All Roads Lead To Tehran

Michael Ledeen, who has constantly urged the US to get tougher on Iran, notes that with the current conflict in the Middle East, all roads lead to Tehran:

Notice also that over the weekend there was a “security summit” in Tehran, involving all of Iraq’s neighbors, at which Iran’s moonbat President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made one of his trademark understatements about Israel. “The existence of this regime will bring nothing but suffering and misery for people in the region,” he mildly commented, and then said that the anger of the people might soon “lead to a vast explosion that will know no boundaries.”

Sounds to me like he knew something before the rest of us. As well he should, because Iran has been quite busy in Lebanon of late. The Lebanese Tourism Ministry’s Research Center announced an amazing statistic in early July: in the first six months of the year, 60,888 Iranian tourists visited Lebanon. No other Asian country came close (the Philippines ranked second, with a bit over 12,000). I don’t think that there’s enough disposable income in mullahland to cover the expenses of more than ten thousand people a month headed for the Beirut beaches. Do you think, as I do, that a goodly number of those “tourists” were up to no good? Maybe some of them were working for the Revolutionary Guards Corps? Or were Hezbollah operations people? I’ll bet you your favorite farm that one of them was the world’s most wanted man, Imad Mughniyah, the operations chieftain of Hizbollah, the world’s most lethal terrorist organization.

Actually I won’t bet; it would be unethical. We know that Mughniyah flew to Damascus a while back with Ahmadinejad, and went to Lebanon to work with his buddies.

In this war, there is no meaningful distinction between Iran and Syria, they work in tandem. It’s just that Iran gives the orders and Syria obeys.

Unfortunately for us, Ledeen is right. Israel is attacking Lebanon, despite the fact that Lebanon is a proxy of Syria who is a proxy of Iran. There’s some wisdom in going up the chain, but ultimately if the Middle East is to become less of a powderkeg the terror masters in Iran must be dealt with. Ideally one could do that without military action, but ultimately we will have to do something far more bold than sit around in the UN and discuss the situation.

We cannot allow Iran to go nuclear. We cannot allow Iran to continue to support terrorism. An invasion may be almost certainly out of the question, but sooner or later we will need to contemplate the need for action. If that only comes at the point where New York or Tel Aviv are smouldering ruins, then we have waited too long to act.

We are in the middle of a regional war in which terrorist states like Iran and Syria are propping up terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and Hizb’Allah. We cannot decieve ourselves into thinking that our current conflict can be resolved solely with diplomacy. Sooner or later this nation may be forced to stand against a rising tide of theocratic terrorism before the attacks of September 11, 2001 become just a terrible prelude to greater horrors.

Peace is not the mere absence of conflict, it is the victory of justice. A “peace” that leaves millions in the grip of outlaw regimes like the Assad regime and the Iranian theocracy is no real peace at all – it is the futile effort to buy time with the blood of innocents. We face an ideology that is no less totalitarian than Naziism, and no less vile. We cannot bury our heads in the sand and assume that ideology will never obtain the ability to present a grave danger to us – they are tirelessly working to find ways of destroying us.

Ledeen ends with his Cato-esque call of “faster please”:

Last week, President Mikheil Shaakashvili of free Georgia came to Washington and reminded us–not that it was much noticed — of America’s revolutionary mission. But President Bush heard it. “I just sent over to President Bush the letter that Georgian freedom fighters sent…seven years ago, and it never made it to the White House. It was intercepted by KGB and all the people who wrote it were shot,” Mr. Saakashvili said during a visit with the president in the Oval Office. “I’m sure lots of people out there in Korea (and he might well have added, Syria and Iran) are writing similar letters today. And I’m sure that those letters will, eventually, (arrive)…because that’s a part of the freedom agenda that President Bush has and we strongly believe in.”

As do millions of Syrians and Iranians. And you know what? Millions of Arabs all over the Middle East do too. Give them a chance to fight for their freedom, as we did with the Georgians. The longer we dither, the more likely it becomes that we will sadly and unnecessarily find ourselves in a military confrontation of some sort, with all the terrible consequences that entails.

Faster, please. Your options are narrowing. You cannot escape the mullahs. You must either defeat them or submit to their terrible vision. There is no other way.