03.04.10
How’s this for unhelpful?
Brazilian president Lula tells the H-word Creature to her face that Brazil won’t support Iranian sanctions, says the world “must not back Iran against a wall.”
Ruminations on music, culture, America and the world stage
Brazilian president Lula tells the H-word Creature to her face that Brazil won’t support Iranian sanctions, says the world “must not back Iran against a wall.”
. . . believe that only force will stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
Pretty sensible bunch, those Americans. Imagine what we’ll do when we get our country back.
Ryan Mauro at Pajamas Media asks, Just what consitutes the “red line” concerning Iran?
One of life’s great delights is reading a piece of writing in which one of the age’s most magnificent writers has outdone himself. This is even true when the subject of the writing is a grim reality.
Such is the case with Mark Steyn’s Feb. 19 column. He employs one of his well-known literary techniques: starting into a discussion of something that doesn’t seem even peripherally related to his real topic, and then showing how it’s absolutely of a piece with it. The English pancake race and the Arizona resort hotel have everything to do with our esssential non-seriousness about Iran’s nuclear program.
Actually, while he goes about it in a markedly different – and much more skillful – way, he covers the same terrain I did in my Sunday column. The leviathan nanny state preoccupies itself with all manner of infantile micromanaging of private life, and utterly neglects to keep us safe from our self-declared enemies.
You can just read the Steyn piece for the great writing, but it’s almost certain that your sense of alarm will be heightened as well.
Says, let’s impose an oil embargo. Let’s be truly serious about it and not even involve the UN.
Iran is returning as a front-burner issue this week, what with acceleration of its enriched uranium efforts to 20 percent, and Ahmadinejad’s “telling blow to the world powers on February 11″ remark, about which date Supreme Ayatollah Khameini said it was when Iran would “deliver a stunning punch” to said powers.
Still, the TCM administration remains hair-raisingly clueless. The failure of appeasement is made nerve-frayingly clear by the juncture at which we find ourselves. At no point did the mullahcracy deviate from its pattern of contempt and moving forward in response to our feelers, moving deadlines, talk of last chances and depictions of what a constructive relationship with the “international community” could look like.
DefSec Gates has said he finds the TCM team’s approach to Iran as impressive as any he’s observed since Iran’s 1979 revolution, but goes on to say that “the response has been disappointing.” Is more than a microscopic dot of common sense necessary to then conclude that, for all its impressiveness, it’s not working?
There is no front on which the current regime gripping Washington’s throat is not utterly mad. This juncture in the Iran situation is not a failure to thorougly read one or more personalities in an entity with whom one’s relations have been uncomfortably adversarial. This is a basic inability to see evil when you’re nose-to-nose with it.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has refined bombast to something like an art, and certainly so far it’s been a lot more of that than it has been results (although there has been a noteworthy number of cargo ships going into and out of Iran carrying large quantities of noteworthy payload). Still, his date-specific rhetoric in this utterance bears consideration.
John Kerry plans to go to Tehran.
This is the FHer modus operandi in both foreign and domestic affairs: go for the most disastrous policy available, the policy most contemptuous of freedom and decency, in the name of some supposedly-grand-but-actually-perverted vision for “the world.”
London Times editorial on Iran’s latest missile test.
The problem with more sanctions is that China has compelling reasons – beyond its business dealings with Iran – for being reluctant to get on board with something serious. It has issues with the US Treasury debt it holds. It thinks the US ought to impose faster, deeper emissions greenhouse-gas reductions on itself. And it’s buds with North Korea, which is supplying Iran with a lot of hardware and technology for its program of doom.
Iran’s ruling regime announces plans to build ten new industrial-scale uranium enrichment plants.
It’s time to knock off the crap about “closing windows of opportunity” and squeeze this bunch, hard.
Three developments to watch over the weekend:
1.) The pretty-well-confirmed terrorist attack on the high-speed, Moscow-to-St. Petersburg train, and the investigation into who did it
2.) The possiblility that the fiscal meltdown of a nation-state (Dubai) may be contagious
3.) The noises being made by members of Iran’s parliament about pulling out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Undersecretary of State William Burns tells the Middle East Institute that the US recognizes Iran’s “right” to nuclear power and that we’re ready to sit down and try to find a way forward with an illigitimate regime that responded to protests over its rigged election with mass arrests, beatings, hangings and torture, that was recently busted by the Israeli navy for sending a cargo ship stuffed beyond brimming with rockets, grenades and rifles to Hezbollah, and that was recently found to have experimented with advanced nuclear warhead design, among other antics for which it’s noted.
This is utter madness.
A previously secret IAEA dossier says that Iran has tested an advanced nuclear warhead design.
Put this in the context of the items mentioned in my post from earlier today – the seized cargo ship, the demonstrators in Tehran, brave and clear-headed enough, despite gassings, beatings and torture, to let the world know that they know that TCM is choosing the side of evil in this great face-off, daring him to grow a pair, grow a heart, change sides, support good, support freedom.
TCM won’t do it. The IAEA won’t do it. The UN Security Council won’t do it. Who will defeat this darkness?
. . . such as Iran’s role in world trouble-making, Hizbollah’s utter lack of interest in anything resembling peace, and the moral rottenness of the UN.
A cargo ship packed to the hilt with weapons and ammunition supplied by Iran and headed for Lebanon was seized Wednesday by the Israeli navy. So much for the premise of the Goldstone report.
On a similar note, on the sidelines of the official Iranian 30th anniversary celebrations of the taking of US hostages, a brave group of anti-regime demonstrators spoke out. One of their chants takes its cue from the W Doctrine. Interesting sidenote: this story has a flying-donkeys aspect, in that the only MSM outlet to cover it was NBC News. Gotta give credit where it’s due.
UPDATE: It appears TCM has sent a clear signal to those demonstrators as to where he stands.
UPDATE II: Powerline has the video of the Israeli SEALs boarding the ship, and later having a look at the cornucopia of rockets, grenades and rifles.
. . . is playing the EU, the IAEA, the US, and the civilized world generally for a gaggle of fools.
TCM’s way of commemorating the 1983 attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut.