Issues: August 2006 Archives

Iran Ready for "serious" talks.



It took them three months to say that? After three years of what the appeasement artists solemnly declared were serious talks?



At least there is one rational voice on the issue:

At U.N. headquarters in New York, U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said the United States is prepared to quickly submit elements of a new Security Council resolution that would impose economic sanctions on Iran if it does not accept "the very, very generous offer" from the five permanent council members and Germany.

I understand our options are limited, especially with the domestic political situation. Nonetheless, I'd rather have our president do the intelligent, principled thing, even if it causes the Republicans to lose Congress in November. I don't think it will, but it could.



I cannot bring myself to wish ill on Howard Dean or any of the other Donkey honchos. But I wouldn't cry if they suddenly saw the error of their ways and discovered a certain burning ambition to enter a different trade.



On the same subject,

It turned away International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors from an underground site meant to shelter its uranium enrichment program from attack and its top leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared that Tehran will continue to pursue its nuclear activities.

If there is anyone who still thinks that if a sufficiently strong response is not forthcoming in the next few months, we're going to entering a phase of history where fanatical religious leaders with attitudes that hardened in the eighth century AD have nuclear weaponry to intimidate the rest of the world with? Ladies and gentlemen, this scenario makes North Korea having nukes look positively wonderful by comparison. Kim Jong Il won't start the world's first nuclear war because he thinks Allah has told him he'll get seventy-two virgins in paradise. I don't want a confrontation with Iran. But the worst possible case if we stop them from getting nukes is better than the best possible case if we don't.





ROFASix agrees with me that ultimately, this is another problem that the US will be expected to solve.



RightWing NutHouse notes some existing Iranian plans. Doubtless we have plans for Iran, as well. Under the circumstances, it would be criminally stupid not to have made contingency plans for war with Iran. We've got such a plan for war with Canada, for crying out loud, and have since 1934. It's not like you can suddenly gather intelligence, figure out what are and are not important targets, figure what it would take to achieve them, put the logistics in place, and figure out all of the coordination, after the shooting starts. Well, I suppose you could if you wanted to lose and waste resources. Isn't that the sort of thing the president's enemies have been riding him for?



Thomas Sowell at Real Clear Politics

After we, or our children and grandchildren, find ourselves living at the mercy of people with no mercy, what will future generations think of us, that we let this happen because we wanted to placate "world opinion" by not acting "unilaterally"?

While we're on the subject, Michael Barone on out covert enemies.

Via Politburo Diktat, Ace of Spades has a good explanation for the terminally outraged on how the government is sometimes not lying to you, it's lying for you.



But I do think one of his examples was weak. Not the Chinese Embassy stuff, that's spot on. But anybody with any intelligence or exposure to banking records requirements knew the government tracks financial records extensively. It's how we catch mobsters, drug traffickers, etcetera, and how we have been catching them since the 1930s. The government doesn't publicize it, but if they ever said, "We're not doing it," I must have missed it. They simply didn't draw any attention to it. Just like there are ways people in certain high-risk occupations have of letting people know that There Is A Situation But I Can't Say So Openly. Many of these are found in publicly available, completely unclassified documentation, others are things that everybody in the business knows. However, you don't see them splashed on the front of the trade publications. To coin a completely bogus but plausible example of the sort that are used, "If your auto dealership is taken over by terrorists, fly double pennons! The Police know that's what it means!" If the New York Times or other media publicized these methods, those these methods are meant to guard against would be able to take precautions, and sometimes there just aren't a whole lot of means available. If the network news said, "A Police SWAT Team was able to deal with Al-Qaeda taking over the grounds of Joe's Discount Car Sales in Podunk today. Forty-three terrorists were killed without civilian injury. They discovered it unbeknownst to the terrorists when an alert Police Officer, Mr. B. Anonymous, noticed that the employees at Joe's were flying double pennons, a universal signal that car dealerships are being controlled by terrorists." Add that to the standard camera shots, and every terrorist from now on is going to know that double pennons mean the SWAT team is going to come, and there are only a limited number of such signals possible.



It's not that the government said that bank records weren't being monitored. That would have been a stupid, obvious lie. Of course bank records were being monitored. They've been monitored for seventy years. But sometimes, if you just don't bring something to your enemies' attention, they forget about it. Or maybe nobody ever told them in particular. Or they just don't realize that this is important information, they don't worry about it, and pretty soon, their arrests are announced. Kind of like a combat ambush but better.



Publicizing these methods means that they are not available or won't work. The enemies of civilization will take precautions so that they don't get caught by them. And that is precisely the crime of the media in the banking records brouhaha. They reminded those whom the methods were being used against them that these methods existed, so they could take precautions against them. I think the War on Drugs is a stupid worthless counterproductive waste of resources, but given that I can't change the fact that we are fighting it, finding drug traffickers through financial records sure beats no-knock raids. I'd rather not be fighting the War On Terror, either. But given that we are in it whether we want it or not, I'd rather discover terrorist plots through their financing before the fact than during, when they and the enforcement types are spraying bullets everywhere and bystanders are likely to get hurt, or afterwards, when all we can do is pick up the debris.