WarSclerotic

Pleasantries from president won’t change Iran – Your Houston News: Opinion.

An alleged Iranian plan to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. — perhaps by setting off a bomb in a Washington restaurant — seems to offer more evidence of Iran’s intentions.

This case suggests at least two possibilities: Iran intends to use whatever means are available to attack its enemies, and that it may not fear significant retaliation from the U.S.

As a candidate and early in his presidency, Barack Obama had expressed the hope that talks with Iran could be fruitful. But some regimes are so hell-bent on their ambitions, and driven by their hatreds, and have so little regard for their enemies’ will or courage, that they do not respond to peaceful gestures as less daredevil governments might.

It is clear that Iran has set its sights on terror against the U.S. and its allies, perhaps on a massive scale. Iran has armed its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan to kill American soldiers; equipped Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon with missiles to facilitate attacks on Israel; rushed to develop nuclear weapons (slowed by a U.S.-Israeli cyber-attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities last year) and missile technology that might be used to attack Israel and the West, and forged close ties with Venezuela, run by anti-American strongman Hugo Chávez.

And now, two men linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, the force propping up the ruling mullahs, have been charged with a plot to target a U.S. ally on our soil and, perhaps, kill many of our citizens. Such a plot would have had to come from the highest levels.

What to do? Our military is overextended, working on wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. (Though, of course, dire threats to national security, as in World War II and the Cold War, could elicit a much more powerful response — including paying higher taxes, of all things.)

If the U.S. has more leverage to punish Iran economically, that should be done. We can make more of an effort to promote democracy in Iran. After all, much of the population, especially the young, detests its leaders. We should redouble our efforts to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons.

We shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that Iran will change its behavior in response to pleasant words.

— The Providence (R.I.) Journal

This entry was posted on October 18, 2011 at 8:06 AM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.