North Star Writers Group

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is hardly the first head of state in the Middle East to express his desire to see Israel disappear. But he may soon become the first with the ability to make it happen at the push of a button.

As Iran’s nuclear ambitions grow more ominous, the world is responding in the usual way. Multilingual committee meetings, threats of economic sanctions and constructive reminders from the Russians that bellicosity would certainly not be helpful.

Thanks, Yuri! Our new friends the Afghans want to especially convey their appreciation for your pacifist sensibilities.

The “international community” instinctively dithers as crises loom. The UN and the International Atomic Energy Agency are designed with dithering in mind. Unfortunately, Iran’s prospective nuclear weapons are being designed with mass annihilation in mind. Mr. Ahmadinejad doesn’t seem like the kind of guy with whom you can get far in negotiations, especially since he won’t even admit he’s trying to build weapons in the first place – the very weapons for which he has already declared his preferred primary use. (Israel? Wiped off the map? Heard about that one?)

How can a dithering world effectively confront a rabid regime with an eye toward the complete destruction of a neighbor? What’s more, how can a dithering world come to terms with the strong possibility that this particular rabid regime will be followed by others posing the same problem?

Consider the world’s limited options in dealing with Iran. The objective is to stop the Iranians entirely from enriching uranium. This demonstrates that no one believes the obvious lie that nuclear activity is designed only to generate electricity. (Because it’s not like Iran has any oil, you understand.) So Iran’s friends, the Russians – who buy their oil and sell them weapons – offer to enrich the uranium for them and deliver turnkey nuclear reactors – all ready to turn on the lights, but useless for making weapons.

Oh, gee, no thanks! You know, we’ve got all this uranium lying around, and all this enrichment paraphernalia . . . we’ve just got to do something with it.

Well then, the world will send in inspectors! Maybe Hans Blix is available. He’ll put the fear of Allah into Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Put him together with Mohammed El Baradei, head of the IAEA, and no amount of mountains and hidden bunkers will stop them from getting to the bottom of Iran’s nuclear naughtiness.

The mad mullahs in Tehran understand that there is little the world community can do to stop them from building their bomb. Economic sanctions are unlikely to have any teeth when the Germans, French, Russians and Chinese show no inclination to go along. And even if they did, it would probably only incentivize Iran to go faster.

Diplomatic deals, like the current proposal to grant U.S. recognition in exchange for Iran’s abandonment of its weapons program, are untenable because they only work when the regime making the deal can be trusted. Would you trust Ahmadinejad? He recently announced the Iranians are conducting research on an advanced centrifuge he previously denied they even had.

America has gone down this road before. Bill Clinton thought he had a deal in place with North Korea to supply nuclear reactors (for “peaceful” purposes) in exchange for Kim Jung Il’s abandonment of his weapons program. Oops. Kim built the weapons anyway. Fool Bill once, shame on Kim. Fool George, too? Not likely, Mahmoud.

So why should Iran even attempt the pretense of hiding its nuclear activity? In truth, it isn’t. Even Iran’s “denials” have more of an in-your-face character than a plea of innocence, as if to say, We know we’re lying and you know we’re lying, and you can’t do a darn thing about it.

Iran presents a deathly serious global security crisis because its fanatical regime shows every sign that it is deathly serious, not only about developing these weapons, but about putting them to good use. Against this looming threat stands a tragically unserious patchwork of international organizations and established diplomatic methods. International bodies that were designed to prevent any more Hitlers from marching across Europe are entirely unprepared to stop an isolated, secretive and unafraid regime full of zealots from building doomsday weapons they fully intend to use.

We knew in 1979 that the regime arising from Iran’s Islamic Revolution was willing to stick its finger in the world’s eye and see what would happen. It saw that nothing happened. Its resultant direction should come as no surprise.

Today, many Americans consider it a scandal that the regime of Saddam Hussein was forcibly removed from power when it may not have had any weapons of mass destruction and may not have presented an imminent threat. Perhaps the real scandal is that this very course of action was not pursued against Iran long ago, because today the threat is imminent, and the weapons are coming along nicely. And it’s hard to see a darn thing that can be done about it now.

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This is Column # DC30. Request permission to publish here.