GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DIN-DIN? –  While New York police are probing the Times Square bombing, they're also contending with an undistinguished visitor who's popped into town.  He could be trouble at the UN, but what else is new?  John Bolton, in the Wall Street Journal, reflects on Mr. Ahmadinejad, and our failed Iran policy:

Negotiations grind on toward a fourth U.N. Security Council sanctions resolution against Iran's nuclear weapons program, even as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrives in New York to address the Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference...

...In Congress, sanctions legislation also creaks along, but that too is simply going through the motions. Russia and China have already rejected key proposals to restrict Iran's access to international financial markets and choke off its importation of refined petroleum products, which domestically are in short supply.

And...

The further pursuit of sanctions is tantamount to doing nothing...

...Speculating about regime change stopping Iran's nuclear program in time is also a distraction. The Islamic Revolution's iron fist, and willingness to use it against dissenters (who are currently in disarray), means we cannot know whether or when the regime may fall.

And since the Obamans will not use force, and will prevent Israel from doing so, Iran will certainly get the bomb, and soon.

While U.S. policy makers will not welcome that outcome, they certainly hope as a corollary that Iran can be contained and deterred. Since they have ruled out the only immediate alternative, military force, they are doubtless now busy preparing to make lemonade out of this pile of lemons...

...Facile analogies to Cold War deterrence rest on the dubious, unproven belief that Iran's nuclear calculus will approximate the Soviet Union's. Iran's theocratic regime and the high value placed on life in the hereafter makes this an exceedingly dangerous assumption.

Correct.  The proper analogy might be Japan in World War II, which sponsored suicide attacks.

We should recognize that an Israeli use of military force would be neither precipitate nor disproportionate, but only a last resort in anticipatory self-defense. Arab governments already understand that logic and largely share it themselves. Such a strike would advance both Israel's and America's security interests, and also those of the Arab states.

Nonetheless, the intellectual case for that strike must be better understood in advance by the American public and Congress in order to ensure a sympathetic reaction by Washington. Absent Israeli action, no one should base their future plans on anything except coping with a nuclear Iran.

The tragedy is that we have a president who's spent most of his life among leftist intellectuals who really don't see a problem with a nuclear Iran.  After all, who are we to judge?  Because they live in their own limited world, these leftists are convinced that Iran would never use the bomb.  After all, the Iranians must be rational, they argue, and logic will prevent them from using it.

On such fantasies may rest the fate of our nation.

May 3, 2010