Did you hear the one about Mohamed ElBaradei the director general of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)? He wins the Nobel Peace Prize for his “efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way,” then in 2008 he threatens to resign his position if a military strike against Iran happens because “it would turn the Middle East region into a ball of fire.”
Not funny? Come on, don’t you get it?
Here you have an Egyptian lawyer in charge of the IAEA since 1997 being credited with preventing nuclear proliferation. But the Israeli Air Force did more on September 6, 2007 to prevent the military use of nuclear weapons by rogue nations than most any nation or UN affiliate since 1981.
In 1981, Israel took out Hussein’s French-built nuclear reactor in Baghdad. Since no other country had sufficient motivation to stop or deter Hussein, the Israeli’s did the job themselves. And it worked. Secretary of State Alexander Haig told President Reagan, “Before this is over, we’ll be on our knees thanking God Israel did what it did.” Over a decade later, Secretary of Defense Cheney referenced the 1981 attack when he told the Israeli ambassador to the US, “If it weren’t for you, Desert Storm wouldn’t have been a success.”
Now do you remember what happened on September 6, 2007? Yes, that was when Israel took-out Bashar al-Assad’s secret nuclear reactor in Syria. Israel’s motivation was probably similar to what they had in 1981. While we haven’t heard any public statements similar to Haig’s comment, I’d think somebody, somewhere must have said it.
In 2008, ABC news reported that Assad’s terminated Syrian reactor was strikingly similar to North Korea’s nuclear reactor in Yongbyon. North Korea? Do they have nukes?
Yes, their nuclear program dates back to the 1960s. The Clinton administration tried several appeasing techniques starting in 1994 to get Kim Jong-il’s newly-inherited regime to abandon the long-running program. While Kim Jong-il freely took the bribes, ultimately funded by the American taxpayer, he never lived up to his word on the North Korean part of the agreement. In 2003 Kim Jung-il’s regime admitted the North Koreans possessed nuclear weapons and then proved it with a successful test on October 16, 2006. The North Koreans apparently got busy exporting their proven nuclear weapons capability to Syria.
Diplomacy didn’t work. Sanctions didn’t work. Appeasement didn’t work. The UN didn’t work at all.
Lesson learned?
For several years, we’ve been listening to Iranian threats to blow Israel off the map. Meanwhile, plentiful evidence has piled up that Iran has been supplying the terrorists in their illegal war against the democratically-elected government of Iraq and its people.
While Israel is politically prevented from helping fight global terrorists operating within sovereign nations around them, they do have a pretty well proven record for doing something if they believe they are about to be blown off the map.
The charter members of the axis of evil identified in the 2002 State of the Union Address, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, all made decisions to continue to defy post-911 America and the rest of civilization. Deterrence failed.
Iraq insisted upon forced regime change before it would change its way. North Korea flaunts their nuclear weapons program while their people starve and their cousins to the south prosper greatly. Iran defiantly is clinging to its threat to destroy Israel, supplying the terrorists invaders in Iraq, and desperately trying to get their nukes developed before it is too late.
But “too late” is defined by their nuclear weapons development progress. The sands of the hour-glass fall to obscurity as their program approaches completion. It is much like they are playing Russian roulette with the tactic of squeezing the rounds off as fast as possible in order to get the game over before they lose. It’s suicide.
The facts are simple:
1) Israel refuses to die.
2) Therefore they can not allow those who wish them dead to acquire the weapons that can kill them.
3) Therefore if the UN, or America, or any other nation or collection of nations does not want Israel to do the job themselves, they have to do or find somebody to do the job instead.
4) Or Iran has to change.
Iran needs to do a couple to things to rejoin the community of civilized nations. What they chose to do is totally up to them. But if Iran really wants not to be attacked, they need to completely abandon their nuclear weapons development program and then prove it to the world. And if Iran really really wants to end the Global War on Terrorism, they need to join the rest of the civilized nations in the war against global terrorists and then prove they have changed their ways.
A peace-starved world will not hold their past sins against them. If the Iranian did those two simple things, they would not be attacked. They would improve the life of their people. They would prosper like never before. They would even be considered heroes by many.
However, if Iran stays-the-course and doesn’t do those two things then ElBaradei’s opinion that “attacking Iran would be worse than anything else,” would be wrong. Not attacking would be much worse.
It just makes sense.