Iran taunts the West and hurts its own cause Posted by: McQ
on Thursday, June 12, 2008
As an indicator of how amenable Iran is to sanctions and incentives (and negotiations), they've now taken to taunting the West (and especially the US):
Increasingly tough warnings from President Bush and his European allies have done nothing to temper Iran’s stance on its nuclear program, worsening the confrontation over what American officials and others suspect is a covert Iranian plan to build an atomic bomb.
In Germany for meetings with Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Bush emphasized again on Wednesday that “all options are on the table” in any response to what is suspected of being Iranian research into developing nuclear weapons. Those options would include the possibility of military force, he said.
Iran has, of course, rejected all entreaties to negotiate, scoffed at incentives and laughed at sanctions. In true little-dog-with-a-big-dog syndrome, Iran childishly taunts countries which, if they chose, could cause inestimable harm and damage to Iran.
Even as Mr. Bush won new support from the Europeans, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran responded by mocking attempts to rein in his country’s nuclear program, which Iran maintains is for peaceful development of nuclear energy. Mr. Ahmadinejad said in a televised speech in Iran that the West “cannot do anything” and singled out Mr. Bush as a lame duck who had failed at every attempt to hurt Iran.
“Bush’s time is up, and he was not able to harm even one centimeter of our land,” the state-run news agency, IRNA, quoted Mr. Ahmadinejad as saying.
And, as you might expect, such an attitude couple with Iran's intransigence is actually winning more Europeans over to the US side of the argument.
Mr. Bush won European support on Tuesday for consideration of additional sanctions, including restrictions on Iran’s banks, if the government rejects an incentive package intended to persuade Iranian leaders to suspend uranium enrichment.
The ability to essentially cut off Iranian banks from the world banking system is one of the most powerful tools that can be wielded by the West. It can, quickly, put Iran on dire financial and economic footing. And Iran's attitude toward the rest of the world's concerns is pushing those more reluctant to give their permission to such drastic sanctions toward doing exactly that.
Iran seems not to see the possibility of these new sanctions perhaps being more devastating to the regime than a military strike. They prefer, instead, to mock and taunt the US (and the Jewish entity) about such a strike being an impossibility:
The Iranians appear to believe that, should the crisis over the nuclear program deepen, rather than supporting Mr. Bush, his European allies would probably rein him in as well as the increasingly militant Israelis, who have raised the possibility of strikes on what they suspect are Iranian nuclear facilities.
“We do not think there is a chance for a military strike,” Iran’s foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, said Wednesday at a news conference in Paris. He dismissed the threat of an Israeli attack as “not serious.”
One can only hope the little dog keeps yapping as it is and finally convinces the rest of the world that it should be put on a leash. Isolating their banks by cutting them off from the rest of the financial world would definitely do that, and put one heck of a crimp in a very expensive nuclear program. It might also lead to what everyone would like to see - internal regime change.
Iran is not concerned about what the Europeans and the US are saying about sanctions. China and Russia will run interference for them and they know it. So the mullocracy can laugh at the threat of sanctions, just like they have for the past few years.
My sympathies are with the Iranian people. They are largely innocent and decent and deserving of a lot better than the mullahs and the little creep.
But on the other side of that coin is a terrible fact: In threatening to wipe another country off the face of the earth, Iran’s government makes Iran itself a good candidate for getting wiped off the face of the earth.
If there’s general agreement between the two major parties here now, and among our putative "allies," that we just can’t afford any more "nation building," given the complications of post-regime-change Iraq, maybe everyone can come to a quick consensus, in that case, on nation destroying.
Just what is it that you get, in this Brave New World, when you threaten to wipe another nation off the face of the earth? A negotiator who stops by the consulate in Geneva and says "maybe you don’t want to do that?"
How about just treating them like a sovereign country and taking them at their word, especially when they repeat themselves so often, and relieve them of the burden of existing?
I just keep my concern that Iran just might be pulling a fast one in order to make Israel and the US look bad. They know they would lose militarily. This taunting is almost inviting an attack, which if it came up empty would embarrass the US to a dire extent. We know they could be falsifying intel, so im very uneasy about attacks.
I would be perfectly happy to see the U.S. join Israel in shutting down anything that resembled nuclear infrastructure, but if the Iranians want the U.S. and Israel to go to that much trouble then I think that they should be over-accommodated, in the 10,000 percent range of overaccommodation.
With the current political atmosphere here in America (the elections, aka the silly season) I would again bet that the Iranians know they will not be attacked. So they can do what they want and say what they want. Well, short of actually setting off a nuke somewhere, like in Israel.
But that’s the problem with ignoring this problem because it’s an election year.
This is not just an Israeli problem; it’s an international problem, and as the leader of the coalition in Iraq, the U.S. is right in the middle of it.
It’s not an election year for our forces in the region. And when you have an enemy threatening to wipe another country off the face of the earth, and you’re in the middle of it, take the enemy at his word.
