Iran's Rubicon

After linking to yesterday’s post Solving Iran, Tom Lifson at The American Thinker expressed some skepticism that Iran could be so vulnerable to internal forces that it “could withstand a serious American invasion of Iran for only a few days”. That, in turn, caused me to email him with a quite different perspective and ultimately this appeared on The American Thinker. So today, let’s carry on our examination of the situation in Iran.

A key point here is that the United states has been patient with the United Nations, indeed too patient. Just as permissiveness spoils a child, American permissiveness with UN bureaucrats has induced unacceptable behavior and a lack of seriousness at Turtle Bay. The United States has a fine history of advancing the cause of peace there. In a speech there on December 8, 1953, President Eisenhower first proposed an “Atoms for Peace” plan, and in his address he proposed that part of the nuclear stockpiles of the world be donated to an international “bank of fissionable materials”. The result in following years was American lending scientific know-how and some fissionable materials to countries seeking to establish experimental reactors or reactors for generating electricity. What we have gotten for our generosity is treachery! Nations have chosen to pervert the concept “Atoms for Peace” by developing nuclear weapons programs in vainglorius pursuit of power (e.g. Degaulle’s France) or to suppress the will of captive peoples (e.g. the USSR) or to make some cash (e.g. France again) or to settle scores with its neighbors (e.g. India & Pakistan) or to defy the will of the international community of nations (e.g. Iraq, Iran, Libya etc. etc.), or to blackmail others into supporting kleptocracy (e.g. North Korea). The ones using it as a deterrent to aggression are few; the United States itself, Britain and Israel come to mind.
There is a lot of pontificating about “international law” at Turtle Bay. The basic right of a sovereign nation is liberty, especially freedom from occupation. Yet on November 4, 1979, Iranian forces occupied the American Embassy in Teheran. It is still occupied! Indeed, the government of Iran has chosen to make it a “museum” dedicated to the day Iran defied the United States. And just as a rebellious child deserves a good spanking, the government of Iran (the mullahs) need their punishment. Just yesterday, the people of Lebanon showed the world what an energized populace can do in the face of the actions of the insolent mullahs of Iran! One could hope that the people of Iran follow an excellent example, in an effort to appease the citizens of the United States of America. Because that invasion of sovereign territory on November 4, 1979 was a causus belli under international law. There is no need for a United Nations resolution to authorize a response. We can wipe the government of Iran off the face of this earth, at a time of our choosing,. That is not the worst President of the United States currently sitting in the White House. It is one of the best. And those American armed forces currently in Afghanistan and Iraq and around the west coast of the Arabian (nee Persian) Gulf and afloat there and the Arabian Sea are the most powerful war machine in history.
Now it is not in the character of the American people to visit the sins of the father on the son. And it has been a generation since the takeover of our embassy. A new generation has come to maturity in Iran and that generation has a choice. We respectfully submit, they better make the right one.