The Tide Creeps Ever Higher--Sobering News on Iran

Must-read article in the Times (of London). I've predicted a major military showdown with Iran for quite some time. This makes it clear that that eventuality has only become more likely.

Clearly, Iran now believes it can profit from confrontation, which hardliners around President Ahmadinejad appear to be actively seeking. For the past six months, Washington has warned Iran to stop supplying weapons to the insurgents in Iraq. The response has been not only a contemptuous denial but also the dispatch of Iranian Revolutionary Guards to other areas of confrontation. Iranian officials have also admitted that they are supplying weapons to the Taleban in Afghanistan...

Iran would do well to listen not only to the words but also the tone of Mr Bush’s latest warning. Anger, exasperation and frustration at Iran’s failure to rein in its export of terrorism or to curb its push for a nuclear capability are changing the balance of the debate in Washington. Those who urge further United Nations sanctions, a search for a diplomatic solution and the isolation of Tehran’s hardliners can point to little success. Those who argue that Mr Bush must destroy Iran’s nuclear programme before he leaves office are being balanced by the intense concern in Israel and by Iran’s own arrogant behaviour. If Iran is deaf to warnings from Washington, it should not ignore the tough new language in Europe...

I'm not sure the American hard-liners are being balanced by concern in Israel and by Iran's arrogant behavior so much as they are solidified in their assumptions--a good thing in this case. Not all consensus needs to come from the UN to be valid. (In fact, none of it does.)

I also challenge the assumption Iran is making in attempting to replay the Vietnam script. They might pull it off. They might not. It's not hard to see who's playing into that script and who's not.

Yet whatever one thinks about the wisdom of having ventured into Vietnam during the Kennedy administration, its worth remembering that we need not have lost there--at least not on the scale we did. They may not have been Americans, but millions of innocent lives were lost to Communist oppression as a result of our withdrawal. One can argue if it counts as 'genocide' but either way, it is unbelievably tragic and partly our fault.

The cost of decades of emasculated American self-questioning are impossible to calculate but arguably even larger in that they include--with the utmost irony--the costs of the current Iranian crisis itself (and Carter's mismanagement of it in 1979). History has extremely long-term ripple effects.