Vice President Cheney says that will not stand:
"Our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions," Cheney said in a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Studies.
He said Iran's efforts to pursue technology that would allow them to build a nuclear weapon are obvious and that "the regime continues to practice delay and deceit in an obvious effort to buy time."
If Iran continues on its current course, Cheney said the U.S. and other nations are "prepared to impose serious consequences." The vice president made no specific reference to military action."We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon," he said. [Emphasis added]
We?
The international community is fine with Iran having nuclear missiles.
The international community won't bat an eye if Iran nukes Israel.
The international community will not impose serious consequences under any circumstances.
So while I appreciate Cheney's determination to stop the Iran threat, who on Earth is included in that "we" comment?
UPDATE: Niall Ferguson, too, wonders about the international community's will to stop Iran:
It's easy to imagine the international uproar that would ensue in the event of U.S. air strikes. It's also easy to imagine the havoc that might be wreaked by Iranian-sponsored terrorists in Iraq by way of retaliation. So it's very tempting to hope for a purely diplomatic solution.
Yet the reality is that the chances of such an outcome are dwindling fast, precisely because other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are ruling out the use of force -- and without the threat of force, diplomacy seldom works. Six days ago, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin went to Iran for an amicable meeting with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Putin says he sees "no evidence" that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons. On his return to Moscow, he explicitly repudiated what he called "a policy of threats, various sanctions or power politics."
The new British prime minister, Gordon Brown, also seems less likely to support American preemption than his predecessor was in the case of Iraq. That leaves China, which remains an enigma on the Iranian question, and France, whose hawkish new president finds himself distracted by the worst kind of domestic crisis: a divorce.
By contrast, Washington's most reliable ally in the Middle East, Israel, recently demonstrated the ease with which a modern air force can destroy a suspected nuclear facility. Not only was last month's attack on a site in northeastern Syria carried out without Israeli losses, there was no retaliation on the part of Damascus. Memo from Ehud Olmert to George W. Bush: You can do this, and do it with impunity.
The big question of 2007 therefore remains: Will he do it?
Of course, the problem is that Syria's program, like Iraq's in 1981, was a point target. Iran's today is widely spread throughout Iran. And I wouldn't be surprised if Iran had facilities in other countries (which might include Syria). So the Israeli example is hardly a template.
