is used; all-too-easily accommodating Muslim demands for footbaths or prayer-rooms (even in Buckingham Palace); knowingly sheltering terrorist leaders and supporting them and their families; policing those who expose Muslim sedition rather than the seditious themselves; laying down Newspeak rules for official commentators so that Islam cannot be associated with the terrorism that Muslims carry out – and so on. The list could be very much longer.

In the late eighteenth century Edward Gibbon wrote, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: ‘The system of arts, of laws, of manners … distinguish, above the rest of mankind, the Europeans and their colonies. The savage nations of the globe are the common enemies of civilized society; and we may inquire with anxious curiosity, whether Europe be still threatened with a repetition of those calamities which formerly oppressed the arms and institutions of Rome.’ 

Rome fell. It was arguably the greatest disaster in history. Darkness descended over Europe for a thousand years. Like a mansion decayed, deserted by its owners, half buried by an encroaching wildness, it sheltered precariously under its broken roof tribes of lawless and illiterate barbarians restrained only by the terrible would-be-totalitarian power of the Catholic Church. 

But the essence of Rome never died. Light broke again, eventually. Europe rediscovered its Roman heritage. Our culture is fundamentally Roman – or to be more precise, Greco-Roman.

The silver age of Rome (no golden age ever existed) was the Republic.  The republican idea – surely one of the greatest ideas that humankind has ever conceived – arose in ancient Greece: the idea that people of different origins and customs could live together, pursue their chosen trades and occupations, bring knowledge and information, inventions and techniques from many sources, contribute in individual ways to the general prosperity, act and express themselves freely, provided only that they accept the rule of the same law; and the law was to be made by the people themselves. It was the innovation of popular self-government, revolutionary and unique.

The citizens of the Greek city-states realized that they could dispense with the autocratic authority of a king, a chief, a headman. They alone in all the world broke the old universal pattern of human organization – adherence of person to family, of family to tribe, of the tribe being rooted in a piece of earth, its cohesion forcefully maintained by the arbitrary rule of an hereditary chief. To this day the old tribal pattern prevails in Africa and the Middle East. It continues among native peoples of all continents, even where European colonists have established themselves as permanent populations. In Europe itself there are traces and remnants of tribalism, persistent in atavistic sentiment, and lately in active political movements for reversion (for example, among Celts in Britain, Basques in Spain, the Flemish in Belgium.) Such political movements are pathetically nugatory in the dying days of the continent.  

The Renaissance was the re-birth of Greco-Roman civilization.  Again, as in Rome and classical Greece, thinkers began to speculate freely, in defiance of the Universal Church. Science and philosophy could flourish there again, and flourish they did. Exploration and discovery opened new worlds. Europe rapidly became the most fertile and powerful civilization of all time. In the most potent and productive states, kings weakened into figureheads; the people ruled.

From Europe and its erstwhile colonies, the science, the technology, the inventions that the world desires, have flowed. The inventions themselves are copied by far distant nations, which grow wealthy on their production and sale. But few of those countries copy the condition of freedom-under-the-law, and the institutions that preserve it, which allow and therefore foster innovation and experiment, those magnificently daring adventures into the new, with all its risks and rewards. So what will the world do if the source dries up?

Now ‘those calamities’ which threatened Rome are again threatening Europe, as Gibbon feared they might. It is not a clash of civilizations, but of civilization with barbarism. If Europe will not raise a finger to save itself, will America be willing once again to save Europe? What could it do? And if it can do nothing, is there any attempt by Americans to prepare for the time when they’ll no longer have any European allies?

The answer may depend on what leadership comes to power in the United States in the near future.  One candidate for the presidency obviously does not recognize the approaching catastrophe, and seems even to have some sympathy with Islam. The other may see and hear it, but will he act against it?  

Whether the darkness descends slowly through change in the demography of Europe, or is hastened through aggression by a nuclear armed Iran, it will be deep and persistent, unless the American Republic resists it. This time Europe will not be lawless. Worse, it will be under a system of law that, far from protecting freedom, ensures oppression. Sharia, the law of Islam, fixed since the Dark Ages and unchangeable, will hold the people   in subjection. Less escapable and even more cruel than the mediaeval Christian Church; utterly opposed to Justice as it is conceived in the post-Enlightenment West; contemptuous of women, forbidding homosexuality, caring nothing for ‘the environment’, unfavorable to figurative art and music; resistant as iron to innovation, is the law of Islam. It proceeds, Muslims believe, from an authority higher than any king or tyrant, and more absolute: their God. To him all must submit absolutely. ‘Islam’, remember, means ‘submission’.  

Western civilization has at present the political, economic, military, and intellectual resources to prevent a second fall. What is missing as yet is the will. To gain it, we must first take pride in our achievements; recognize, believe in, and have the courage to proclaim the superiority of our customs and ideals over the customs and ideology of our enemy. 

The US presidential election of 2008 may be decisive as to whether our civilization resists and survives, or submits and falls. 

Jillian Becker

September 2008

Part of the great speech Sarah Palin would have made at the protest rally against Ahmadinejad – who is addressing the corrupt and useless United Nations today – if the stupid lefty organizers had not ‘dis-invited’ her:

The world must awake to the threat this man poses to all of us. Ahmadinejad denies that the Holocaust ever took place. He dreams of being an agent in a “Final Solution” — the elimination of the Jewish people. He has called Israel a “stinking corpse” that is “on its way to annihilation.” Such talk cannot be dismissed as the ravings of a madman — not when Iran just this summer tested long-range Shahab-3 missiles capable of striking Tel Aviv, not when the Iranian nuclear program is nearing completion, and not when Iran sponsors terrorists that threaten and kill innocent people around the world.

The Iranian government wants nuclear weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency reports that Iran is running at least 3,800 centrifuges and that its uranium enrichment capacity is rapidly improving. According to news reports, U.S. intelligence agencies believe the Iranians may have enough nuclear material to produce a bomb within a year.

The world has condemned these activities. The United Nations Security Council has demanded that Iran suspend its illegal nuclear enrichment activities. It has levied three rounds of sanctions. How has Ahmadinejad responded? With the declaration that the “Iranian nation would not retreat one iota” from its nuclear program.

So, what should we do about this growing threat? First, we must succeed in Iraq. If we fail there, it will jeopardize the democracy the Iraqis have worked so hard to build, and empower the extremists in neighboring Iran. Iran has armed and trained terrorists who have killed our soldiers in Iraq, and it is Iran that would benefit from an American defeat in Iraq.

If we retreat without leaving a stable Iraq, Iran’s nuclear ambitions will be bolstered. If Iran acquires nuclear weapons — they could share them tomorrow with the terrorists they finance, arm, and train today. Iranian nuclear weapons would set off a dangerous regional nuclear arms race that would make all of us less safe.

But Iran is not only a regional threat; it threatens the entire world. It is the no. 1 state sponsor of terrorism. It sponsors the world’s most vicious terrorist groups, Hamas and Hezbollah. Together, Iran and its terrorists are responsible for the deaths of Americans in Lebanon in the 1980s, in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s, and in Iraq today. They have murdered Iraqis, Lebanese, Palestinians, and other Muslims who have resisted Iran’s desire to dominate the region. They have persecuted countless people simply because they are Jewish.

Iran is responsible for attacks not only on Israelis, but on Jews living as far away as Argentina. Anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial are part of Iran’s official ideology and murder is part of its official policy. Not even Iranian citizens are safe from their government’s threat to those who want to live, work, and worship in peace. Politically-motivated abductions, torture, death by stoning, flogging, and amputations are just some of its state-sanctioned punishments.

Read it all here.

 In Front Page Magazine, Faith McDonnell writes about the reception various Christian groups are holding in New York to honor the genocidal President of Iran:

Already well-established for killing Christians, Jews, Baha’I’s, and Muslims of the wrong sort, the Islamic Republic of Iran is about to descend to a new level of repression and persecution.  A proposed penal code nearing final passage in the Iranian Parliament would, for the first time, formally institute the death penalty for “apostasy.”   The Islamists in Iran would waste no time using this law against Christian converts from Islam, members of the Baha’I faith, and Muslim activists and dissidents.  So what are Christian churches in the United States doing in response to this threat to their fellow believers?  Holding prayer services?  Not one group of mainline/pacifist churches.  They are breaking the Ramadan fast (who knew they were fasting for Ramadan?) at an Iftar with Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Terming their dhimmitude as “an invitation to an international dialogue between religious leaders and political figures,” the American Friends Service Committee, Mennonite Central Committee, Quaker United Nations Office, Religions for Peace, and the World Council of Churches – United Nations Liaison Office announced this by-invitation-only dinner with the Iranian leader who has denied the Holocaust took place, threatened the annihilation of Israel, and who, along with the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has continued the tradition that began with the Iranian Revolution of violating the human rights of all Iranian citizens. 

Arranging the Iftar at Manhattan’s Grand Hyatt Hotel, accompanied by obsequious verbiage about “the significance of religious contributions to peace,” and “building mutual understanding between our peoples, nations, and religious traditions,” the event’s sponsoring committee is just the latest example of the pattern of Western behavior towards Islam that has been so well described and foretold in the work of Bat Ye’or and others.  In some cases, these mainline Christian leaders are toadies, hoping to avert a jihad-level catastrophe by assuming the position as submissive “People of the Book.”  In other cases, mainline Christian leaders have reached the point where the doctrines of the Christian faith (for which many Iranian Christians have been willing to die) have no meaning anymore, and all religions are equivalent.

Perhaps it would be worth it to hold your nose and dine with the devil if it meant an opportunity to speak out about Iran’s repression and persecution, to be a voice for those who are suffering, and to demand that Islam offer reciprocity for the freedom of religion and decency of treatment that Muslims have received from Christians, Jews, and Baha’is.  With Iran on the verge of a new level of repression, and religious minorities in Iran facing a new level of siege because of the proposed apostasy penal code, an American Christian leader is needed to speak with courage and forthrightness over a dinner plate.  To use the phrase that mainline liberal church leaders are so fond of when it comes to attacking George Bush, a prophetic voice to speak truth to power.   Ahmadinejad will hear such voices, but he will not hear them in the posh dining rooms of the U.S. mainline church leaders.  He will hear them in the prison cells and court rooms of Iran. 

 A brave Iraqi could be sentenced to death for visiting Israel.

Al-Alusi said he went to Israel to seek international support for Iraq as it struggles against terrorism, and insisted that the outcry reflects Iranian meddling in Iraq’s internal affairs — an accusation often leveled by Sunnis like himself against Iraq’s mostly Shiite neighbor.

"Iran is behind Hamas and Hezbollah and many other terrorist organizations. Israelis are suffering like me, like my people. So we need to be together," he said. "Peace will have more of a chance."

Read the whole story here.