Sarah on the Iranian threat:

Senator McCain has made a solemn commitment that I strongly endorse: Never again will we risk another Holocaust. And this is not a wish, a request, or a plea to Israel's enemies. This is a promise that the United States and Israel will honor, against any enemy who cares to test us. It is John McCain's promise and it is my promise.

As Sandra Bernhard would say: shiksa.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 01:45 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Perhaps you need to be more modest yourselves. Just a thought.

A reminder: Many women continue to be arrested in Iran for violations of the strict dress code, and it doesn't always turn into a riot, as it did this time. The difference is that when it does, we can find out about it, due to cell phone videos and blogging.

The full story is here at PJ Media, including translations of what the crowd is chanting on the video.

The situation in Iran is untenable.

Via Insty.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 09:44 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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Maybe the folks at the NIE aren't just on crack, as one might suppose from the wild fluctuations in their assessments:

a full two years after Iran supposedly called a halt to its nuclear program, the intelligence community was still as sure as it ever is about anything that Iran was determined to build a nuclear arsenal. Why then should we believe it when it now tells us, and with the same “high confidence,” that Iran had already called a halt to its nuclear-weapons program in 2003? Similarly with the intelligence community’s reversal on the effectiveness of international pressure. In 2005, the NIE was highly confident that international pressure had not lessened Iran’s determination to develop nuclear weapons, and yet now, in 2007, the intelligence community is just as confident that international pressure had already done the trick by 2003.

It is worth remembering that in 2002, one of the conclusions offered by the NIE, also with “high confidence,” was that “Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.” And another conclusion, offered with high confidence too, was that “Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material.”

I must confess to suspecting that the intelligence community, having been excoriated for supporting the then universal belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, is now bending over backward to counter what has up to now been a similarly universal view (including as is evident from the 2005 NIE, within the intelligence community itself) that Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons. I also suspect that, having been excoriated as well for minimizing the time it would take Saddam to add nuclear weapons to his arsenal, the intelligence community is now bending over backward to maximize the time it will take Iran to reach the same goal.

But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations. As the intelligence community must know, if he were to do so, it would be as a last resort, only after it had become undeniable that neither negotiations nor sanctions could prevent Iran from getting the bomb, and only after being convinced that it was very close to succeeding. How better, then, to stop Bush in his tracks than by telling him and the world that such pressures have already been effective and that keeping them up could well bring about “a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program”—especially if the negotiations and sanctions were combined with a goodly dose of appeasement or, in the NIE’s own euphemistic formulation, “with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways.”

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:43 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Did we "reward piracy"? Well, probably. This time.

And the fact that the EU and the UN are useless is hardly news.

It's just that I choose to believe that the grownups (the U.S., the Brits, the Australians) have long-term intentions beyond letting legitimate Iranian hostages go.

As I've said before, capturing the British sailors was an act of war. It's just that the war itself may be time-released.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:03 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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1 The problem with a time-released response is that, not unlike WWII, it allows the enemy ample time to aggregate weapons and political power to blunt or depreciate the actual attack. Had we intervened and stopped Hitler as he was moving his army into the Rhineland it's at least possible that the war might have been averted. The difference can be measured in about 40 million lives. It is estimated that Iran will have a nuclear weapon within two years and should the Democrats win the White House we can be assured they will engage them and the other barbaric regime--Syria--in a protracted and wholly impotent series of "negotiations." For an apt retort to the left, please see my post "Speaker Pelosi's 'Peace in Our Time,' at: www.clearcommentary.com Philip Mella ClearCommentary.com

Posted by: Philip Mella at April 07, 2007 11:50 AM (EEIw3)

2 Now if the Iranians had appologized and said that it was thier mistake, for some of these right wing idiots that would be all the more reason to go to war! My question is what were the Brits doing so close to the border without ample protection. Its like when you are about to have sex and say that you have no intention of penetration, just wanna hang close to that area, without any accidental penetration and no condom

Posted by: azmat hussain at April 09, 2007 07:17 PM (mdszq)

3 No. Apologies are not an act of war. Kidnappings are. Hm. How would a guy feel if he got naked with a girl, didn't penetrate her, didn't even ejaculate, and then was informed later on that he'd gotten VD and she was pregnant? It seems to me that he might be a bit put-out by such a thing.

Posted by: Attila Girl at April 09, 2007 07:37 PM (6C0F9)

4 That is the point risky behavior can get you into trouble. Stay far away, don't get naked and you are OK!

Posted by: Azmat Hussain at April 10, 2007 08:08 PM (mdszq)

5 So the Western world should just tiptoe around the Iranians, so as not to tempt fate? No, Az: they should tiptoe around us. We've been tiptoeing since the 1970s, and all it's gotten us has been more trouble.

Posted by: Attila Girl at April 10, 2007 08:21 PM (uSWaZ)

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Thank God.

One can only suspect what's going on beneath the surface, here: either the Brits/Americans quietly issued an ultimatum, or the entire situation was manufactured within Iran and reflects its own turmoil.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 04:56 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Captain Ed has a nice summary about some of the ways the U.S. has been quietly reducing the amount of capital available in Iran—both for improving oil-industry infrastructure and for funding terrorism.

It helps to answer the question, "what are we doing about these guys?"

A fair amount, it turns out.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 04:25 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Via James Joyner, who remarks

It would be harder for Iran to be much more isolated in the international community, as even the Russians have backed away from them in recent months. Still, sending such a strong signal that they are not responsible, rational actors makes no sense to me. Their position should be to try to force the world to take them seriously as a regional power, not to reinforce their status as a rogue state.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 04:07 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I don't think it applies in the Middle East.

Haven't we been down this road with Iran before?

Via Insty.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 10:23 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Over at Protein Wisdom, The Sanity Inspector slams Lisa Margonelli's recent statements on NPR, comparing her perceptions of Iran to those harbored about Soviet Russia by its apologists in the early years of the Cold War.

The analogy that crosses my mind is the obvious one, though: Nazi Germany. Too few people read Mein Kampf, and among those who did, too few regarded it as possible that Hitler actually meant what he said.

I'm all for understanding the complex motives behind human interactions, but here is also something to be said for taking the leaders of nations at their word when they speak of their overarching geopolitical goals.

And I remain skeptical of those who assure me that they know what ordinary Iranians think and feel: I heard too much of that with Iraq, from people who had vested interests in believing that the Iraqi-on-the-street would be offended—offended!—if we dared to depose Saddam.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 02:24 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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It's, like, a cauldron of sectarian violence. Had you noticed?

Posted by: Attila Girl at 02:20 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Jules Crittenden knows it. I know it, too.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 06:17 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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. . . Maynard discusses the possibility of a nuclear exchange in the Middle East. It isn't a cheerful prospect.

Of course, I have no interest in watching Israel lie down and die, or the Western World being subject to nuclear blackmail (beyond what Kim Jong Il has already attempted).

Posted by: Attila Girl at 12:15 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Sorry; bad joke. But the fact that it dates back to the 1970s is telling.

Melanie Phillips makes the case for taking the war to the mullahs, and otherwise trying to win the one we're fighting in Iraq.

Via Insty.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 07:36 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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The high winds have subsided, and the sky is blue, with fluffy white clouds. I'm thinking this would be a great time to start drilling ANWR.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 03:02 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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David Zucker takes it on here. James Baker doesn't come off too well.

Via Glenn.

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Via Insty, Austin Bay discusses the possibility that Iran already has nuclear weapons, and concludes that it's damned unlikely; he points out that there are other reasons the U.S. appears so oddly passive right now.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 09:37 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Can't someone just see to it that Ahmadinejad gets laid sometime between now and the 11th of next month? I suspect that would help enormously.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 01:56 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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Let's all just step back, shall we?

If I called Secretary Rice to ask her what the game plan is, would she tell me? She shouldn't, of course.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 03:30 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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but your eyes say military action.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:53 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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This would be the perfect time to bomb Iran back to the pre-nuclear age; they won't be expecting it just now.

Love,

Joy

Would everyone stop looking at me like that?

Posted by: Attila Girl at 02:04 PM | Comments (18) | Add Comment
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