November 4, 1979: The free world watches in collective disgust as 53 Americans are taken hostage by a group of Iranian Islamist student radicals and held at gunpoint inside an overrun American embassy in Tehran. Nightly television news broadcasts display painful-to-watch video footage of blindfolded and wrist-bound embassy workers being dragged and paraded in front of a jeering, unruly, hateful mob chanting anti-American slogans like “Death to America” while burning the stars-and-stripes in the streets.
Thus begins the Iranian Revolution. It also begins the dismantling of a difficult Carter presidency already tarnished by skyrocketing inflation, unemployment and recession. When nearly a year and a half of negotiations on behalf of the administration breaks down, the lame duck president has no choice but to enlist the help of the military to conduct a rescue operation.
But for Carter, a diplomat and future Nobel Peace Prize recipient, and anti-military liberal, soliciting help from his own military is a final option tentatively entered into. It’s no wonder that when Operation Eagle Claw, as it’s called, is enacted, its results are disastrous, culminating in the crash of two aircraft and eight American servicemen. As the world watches stunned, the once powerful US is now looked upon as weak and sadly out of touch with the new radical thugs who look upon their Islamist leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, as a living Allah.
Fast forward three decades, dozens of deadly terrorist attacks in America and abroad, and Iran is once again poised to take more hostages. Only this time, instead of grabbing hold of 50-plus embassy workers, they’re going after something a little more ambitious. Nothing less than global domination. In other words, Iran is about to take the world hostage by bringing online a nuclear weapons arsenal that is not only designed to obliterate Israel, but also Western Europe and the US.
Just yesterday, the New York Times reported that Iran’s foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, issued a warning to the West “that it had one month to accept Iran’s counterproposal to a deal brokered by the United Nations aimed at slowing the Iranian nuclear program, or else Iran would begin further enriching its nuclear fuel stockpile on its own.”
Mottaki, who issued his “ultimatum” before state television cameras in Cairo only two days after missing their UN deadline, stated explicitly that his country, acting on orders from its radical leader, President Mahmoud Ahmadinjad, that it has the ability to “enrich its stockpile of low-enriched uranium to 20-percent.” If Mottaki is indeed telling the truth, a 20-percent enrichment will at least be enough to produce a crude version of modern nuclear warhead.
With Iran’s nuclear program said to be as much a symbol of national pride as is their radically Islamist anti-West beliefs, some world leaders view Mottaki’s swagger as a diversionary tactic meant to shift attention away from the country’s ever-crumbling social order that’s come about in the wake of Ahmadinjad’s having stolen the presidential election back in June. With anti-Ahmadinjad protestors being yanked off the streets, beaten, jailed and in some cases, killed, Iran is looking more and more like the Nazi Germany of pre-World Way II, say, less than a year before Panzers Blitzkrieged their way into Poland.
Iran’s official stance on building up their nuclear stockpile is for energy needs. But given the government’s tendency towards bullying anything and anyone who stands in their way of destroying the West, perhaps they should look into more green and sustainable energy alternatives like solar and wind power. Since it looks like Tehran is not going to abide by the UN proposal and abandon their nuclear ambitions under any circumstance, Obama, like Carter thirty years before him, is going to attempt to impose “harsh financial sanctions” on Iran.
But will sanctions hurt the Iranian people?
Almost definitely, which is why Washington is trying to tiptoe it’s way around the harsh reality of war, trying to figure out a gentler way of imposing penalties on government institutions and officials, rather than the general public at large. Kind of the diplomat’s version of the “smart bomb.” How realistic is this scenario? On a scale from 1 to 10, sanctions aimed at specific government targets probably weighs in at around a minus 3.
What should be done to stop Iran’s nuclear ambition in its tracks?
Nothing short of military intervention, should it come to that. Unlike Iraq nearly a decade ago, at least this time, we know for certain a nuclear stockpile exists and that its purpose is none other than to destroy the peace-loving free world.
Iran’s defiance is not based upon its energy needs. It’s based upon its lust for a nuclear arsenal with which is can terrorize the globe. The fact that the defiance is occurring during political upheaval which includes the outright killing of eight protestors alone this past Sunday, is not indiscriminate. According to one anonymous Washington, DC-based Iranian official, “I am sure that, in light of the recent events much more than in the past, the Revolutionary Guards and Ahmadinejad would love the new heightened tension with the US and the West.” He also goes on to say that harsh sanctions could work against the free world by unifying the Iranian people.
The people who were arrested, tried and executed within a matter of hours this past Sunday were charged with “desecrating the values of the Islamic Revolution.” Those values are none other than the fiery annihilation of the West and Israel. While members of the Iranian press and media are being arrested and no doubt face their own lengthy jail sentences and/or execution, Tehran will continue to defy the UN and proceed with its nuclear ambitions. Not for energy, but in order to achieve a first-strike capability.
Back in the late 1930s, while Prime Minister Chamberlin received an appeasing “nonaggression” promise from Hitler which he was certain would guarantee “peace for our time,” Ernest Hemingway was warning the world that the recent Fascist-backed revolution in Spain was just the precursor to a “long planned murder” which would no doubt engulf the entirety of Europe and the world. Obviously, unlike Chamberlain and other would-be diplomats, Hemingway had the gift for being able to look something in the face and knowing exactly what it was. That face bore a tiny, if not comical mustache, and it personally authorized the murder of millions.
“I expect the regime to further intimidate the people,” says Abbas Milani, a critic of Ahmadinejad and his murderous band of revolutionary thugs and criminals. But what President Obama should expect is that unless he takes a good hard look at his Nobel Peace Prize and realizes that sooner than later, a military option just might be the only true solution to preserving that peace, he might wake up one night to a nuclear mushroom cloud rising above Israel and the West.
