People have asked me, “What did you think of Norman Podhoretz’s piece in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday?” When I say “people,” I mean two people — which is enough for me to blog.
Norman says, as he has said before, that there is no deal to be had with the Iranian regime. If you want to stop them from acquiring the Bomb, you have to take military action against them. And the choice before us at this parlous pass is “conventional war now or nuclear war later.” (That is no choice at all, really: Conventional war is by far the preferable.)
Let me give you my sense (for what it’s worth). If we squeezed and harassed Iran at every possible turn, we could delay their acquisition of the Bomb — further delay it, I should say. We should do the equivalent of a full-court press, or a relentless and harassing defense. We should trip them up via every avenue available: economic, intelligence-related, and so on. In this way, we could buy more time, which might allow Iranians to effect regime change before D-Day (or A-Day, the “A” standing for “atomic”).
But I don’t know. Norman may well be right. Which would be unsurprising, given his record on issues foreign and domestic, political and cultural, since the 1960s.
P.S. One of the deepest stains on Barack Obama’s record is his essential ignoring of the “green movement” in Iran, which exploded on the streets in 2009. People chanted, “Obama, Obama! Either you’re with them [the regime] or you’re with us!” Our president seemed annoyed that the Iranians were disturbing his rapprochement with the regime.
Later, Natan Sharansky said that Obama committed “maybe one of the biggest betrayals of people’s freedom in modern history.” At the critical moment, “the leader of the Free World said, For us, the most important thing is engagement with the regime, so we don’t want a change of regime.”
Iranian civil society can take a sliver of comfort in this: Obama treats Cuba’s no better.
P.P.S. Maybe if Obama had understood the green movement to be an army of radical environmentalists? Opposing the Keystone XL pipeline or something?