Three recent events make plain the state of affairs with dictatorial Iran. The first event was Iranian disclosure that negotiations with Britain, France and Germany over the last year — which effectively ended nine days ago when Tehran rejected the European trio's commodity-studded appeal to halt nuclear development — were a pleasant way to pass the time as enrichment centrifuges spun. The second was a public divergence between the United States and Europe on remedies; the trio referred Iran not to the United Nations Security Council but to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA scolded Iran and Iran laughed it off; President Bush, on the assumption that Tehran is racing to build an atomic bomb, reserved Washington's right to military action and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder abnegated Berlin's, alleging that "It doesn't work." The third event provided evidence for charges of sedition that had been leveled, first by Washington and then Baghdad, at Tehran for many months: weapons tailored for use by terrorists were seized on their way from Iran to Iraq.
Europe's failure marks two-and-a-half years lost in diplomatic engagements since Iran's nuclear activities were exposed by dissidents. Round and round has the elder West gone, accepting whatever dialogue or inspections Tehran would permit, and taking denials and rebuffs straight-faced before returning for another conference — a process first sharing the plodding iteration and now the nonsensicality of children's rhyme "Hickory, Dickory, Dock."
In April, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that the White House would wait until summer to render verdict — probably assuming that the Bush administration would know by then if negotiations had foundered, which they have.
Where to, now? There is a thrust-and-parry over what is and what can be done.
How do we know Iran is going to weaponize? Even failing common sense — tyranny seeks power, always — indications of uranium suitable only for bombs were discovered by the IAEA in August of 2003 and June of 2004.
How can military action be contemplated? Iran's mullahs obviously want nothing the Europeans will give them in exchange for cessation of research, the United Nations Oil-for-Food program demonstrates the futility of sanctions as more than means, and despite strategic doubts the only two choices left are the force of arms and shrugging one's shoulders.
What of reports placing Iranian nukes a decade away? First, Iran has never ended its war against we, the "Great Satan," and with its claws in southern Iraq is responsible for the death of American and Allied soldiers, here and now. Second, never in modern times has a fully emerged threat been dealt with as it might have been preemptively. And nukes, each advancement more irreversible than the last, are forever — see Russia and North Korea.
What about Iranian dissidents? There is the claim that military action will harm the sizable and aggressive democracy movement within Iran. But military action need not be incompatible with equipping an armed revolution. And, unfortunately, in the four years since Iranian democrats held candlelight vigils for victims of the September 11th attacks, insisting that Iranian independence come only from within not only smacks of pride but, for the security of the free world, offers diminishing returns.
A dictatorship with armies of terrorists and streets full of discontents wants to arm itself with nuclear weapons. So why wait?
Opponents of diplomatic and military assertion — the relativist left and some pragmatists and parochialists at center and center-right — have long been of the opinion that despot corners of the world were and are better left alone, that imposition amounts to meddling and meddling leads to unforeseen consequences that soon outnumber benefits. What have three years of American-led assertion wrought? The Near East's democratic watershed undermines the argument for disengagement but the broader left defends by pointing to emergent phenomena that, naturally, increase with time and depth of foreign involvement. If Saddam Hussein or the Taliban had not been deposed, go a great many claims, status quo x would not have been desirable but certainly more desirable than our substitution of y, since z appeared because of it. Whether certain instances of z are truly deleterious or more than temporary setbacks is debatable. In that debate, however, is the risk of mistaking ambivalence for prudence.
According to the press overseas, Europe believes it is mediating a petty dispute between Tehran and Washington. Gerhard Schroeder, discarding a military prerogative, bespoke a Europe prepared to appease and an Iran that will harness the atom. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac have not gone quite as far in acquiescence, but are not nearly close enough to President Bush for an impression that Iran cannot simply fool around until its research is complete.
One must be discerning with references to the Third Reich. But those who would charge excessive citation would deprive us of the finest in appeasement's case history, both disastrous and wholly avoidable.
William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich narrates Adolf Hitler's first three territorial acquisitions: the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. Though a military incursion won the Rhineland, and the specter of mobilized Wehrmacht divisions were central to taking Austria by browbeaten plebiscite and Czechoslovakia by the Munich Agreement, the German dictator — confident during his first conquest but hysterical at moments of uncertainty during his second and third — was able to draw his demands, one by one, from Britain and France, whose governments were to abrogate treaties and deliver up millions, all to make unnecessary an armed confrontation.
Hitler's military could only bluff on the borders of Austria and Czechoslovakia; the combined powers opposite the Nazi regime were superior in every calculation. Had free Europe risen to meet Germany in the Rhineland, the assemblage would have crushed the Third Reich like an eggshell. Relativist quarters, the dysfunctional anti-nationalists and the solipsists, would have been smaller in number and lesser in influence; and the market for Nazi sympathy tiny compared to the solidarity racket enjoyed by today's terrorists and dictators. But it is difficult to see how a majority of English and French could not have puzzled over the brief armed conflict, wondering why men lost their lives to punish an Austrian whose German transmutation — vilely fascist as it was — expressed, following a strictly empirical military accounting prior to 1939, no threat to the Continent.
Such is the alloyed value of averting catastrophe: the insouciant scoff at what might have come. Unfortunately, Europe appears ready to perform an encore. So do those who trust dictators over elected statesmen. In judging Iran bilaterally or through the Security Council, the president can expect no help from the American left. The Democratic Party has invested much in the idea that danger seems to exist only in Afghanistan, except where terrorists sprout from the seeds of Western transgression — be it Baghdad or London. Tehran, or for that matter Damascus, are off-limits to consideration.
Now whether it is a desire, in the left's stifling contempt for Mr. Bush, to say Blue when he says Red; or sincere befuddlement with geography and polity, and those relationships to Islamist terrorism; the White House has an opposition party in a discomfiting truest sense of the phrase. Already one can read adjectives "bogus" and "false" attached to what leftists expect will be President Bush's justification for any action taken against Iran. That Saddam Hussein, according to the final report of Iraqi Survey Group head Charles Duelfer, was waiting for the death of sanctions he had spent half a decade arsenicating, that "Dispensing with WMD was a tactical retreat in [Hussein's] ongoing struggle," is not enough for the left. No, no help from the opposition.
Particular methods for punishing Iran — Deposition? Strategic elimination? Destablization? — are for the White House to decide. The public will be told and public debate will begin. President Bush should simply prepare to defeat the left in that debate as he did before authorizing the liberation of Iraq.
When he does, he may be alone. But he'll find himself, historically, in better company.