The threat from Iran
The threat from Iran – Martinez – NewsObserver.com.
The more I listened to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal yesterday, the more convinced I am that the United States is concentrating on the wrong war.
It just doesn’t make sense to tie up 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan digging wells and reading suspected terrorists their Miranda rights, while just across the border Iran races unimpeded toward a nuclear weapons capability.
We’ve gotten caught up in our failure to capture Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, and that seems to have minimized our progress in the war against terror and, more importantly, inflated terrorism’s real threat.
It’s been eight years since we’ve been assaulted by a terrorist attack. That’s certainly no guarantee the U.S. won’t be hit again. Still, we’re a lot more security conscious today than we were in 2001, when flight students could tell instructors to skip the landing lesson without arousing much suspicion.
Despite our success, we seem hell-bent on devoting our best people, equipment and at least $100 billion a year chasing after a cave-dwelling ghost army for whom pickup trucks are the main transport. Meantime, just a few hundred miles away, a real army under the command of the most belligerent regime in the region test fires solid-fuel missiles that can reach Israel and southern Europe.
We have to hope that some Pentagon analyst has the guts to tell Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and President Barack Obama that the terrorism threat posed by bin Laden, al-Qaida and the Taliban is marginal compared to the menacing nuclear ambitions of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and secular president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
It’s no secret that Khamenei and Ahmadinejad would like to wipe Israel off the map. What gets less attention here in the United States is Iran’s desire to dominate the Middle East, a promise the regime made after 1979 Islamic Revolution led by Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
It’s a threat the region’s Arab nations take seriously.
Former special diplomatic envoy Ambassador Dennis Ross has written that a weaponized Iran could trigger a Middle Eastern nuclear arms race. Tariq Khaitous of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy is among many foreign policy experts who predict that, at the least, Arab nations would arm their militaries to the hilt with sophisticated conventional weapon systems to deter a nuclear Iran.
Then there’s Egypt, which didn’t sign on to the Chemical Weapons or Biological and Toxic Weapons conventions. Since Egypt has used such weapons in the past, it’s not a stretch to believe it would counter Iranian weapons of mass destruction with chemical and biological WMD.
If you think the Middle East is unstable today, imagine the tinderbox it would be with all this weaponry.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is among those who advocate that the United States develop a nuclear protection umbrella in the Mideast, similar to that deployed in Europe against the Soviet Union.
Good idea. Problem is, good ideas can work for the bad guys as well.
Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.N., postulates a chilling use of the nuclear umbrella…by Iran. With development of its nuclear weapons and missile programs, Iran could provide a nuclear umbrella for al-Qaida or the Taliban. As Gold outlined it, had the September 11 attacks occurred in, say, 2011, Iran could offer the Taliban protection from American troops with nuclear or conventional missiles launched from within Iran. Iran didn’t have that capability in 2001. It has the conventional weapons capability today.
Working with terrorists groups is old hat to the Iranians. Last month the Israeli Navy seized a cargo ship with 500 tons of rockets, mortars, fragmentation grenades and rifle ammunition that Israel said were destined to Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy army against Israel.
The Afghan war is a distraction that could force us to appease Tehran’s ayatollahs, who are on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons because we’re too busy chasing militant-packed pickups outside of Kabul.
WarSclerotic 
December 26, 2009 at 9:12 PM
wow! amazing article! great written!Ahmadinejad is not just promises to wipe us from the map-he also swears that iran has nothing like nuclear programm. probably that is why russia that is very concerned about influence on middle east is going to provide to iran enriched uranium. iran is unpredictable agressor. i have a feeling that for usa russia and china this threat is not real or serious. if its not like that i cant find an explanation for their policy.