A 20-Year-Old Puzzle: Have We Discovered what Iran is Really Up To? (Part Two of Two)

(Analyst's note:  Absolutely must read.  Please consider searching on "Huessy" to find part one.)


by Peter Huessy

Either a deal will be made with the “international community” to make Iran’s nuclear program transparent or that nation will face “crippling” sanctions. Which will it be? .... History does not appear to be on our side.

.... R. James Woolsey, the former Director of Central Intelligence said it best recently: “We will not, however clever our diplomacy, be able to stop the Iranian nuclear program with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in charge. The revolutionary guard is now effectively the governing organization in Iran, and they are theocratic, totalitarian, genocidal fanatics. It doesn’t matter if there’s a signed piece of paper promising this and that, and they have signing ceremonies and lots of celebrations. It won’t mean a thing,”

Do we wish to wait until those cemeteries and morgues, both outside and inside Iran, to which Eliot Cohen referred, are filled not with hundreds but with hundreds of thousands or millions of dead and maimed, or do we act now, to “provide for the common defense” as our Constitution requires? For too long we have relied upon wishful thinking and concessional unilateralism to curry favor with the Mullahs. We do not need to find a “smoking gun” among the nuclear facilities in Natanz or Qom – we already have it, in the very words of the Iranians themselves for the past thirty years. We ignore this at our peril.