Alan Caruba / Apr 22, 2002
Here’s what I don’t understand. I have recently finished reading Congressman Curt Weldon’s book, “Countdown to Terror”, Ilan Berman’s book “Tehran Rising: Iran’s Challenge to the United States”, and Kenneth R. Timmerman’s “Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran.”

Timmerman’s book cites each exact day that the ayatollahs got together to plot their Islamic conquest of the world, moving their plans one step down the road. Berman’s book is a more general analysis, but equally specific when it needs to be, and Weldon’s book warns that these murderous, power-crazed men who take their orders from Allah are deadly serious, repeatedly saying they hate both Israel and the United States, and apparently having few reservations about trying to destroy either or both of us.

Apparently, the leaders of the United States have known for many years that when the leaders of the Islamic Republic get up every morning and say, “Death to the Great Satan, America”, they really mean it. And they add, “Death to the Little Satan, Israel.”

According to these books ever since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 and despite the 1980’s war with Iraq, the handful of ayatollahs who run Iran have lived for no other reason than to spread the domination of Islam throughout the entire world, to fund and control a network of terrorist organizations to do their dirty work, and to acquire nuclear weapons. These guys may be certifiable nuts, but they have achieved this.

What I can’t understand is, how the billions we spend to have the CIA and other agencies collect all that great intelligence data about what the ayatollahs, al Qaeda, and other nasty people are planning apparently has either failed to connect the dots or was ignored when they did!

In 1998 the CIA was surprised to discover that both India and Pakistan had acquired “nukes” as well. Earlier, the 1994 Clinton administration’s “Agreed Framework” with North Korea, based on the belief that you could actually do a deal with pathological lying communist gangsters, also resulted in their predictable capability to not only make nukes, but to deliver them via long-range missiles.

Successive US administrations have known that Iran has been behind the many attacks on US embassies and armed forces, from Lebanon to Beirut to Baghdad, yet have said little or nothing until President Bush named Iran as one of the “axis of evil” nations.

For twenty years Iran lied, cheated, and did everything else to achieve the ability to make nuclear warheads and the missiles to transmit them, and the best the US could do was complain to the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency which was enabling Iran every step of the way. In this effort, France, Germany, Russia, China, Pakistan, and North Korea were among the many nations that could not wait to provide blueprints and the machinery to produce a nuclear Apocalypse. It was an open secret.

Prior to World War II, there was a spate of books by journalists based in Germany and Europe who essentially said Hitler is a very bad person and Germany is getting ready to start another war. They were right. At the time, however, Americans most definitely did not want to participate in a second war in Europe. It required all the guile that Franklin D. Roosevelt possessed to provide help to the British after they were attacked and he had to wait until Pearl Harbor before Americans decided that enough was enough.

One would think that September 11, 2001 was enough, but its memory has faded so swiftly that a lot of Americans are mad at President Bush for putting our troops in harm’s way in places most could not find on the map. They are nasty, messy little countries filled with people who dislike each other intensely.

In Iraq, we want them to play nice, stop shooting at our soldiers, stop killing each other, and vote like we do. For a while we thought they would, but for now our best hope is that we can avoid a civil war in Iraq, having to choose sides if it happens, and most importantly not lose our strategic military position there. The problem, however, is that we need far more troops to achieve that goal. And we would need an even larger armed force to invade Iran.

The White House, members of Congress, the CIA, et cetera, all know that the real problem is Iran and always has been. Saddam Hussein provided the reason for the US invasion whose strategic purpose was to create a base for our troops if and when we had to support either a popular uprising in Iran or disable—via another preemptive war—as much of its nuclear and other WMD capacity as possible.

Indeed, what Saddam taught everyone in the region was, you don’t go up against the United States unless you have nuclear weapons.

The ayatollahs—insanely determined to destroy Israel—sought to achieve “parity” with Israel’s nuclear capabilities. They continue to arming Syria and, in Lebanon and Gaza, its proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas. Iran was forever shipping shiploads of arms to the Palestinians.

The ayatollahs also know that launching a nuclear missile from a ship off the coast of the US has already been “gamed” in the Pentagon. And the result was that virtually nothing could be done to prevent it.

You too can read these books and learn everything ghastly thing that the White House, State Department, Department of Defense, and the entire US intelligence community knows.

Ironically, the greatest asset the United States has going for it are the Iranian people who, time and again, have gone into the streets to protest the ayatollahs. They are literally pro-American! We have to ramp up our efforts to reach out to them.

If you thought that Iraq needed a regime change, an Iran with nuclear weapons capability should move to the top of the list of immediate foreign policy priorities.

Alan Caruba writes a weekly column, “Warning Signs”, posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, www.anxietycenter.com.

© Alan Caruba, September 2005

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