The Old Ladies of the Left

Aloha, my name is Grant Jones and I blog at The Dougout. I have been given the honor of posting at the Infidel Bloggers Alliance. For my first effort I have a post from a few weeks ago on Seymour Hersh's trial balloon "The Iran Plan." Although, two weeks old I think Hersh's article provides a useful window into the worldview of the American liberal/left.

The title of this blog entry refers to Seymour Hersh's article in the New Yorker "The Iran Plans." There has been much nattering on leftist blogs about the supposed plan to use nuclear bunker busters on Iranian underground nuclear facilities. Hersh's disclosure does not seem to be intimidating the Mad Mullahs. It wasn't suppose to. The threat of the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons with Hersh's lurid description, "we're talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years," was meant to frighten Americans. It seems to be working in some quarters, along with Hersh's unidentified source stating that President Bush with his "messianic vision" is the problem.

In what passes for wisdom in left/liberal circles a government which has declared that Israel "must be wiped of the map," denies the reality of the Holocaust and is working to acquire nuclear weapons deserves the benefit of the doubt until the UN finds a "smoking gun." Perhaps, a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv would qualify. Whether the Iranians making good their threat to finish the job Der Fuhrer started will bother anyone in Vienna is an open question.

The UN has no interest in preventing the Iranians from acquiring nuclear weapons, just as they have no interest in stopping the genocide in Darfur.

Hersh in his article stresses that what is needed to deal with this threat is diplomacy. The academic history blog Cliopatria, because of its lack of liberal/left opinion, has added Taylor Owen to its ponderous list of contributors. Owen, right out of the gates, wrote an entry "The Facade of Diplomacy - why this confrontation is about more than Iranian nukes." According to Owen the problem is "the intransigence of the US administration's position has exacerbated the confrontation with Iran." How original of Owen, blaming America for the genocidal intentions of the Jihad crazed psychos who control Iran.

Hersh agrees, the sub-titled of his article is "Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?" Isn't it cute how Blame America First leftists can airbrush twenty-seven years of history away? In fact the United States and Iran have been in a state of war since November 4, 1979. The taking of a nation's embassy is usually interpreted as such under the international law that liberals hold in such high regard. Since that time Iran has waged war upon not just America but also infidels in general. The left's response to Iran's acts of war is appeasement...oops...diplomacy. Their motivation is outright cowardice, as Hersh admits:

A military conflict that destabilized the region could also increase the risk of terror: "Hezbollah comes into play," the adviser said, referring to the terror group that is considered one of the world's most successful, and which is now a Lebanese political party with strong ties to Iran. "And here comes Al Qaeda."

And there you have it, as long as they're only coming for the Jews there is no problem. Instead of removing this clear and present danger, and one of the main sources of Jihad, American liberals and European politicians want more endless talk and sanctions.

The claim that sanctions will have any effect, besides giving the Iranians time to build a bomb, demonstrates the basic dishonesty of the "diplomacy" crowd. It should be obvious to even the left that sanctions will have no effect given the fact that Russia and China will not participate.

Hersh's, and those who agree with him, position is that the greatest military power in world history should be afraid of the military might of Iran and the Arab street. As one of Hersh's many unidentified sources state:

He warned, as did many others, that bombing Iran could provoke "a chain reaction" of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world: "What will 1.2 billion Muslims think the day we attack Iran?"

In war, and we are at war, the enemy will react to one's moves and try to counterattack. This is hardly an excuse to surrender and appease. As U.S. Grant said "it's time to stop worrying about what Bobby Lee is going to do to us and start thinking about what we are going to do to him." Today we are facing a far more contemptible enemy that Robert E. Lee. The left would have us worry not about what the enemy might do but what they might think!

First, it is debatable whether people who riot, burn and murder because of some cartoons in a obscure paper are capable of thought. Second, in the thugocracies that govern the dar al-Islam what the people think is irrelevant. What their dictators need to know is that making war upon the United States will cost them their regimes and their lives.

Hersh, and his ilk, probably believe there is some excuse for their advocating that the United States turn over its national security to its avowed enemy the U.N. There isn't.