October 26, 2004

And If Not That, Then Perhaps The Comfy Chair?

Nashville's largest newspaper, The Tennessean, says in an editorial today that the growing threat of Iran's nuclear weapons program "warrants an ultimatum."

What kind of an ultimatum? A threat to use force to destroy Iran's nuke facilities, perhaps? Or a threat to use force to oust the terrorist-supporting Mad Mullahs of Tehran?

No. An ultimatum that "Iran... will become isolated if it doesn't listen to reason."

Agonizing. Such a "threat" would be empty and ineffective. Iran hasn't listened to reason for 25 years. And the same European countries that didn't want to back the U.S. in confronting a much weaker Iraq over its weapons program sure won't want to confront Iraq with anything close a threat of force if they don't cease pursuit of nukes.

The naiveté of viewing a threat of "isolation" as an "ultimatum" would be almost funny if the potential of a nuclear-armed terrorist-supporting Islamist regime that hates America and is hell-bent on the destruction of Israel weren't so grave.

I wonder if the editorial's author knows that Iran's nuclear facilities are located in hardened underground sites. I wonder if he knows that Iran's leaders have threatened to wipe out Israel. I wonder if he knows that there are real doubts that Israel has the capability of destroying Iran's underground nuclear facilities the way it took out Iraq's above-ground nuke site in the 1980s.

But mostly I wonder if the editorial's author is aware that John Kerry promised twice during the debates to cancel the nuclear "bunker buster" weapons development program, the one program that might provide the United States a way to destroy caches of weapons of mass destruction stored in hardened underground bunkers by rogue regimes as well as the hardened underground weapons labs and facilities where such weapons are produced.

I wonder, too, if the author has contemplated what we might have to do to Tehran if the Mad Mullahs, unbowed by threats of being "isolated," ever use a nuke to erase Israel, or pass a nuclear bomb to a member of al Qaeda or Hezbollah to smuggle into and then detonate in Baltimore or New York or New Orleans or Los Angeles...