The Iranian regime has reportedly offered to enter into “serious negotiations” over their nuclear program, but will not stop enriching uranium or continuing to develop nuclear weapons technologies. And really, why should they? They know quite well that the UN is impotent and toothless, the EU has neither the political will nor the military ability to stop them, and both the US and Israel are already too constrained in the region to seriously act.

All the Iranians are doing is stalling for more time. They’re undoubtedly close to developing a nuclear weapon within the next two years, and possibly much sooner. Once they possess nuclear weapons, they become virtually untouchable.

We simply don’t have any good options in this case. Military action is always a choice of last resort, and our military options in regards to Iran have never been good, even without the issue of Iraq getting in the way. The Iranians continue to call our bluff. They know that ultimately they’re negotiating from a position of strength, while we in the West don’t have the courage and ability to force them to give up their nuclear ambitions.

Across the globe, dangerous regimes continue to test the world’s willingness to fight for their values and keep the global order — and we keep failing that test. Sooner or later a fatal provocation will occur, and the events of the last twenty years may well be remembered as fatefully filled with naïvete as the twenty years between the First and Second World Wars.

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.

That’s National Review‘s argument on Secretary of State Rice’s deal on the Iranian nuclear program. We’ll sit down for talks if Iran agrees to halt their reprocessing of nuclear fuel in a verifiable way.

I’m with NR on this one:

Instead, the U.S. overture to Iran has given the Security Council the cover it needed to flinch. Further negotiations would postpone indefinitely the enactment of targeted sanctions against the regime, a tactic that the Bush administration had recently discussed with its allies. They would reinforce the mullahs’ perception that the West, for all its bluster, is unwilling to do anything but talk. And they would distract attention from the only question that matters—Will the mullahs renounce forever their nuclear aims?—to the intermediate question of whether uranium is currently being enriched and reprocessed. If Iran’s rulers accept our conditions and temporarily suspend those activities, they do so knowing that the Security Council referral was a bluff, leading as it did to more talks. Why will they be more willing to make concessions now—particularly when the U.S. offer was coupled with no statement, from either Europe or the U.S., on the inevitability of punitive action should the talks fail?

The Iranians don’t lose anything no matter what – if they take the deal they get a reprieve and could probably continue manifacturing centrifuges or reprocessing uranium while the hapless and ineffective IAEA was sent on a wild goose chase. If they don’t, they know that the chances of the US having the guts to do anything about it is relatively low.

To put it bluntly, the madmen of Tehran have us by the short and curlies, and they know it.

On the other hand, we don’t have many options vis-à-vis Tehran. A military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities may not be effective even with our impressive array of ground-penetrating munitions, and could invite a major regional conflagration. Letting Iran get the bomb ensures that a man regime possesses some of the most devastating weapons known to man. While negotiation is quite likely to be futile, Tehran knows that the international community is utterly feckless and their chances of ending up like their former neighbor to the west is slim. All Ahmadinejad has to do is delay for a few months while Iranian nuclear scientists inch their way closer to a bomb.

At the very least, we have made an effort in good faith to find a diplomatic solution to this problem. If military action becomes necessary, no one will care except perhaps our allies who need the diplomatic cover. Eventually, something will need to be done to prevent Ahmadinejad from getting his hands on nuclear arms – all that this move will do is perhaps delay that point for a short period of time.

Power Line has an interesting bit about the cultural significance of President Ahmadinejad’s letter to President Bush. In the history of the Prophet Mohammad, he would often write letters to those whom he intended to conquer. As The New York Sun‘s editorial on the subject explains:

President Ahmadinejad’s letter to President Bush, widely interpreted as a peaceful overture, is in fact a declaration of war. The key sentence in the letter is the closing salutation. In an eight-page text of the letter being circulated by the Council on Foreign Relations, it is left untranslated and rendered as “Vasalam Ala Man Ataba’al hoda.” What this means is “Peace only unto those who follow the true path.”

It is a phrase with historical significance in Islam, for, according to Islamic tradition, in year six of the Hejira – the late 620s – the prophet Mohammad sent letters to the Byzantine emperor and the Sassanid emperor telling them to convert to the true faith of Islam or be conquered. The letters included the same phrase that President Ahmadinejad used to conclude his letter to Mr. Bush. For Mohammad, the letters were a prelude to a Muslim offensive, a war launched for the purpose of imposing Islamic rule over infidels.

I believe that if President Ahmadinejad believed he could strike the United States with a nuclear weapon, he wouldn’t hesitate in doing so. He isn’t concerned about the prospect of massive retaliation; he believes that the United States doesn’t have the will to do such a thing, and he’s convinced that if he can make some kind of grand strike he can unite the Muslim world under his leadership and bring about the coming of the Twelvth Imam.

Ahmadinejad is likely insane – and clinically so. If he gets the bomb, the chances are he’ll use it are fearfully high, and the subtext of his letter would seem to be little more than a veiled threat to the United States. We can’t assume that the doctrine of containment would work against someone with such a messianic belief system – which is why denying Tehran the chance to develop such a weapon is the most singularly important issue we face in the world at the moment.

Mark Steyn has an excellent, but chilling, piece on the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. The West has almost never correctly understood the intentions of the Iranians. Western intelligence utterly missed the downfall of the Shah, which was one of the most crucial events in the history of Islamist terrorism. Now, Steyn worries that we’re miscalculating the Iranian’s intentions about acquiring and using nuclear weapons:

The fatalists have a point. We may well be headed for a world in which anybody with a few thousand bucks and the right unlisted Asian phone numbers in his Rolodex can get a nuke. But, even so, there are compelling reasons for preventing Iran in particular from going nuclear. Back in his student days at the U.S. embassy, young Mr. Ahmadinejad seized American sovereign territory, and the Americans did nothing. And I would wager that’s still how he looks at the world. And, like Rafsanjani, he would regard, say, Muslim deaths in an obliterated Jerusalem as worthy collateral damage in promoting the greater good of a Jew-free Middle East. The Palestinians and their “right of return” have never been more than a weapon of convenience with which to chastise the West. To assume Tehran would never nuke Israel because a shift in wind direction would contaminate Ramallah is to be as ignorant of history as most Palestinians are: from Yasser Arafat’s uncle, the pro-Nazi Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, to the insurgents in Iraq today, Islamists have never been shy about slaughtering Muslims in pursuit of their strategic goals.

Sadly, I think Steyn is largely right. We cannot allow the Iranian regime to possess nuclear weapons – the chances that they’ll use such weapons is intolerably high. We can’t just assume that when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks of “wiping Israel off the map” he’s just playing around. The Iranians are probably the world’s most prolific supporters of terrorism. They are the main source of funding for Hizb’Allah and almost certainly sheltered members of al-Qaeda, including Saad bin Laden and Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi. Iran is not a stable state governed by rational actors – Ahmadinejad’s radical views had to have been known to Iran’s Guardian Council. Even “moderates” like former President Khatami have spoken openly about the need to utterly destroy Israel.

Our options in regards to Iran are limited – invasion has never been a viable military option, and wouldn’t have been even if we weren’t otherwise engaged in Iraq. Precision airstrikes may not be enough to stop the Iranian’s hardened nuclear facilities. Using bunker-busting low-yield nukes would be more effective, but would lead to massive repercussions against the United States. We can only hope that conventional weaponry can do the job well enough to prevent the Iranians from developing nuclear weapons.

Every year we delay puts the world closer and closer towards disaster. The idea that it will take Iran 10 years or more to develop a working nuclear weapon is hopelessly naïve – Ahmadinejad has admitted to developing a more efficient P-2 centrifuge design that would vastly accelerate Iran’s enrichment program.

Sooner or later, the world will have to do something about Iran – either taking out the regime or taking out the weapons. A diplomatic solution is always preferable, but there are no diplomatic avenues when you have a country that is in the iron grip of a group of committed fanatics. Ahmadinejad learned early on that the West can be easily cowed into submission through the use of violence. If we continue to send that message it is only a matter of time before an Iranian nuclear weapon is detonated in a Western city.