Nuclear Iran and How To Stop It

In an article by Victor Davis Hanson, he gives six good reasons why the U.S. should stop Iran's nuclear program and why it has a moral obligation to the rest of the world to do so, and he offers ten things the West can do to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear capability.

Hanson describes the canny nature of Iran's leader, Ahmadinegad (the man in the photo above), who understands the internal conflict of western nations, and I thought this is the most interesting part of the article: Ahmadinegad's ability to manipulate the West's guilt.

Ahmadinegad knows, for example, that many educated people in the West go out of their way to avoid thinking their own culture is better than anyone else's, and Ahmadinegad uses this understanding in his rhetoric to the West. Hanson writes:

Moreover, he knows how Western relativism works. Who is to say what are facts or what is true, given the tendency of the powerful to “construct” their own narratives and call the result “history”? So he says that the Holocaust was exaggerated, or perhaps even fabricated, as mere jails became “death camps” through a trick of language in order to persecute the poor Palestinians. We laugh at all this as absurd. We should not.

Money, oil and threats have gotten the Iranian theocrats to the very threshold of a nuclear arsenal. Their uncanny diagnosis of Western malaise has now convinced them that they can carefully fabricate a Holocaust-free reality in which Muslims are the victims and Jews the aggressors, setting the stage for Ahmadinejad’s “righteously” aggrieved Iran, after “hundreds of years of war,” to set things right.

In the midst of all this passive-aggressive noisemaking, the Iranian government pushes insidiously forward with nuclear development — perhaps pausing when it has gone too far in order to allow some negotiations, but then getting right back at it. Nuclear acquisition for Ahmadinejad is a win/win proposition. If he obtains nuclear weapons and restores lost Persian grandeur, it will remind a restless Iranian populace how the theocrats are nationalists after all, not just pan-Islamic provocateurs. And a nuclear Iran could create all sorts of mini-crises in the region in order to spike oil prices, given world demand for oil.

Read the whole article here: Nuclear Iran?

What can you do about Iran? What can you do about terrorism? You can start here. And let us know what you come up with.