A bit of optimism on Iran
The last bit of news from Iran is the unsurprising but still significant retreat of Moqtada al Sadr to his safe haven across the border, where the mullahs will feed him, at least for a while. For those who have convinced themselves that Moqtada is primarily an Iraqi patriot, rather than an Iranian agent, this ignominious abandonment of his troops should–although it won’t–peel the scales from their eyes.
And it also underlines the nervousness in Tehran. Khamenei probably knows he’s going to die without any of the great victories he has pursued: Lebanese democracy has not yielded, there is no Islamic Republic in Iraq, and Israel is still there. Indeed, the small adjustment to our behavior in Iraq–a handful of arrests of Iranians–must send chills through his malignant body, since it shatters the great lie in which he and his followers had so passionately believed: that America has no stomach for war, and will break and run when attacked systematically.
All this adds to the intensity of the War of the Persian Succession, and effectively creates a power vacuum atop the Islamic Republic of Iran…
But the really big Iranian news came from Europe with the announcement that the EU’s experts have concluded that they have totally failed to deter the Iranians’ nuclear-weapons program. “At some stage we must expect that Iran will acquire the capacity to enrich uranium on the scale required for a weapons program,” according to an internal EU document…The EU, along with the U.S., have offered all manner of seductive goodies to the mullahs, but it didn’t work, as they surely knew from the beginning. Everybody knew.
Or did they? One has to wonder whether the president and the secretary of State knew it would fail. They certainly gave it unrestrained rhetorical support. If you buy the theory that W’s foreign policy is simply the application of winning poker to geopolitics, then you will think that, just as in the run-up to Iraq, he simply out waited the Europeans…This would also explain the timing of our newfound toughness.
We will be very interested to learn in some future years what steps the administration has been taking with regard to Iran over the last half decade. Would you be surprised to learn that there has been something of a clandestine war going on in the last five years — including taking steps to cripple the Iranian oil industry and eliminate certain particularly important men? Would it be surprising in part because such steps would appear to have been both secret and competent?