Neutering An Ally - to death...

from Investor's Business Daily
Posted Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Middle East: The U.S. may be embracing a radical foreign-policy position fraught with danger for the whole world: the nonsensical notion that de-nuclearizing Israel will stop Iran.

According to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., we are no longer "in regime change mode" toward Iran.

The dirty little secret is that we never were. Years of opportunities to wage serious economic warfare against the Islamofascist regime in Tehran have been squandered.

Nor did the U.S. follow the advice outlined by Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute in his book, "The Iranian Time Bomb," and publicly aide Iran's many dissident leaders with material support like satellite phones, laptops and software to confound the regime's filtering of the Internet.

Ledeen wanted such items "distributed to the key groups: students, teachers . . . key religious leaders, both inside Iran and to their supporters outside."

Paired with pumping up the strike funds of worker organizations within Iran, such moves could have led to general strikes and mass demonstrations, possibly bringing down the mullahs' regime in the manner in which it was founded 30 years ago.

Finally, we have not taken military action against Iran's well-spread-out and fortified nuclear sites — a difficult task that isn't getting any easier with the passage of time.

Nicholas Burns, the third-ranking official in the State Department during the Bush administration, even unhelpfully told the world this week there was no "scenario where military force could actually fully stop" Iran's nuclear program.

It's in this highly troubling context that the U.S. seems to be saying, "Well, maybe if we have Israel get rid of nukes, Iran will do the same." By that thinking, World War II could have been avoided by our sinking the Pacific Fleet ourselves and saving Imperial Japan the trouble of traveling to Pearl Harbor.

An explosive report by Eli Lake in Wednesday's Washington Times suggests the Obama administration could seek linkage between Iran's nuclear ambitions and Israel's atomic arsenal and "expose and derail a 40-year-old secret U.S. agreement to shield Israel's nuclear weapons from international scrutiny," according to U.S. and Israeli officials.

On Tuesday, the administration's assistant secretary of state for verification and compliance, Rose Gottemoeller, called on Israel to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

The same Ms. Gottemoeller co-authored a paper in 2005 recommending an agreement in which Israel would move toward nuclear disarmament: Iran would abandon uranium enrichment, and other Mideast powers would scrap their chemical and biological warfare programs.

In pursuit of a "Mideast Nuclear-Free Zone" in which the world can live happily ever after, will the U.S. government now, in effect, echo the propaganda of Iranian officials — that no one should complain about Iran having nukes since Israel has them?

The open secret of Israel's nuclear deterrent has existed for more than 40 years. It has constituted a danger to no one — in fact, it has prevented full-scale conventional wars in the Middle East.

A nuclear-armed Iran, on the other hand, would mean weapons of mass destruction in the hands of jihadists who'd like to see a Tel Aviv, or a London, or a Washington, go up in a mushroom cloud.

Clearly, Israeli disarmament would only make such genocide likelier.
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