The psychopaths who run Iran now make him look like Santa Claus by comparison. Can't we get somebody like him to run the mullahs out of town?
A coup by sophisticated and serious members of the military would be great news. Even better would be a popular uprising. And best of all would be a combination of the two. An Iran with an old-style military dictatorship charged with defending democratic institutions would be an enormous, epochal victory for the West and for the Middle East. That would go a long way toward guaranteeing success in Iraq and would neutralize the threat of the Iran's nuclear ambitions, even if they decided to pursue a bomb. After all, the argument about nuclear weapons is no different than the argument about guns. The threat is from the people who have them, not from the weapons themselves. Lots of countries have nukes; we only need to worry about the ones run by whack jobs.
Alas, while there's reason to believe the White House shares this view in theory, there's less reason to believe it's doing that much about it in practice.
Of course, Jenkins (via RCP) thinks we can't strike Iran successfully. Sadly he doesn't actually argue about the technical merits as much as he says it would be wrong to stop Iran under the mullahs from getting nukes. We should instead, he lectures, learn to like the mullahs and their new nukes:
Iran is the regional superstate. If ever there were a realpolitik demanding to be "hugged close" it is this one, however distasteful its leader and his centrifuges. If you cannot stop a man buying a gun, the next best bet is to make him your friend, not your enemy.Who couldn't bring himself to love Ahmadinejad with nukes?
Another Brit, Heffer (again via RCP), says we can't avoid dealing with Iran one way or another:
As we survey, with appropriate unease and foreboding, the events now unfolding in Iran, we might like to reflect on one of Enoch Powell's less well-known, but most universal, obiter dicta. "The supreme function of statesmanship," he once wrote, "is to provide against preventable evils."Who would have thought that the hated and evil Shah would be the high point of Iranian history from 1978 to the present? Our Left assured us he had to go. So go he did.
We seem to have fallen somewhat short of this ideal both for ourselves and in terms of something called "the international community". True, we could hardly have prevented the Iranians electing what, by most objective standards, is a raving madman to run their country.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad believes in the coming of the Mahdi and something approximating to what Christians term the apocalypse. He also sincerely believes that Israel should be wiped off the map and that the Nazis did not murder six million Jews. I think we can agree that such a man ought not to have a nuclear weapon and, if we can't, then those who dissent should urgently seek psychiatric help.
Ah, memories.
And now we have an evil we are striving to prevent. Or one that we should be striving to prevent, that is. We are striving to prevent this evil, aren't we? Or will we learn to love the unlovable?
