From The Blog:

If Iran can credibly hold Washington and New York City at risk, we’ll be essentially locked in to a Cold War style deterrence paradigm with Tehran — a country that will have no problem unleashing their proxies against US interests and allies (like the Soviets did) without fear of serious conventional reprisal.

The president has at his disposal two tools to ensure that Iran can never threaten the United States: either an offensive, decapitating, conventional strike on Tehran’s leadership, ballistic missile inventory, and nuclear weapons program, or a defensive missile shield so tight a bottle rocket couldn’t slip through. In a critical juncture in history, where the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans can no longer assure our security, Obama has opted for neither.

Why? For the answer, see our two posts below, Promoting American weakness and US security will depend on the kindness of (evil) strangers.

There is serious trouble ahead among the nations as a result of Obama putting away American power as he creates a weak, poor, socialist state out of what has long been the strongest and most successful country in history.

Mark Steyn comments accurately on Obama’s ever more disastrous foreign policy (read all of what he writes here):

You’ve got to figure that by now the world’s strongmen are getting the measure of the new Washington… The Europeans “negotiate” with Iran over its nukes for years, and, in the end, Iran gets the nukes, and Europe gets to feel good about itself for having sat across the table talking to no good purpose for the best part of a decade. In Moscow, there was a palpable triumphalism in the news that the Russians had succeeded in letting the Obama fellow have their way. “This [the breaking of the promise by the US to provide  anti-missile shields to Poland and the Czech Republic] is a recognition by the Americans of the rightness of our arguments about the reality of the threat or, rather, the lack of one,” said Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Duma’s international affairs committee. “Finally the Americans have agreed with us.”

There’ll be a lot more of that in the years ahead.

There is no discreetly arranged “Russian concession.” Moscow has concluded that a nuclear Iran is in its national interest – especially if the remorseless nuclearization process itself is seen as a testament to Western weakness. Even if the Israelis are driven to bomb the thing to smithereens circa next spring, that, too, would only emphasize, by implicit comparison, American and European pusillanimity. Any private relief felt in the chancelleries of London and Paris would inevitably license a huge amount of public tut-tutting by this or that foreign minister about the Zionist Entity’s regrettable “disproportion.” The U.S. defense secretary is already on record as opposing an Israeli strike. If it happens, every thug state around the globe will understand the subtext – that, aside from a tiny strip of land [on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean], every other advanced society on earth is content to depend for its security on the kindness of strangers.

Some of them very strange. Kim Jong-il wouldn’t really let fly at South Korea or Japan, would he? Even if some quasi-Talibanny types wound up sitting on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, they wouldn’t really do anything with them, would they? OK, Putin can be a bit heavy-handed when dealing with Eastern Europe, and his definition of “Eastern” seems to stretch ever further west, but he’s not going to be sending the tanks back into Prague and Budapest, is he? I mean, c’mon …

Vladimir Putin is no longer president but he is de facto czar. And he thinks it’s past time to reconstitute the old empire – not formally (yet), but certainly as a sphere of influence from which the Yanks keep their distance. President Obama has just handed the Russians their biggest win since the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Indeed, in some ways it marks the restitching of the Iron Curtain. When the Czechs signed their end of the missile-defense deal in July, they found themselves afflicted by a sudden “technical difficulty” that halved their gas supply from Russia. The Europe Putin foresees will be one not only ever more energy-dependent on Moscow but security-dependent, too – in which every city is within range of missiles from Tehran and other crazies, and is, in effect, under the security umbrella of the new czar. As to whether such a Continent will be amicable to American interests, well, good luck with that, hopeychangers.

In a sense, the health care debate and the foreign policy debacle are two sides of the same coin: For Britain and other great powers, the decision to build a hugely expensive welfare state at home entailed inevitably a long retreat from responsibilities abroad, with a thousand small betrayals of peripheral allies along the way. A few years ago, the great scholar Bernard Lewis warned, during the debate on withdrawal from Iraq, that America risked being seen as “harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.” In Moscow and Tehran, on the one hand, and Warsaw and Prague, on the other, they’re drawing their own conclusions.

Iran was given until this month to respond to Obama’s appeal to negotiate over its nuclear threat. Do we expect Ahmadinejad any moment now to say, ‘Okay, world, I was only kidding about wiping Israel off the map – we’re don’t really want to threaten anybody, least of all with nuclear weapons, so come and inspect us to your entire satisfaction’?  No, not many of us, we’d guess. Maybe the folk at Foggy Bottom who see, hear, and speak no evil.

Jennifer Rubin writes:

At some point, even the Obama team may recognize that diplomacy, however “smart,” isn’t paying off. What then? Well they might have to do something. They might need to take a breather from hollering at Israel over East Jerusalem apartments and begin to rally international opinion to take some meaningful action in an attempt to dissuade Iran from going down this path [to nuclear war capability].

Now, you may think that’s not likely — because the Obama team lacks the ability or the will to get tough with any power (well, other than Honduras and Israel), or because it’s getting to be too late for economic sanctions. And then we arrive at the real choice: military action or a nuclear-armed Iran. You can see why so many would rather not take “no” for an answer.

 David Solway writes (read the whole article at Front Page Magazine): 

Our political leaders, the majority of our public intellectuals and the mainstream media have not realized, or myopically refuse to realize, what is at stake as the historical drama in which we are implicated unfolds—a drama in which Iran and Israel are the central actors. 

Let us imagine a terrifying possibility. We know that Iran has vowed to unleash nuclear havoc upon Israel. Should Israel respond in kind, as it would have every right to do, the damage may not be confined to a localized area. Many people are callous enough to accept the nuclear probability of Tel Aviv and Tehran reduced to rubble and ash, so long as they can get on with their lives. What they do not realize is that they too are in the line of fire.

An atomic missile falling on Kharg Island, for example, Iran’s major oil depot in the Persian Gulf, would ignite a radioactive oil fire that could probably not be extinguished and the skies would gradually darken over us all. Such a conflagration would more likely than not have to burn itself out, when it might well be too late to recover from its effect on climate and agriculture. Israel would undoubtedly do its utmost to avoid striking such installations, but Iran remains one vast inflammable oil well. An errant nuclear-tipped missile, launched from either side, may have planetary consequences. Krakatoa would be as nothing in comparison. Saddam lighting up a number of oil wells in Kuwait would not even qualify as a harbinger of what would occur—we recall that it took several months for American engineers to control a relatively minor irritation in the aftermath of the first Gulf War.

We are now living what may be the most precarious moment in the recorded history of the world as we continue to play the dangerous game of Iranian roulette—the game in which not one but five of the six chambers are loaded…

In the current play of innocuous strategies vis à vis Iran, of abject appeasement and feeble sanction, juicy carrot and twig-like stick, this is not a fifth act we should placidly discount. Former American ambassador to the UN John Bolton, one of our most reliable analysts, has warned that “there are no incentives that will dissuade Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons” (Newsmax, January 28, 2009). And so far, no disincentives either…

Ahmadinejad has made clear his intention to prompt the advent of the Mahdi by initiating an act of apocalyptic violence. It’s not a bad plan from the Imamic perspective. Accelerate the Mahdi’s arrival by bringing about a nuclear cataclysm and reap the reward of either of two outcomes. Israel is destroyed and Iran survives since, as Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani has informed us, Iran can absorb “thirty or forty million martyrs” in its march toward a global Caliphate. Alternatively, Iran is also consumed and very possibly the world along with it, a global conquest to be savored from a position of vantage in Jannah, the Garden of Eternal Delights. Either way, victory.

Fear-mongering? Think again. Those who would argue that such a scenario makes no sense and is in fact counter-productive have simply not grasped the metality in question. A nuclear weapon is only a bigger suicide bomb and there are prospective “martyrs” aplenty…

The aim is to ensure that Iran stays afloat while it prepares to accomplish its mission, predicated on the calculated risk that neither Israel nor America will intervene in time to deflect its trajectory. It’s a gamble, but one the Iranians are confident they can win. (And they certainly have nothing to worry about from a flaccid and propitiatory Europe.)…

 We should do well to keep in mind that we are not treating with a cadre of lucid and sensible actors who can be trusted to be reasonable—as we understand reasonableness. They are labile, invidious and locked in a mental universe that is utterly foreign to our own…

The original statement delivered in Farsi at the “World without Zionism” conference held in Tehran on October 26, 2005 translates literally as: Israel “must be erased from the page of time,” a slogan draped across Shihab-3 missiles at military parades, which makes the intent rather obvious. “Wiped off the map” is the non-literal translation provided by the New York Times… 

Many of Iran’s enablers in Western intellectual and political circles, such as Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, Jonathan Steele of the Guardian, Stephen Walt of “Israel Lobby” fame, the despicable Jimmy Carter and American Congressmen Denis Kucinich and Ron Paul, have tried to soft-pedal Ahmadinejad’s threat. The Economist’s Middle East correspondent Max Rodendeck speaks dismissively of Iran’s “nuclear gadgetry.” … The downward appraisal by the American National Intelligence Estimate of Iran’s nuclear program, which reduced the threat index and thereby mitigated the urgency of the situation, turns out to have been totally misguided. It was subsequently reversed by director Michael McConnell at a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on February 5, 2008.

Ahmadinejad looks and acts like a small-time crook, but he will soon have his finger on a big-time button. Nor should we be deceived by his apparent buffoonery. He means what he says and he needs to be taken at his word…                                  

Jews now have their own nation and are no longer powerless to react or to exact vengeance. If Israel finds itself in the throes of annihilation in a second Holocaust, left to smoulder in the world’s guilty unconcern, no one can dictate to it what its response should be. And no one should consider himself exempt from the consequences.

It is time to rub the slumber from our eyes. Should Iran carry out its promise to destroy Israel, whether directly or by proxy, thus hastening the looming parousia of the long-awaited Mahdi, and Israel retaliate in nuclear reprisal, the region will be set ablaze. The fact that the world economy would crater far more severely than anything we are experiencing today is almost beside the point. Far worse, the effect on the global ecology might well be disastrous and possibly terminal, and we, too, like our foolish predecessors, will have learned too late that blindness and make-believe never work. The writing is not only on the wall; it is in the documents, the proclamations, the newspapers, the texts of speeches…

Our attention has been distracted by other volatile nuclear powers, such as Pakistan and North Korea. Pakistan in particular, if the inchmeal approach of the Taliban toward the capital is not halted, will need to be robustly confronted. But in an oil-drenched region primed to go up in flames, in which one nation is acquiring offensive nuclear ordnance which it vows to use and another is ready to respond defensively, the immediate world-threat is Iran. It must be dealt with in short order, whether militarily or economically, and its nuclear designs effectively negated.

For if we do not wake up, the day may dawn when we do not wake up.