Hugh Hewitt - in the first segment, some very serious subjects. Iran, you wrote a piece in the City Journal called Facing Down Iran. Once in a while, you hit a nerve. I sense this is one of your pieces that really did that.
Mark Steyn: Well, I think it did. I really put the question of Iran's nukes in the context of a consistent, 27 year pattern of behavior. You know, when the Ayatollah Khomeini took power, he explicitly committed himself to act on behalf of Muslims all over the world. In other words, he doesn't regard himself, he didn't regard himself as a traditional leader of a country. The leader of Belgium concerns himself with Belgian affairs. The leader of New Zealand concerns himself with New Zealand affairs. But the Ayatollah specifically announced he was going to act extra-territorially, and he did. What was the very first thing that happened? He took control of the U.S. Embassy, and held American hostages for over a year, and he got away with it. And he got away with the death threat on Salman Rushdie, too. And he got away with all threse extra-territorial acts, and that's what it really boils down to. You know, when I heard these intelligence experts earlier today saying that Iran's 10 years away from the bomb, well, for a start, I think they're wrong, and I think anyone who pays attention to so-called U.S. intelligence experts at this stage has only themselves to blame. But I would say the point is, it's not the weapons. It's that once a state starts, announces it wants weapons, and then starts explicitly divulging what it wants them for, i.e. to wipe Israel off the map and do all kinds of other things, you take them at their word, and you act then. It's not about the weapons, it's about the regime.
HH: Mark Steyn, also with regards to the five to ten, or fifteen years that comes up, I had an e-mailer pose what I thought was an excellent question. When the United States in 1941, with all of its industrial base, turned its attention to developing an atomic device, it was able to successfully do so in four years. Now the technology is much easier to produce. The industrial base of Iran equivalent to that of the United States in 1941. Why does anyone think it's going to take them five more years?
MS: Yes, I think that's completely ridiculous. As you say, when these things didn't exist, the United States was able to go from start to finish in a very short period of time. Now, they're everywhere. You know, this...Pakistan's nuclear program was basically smuggled out of the Netherlands by one guy, A.Q. Khan, who happened to be working at a couple of facilities in the Netherlands, and on the Dutch/German border, and smuggled out enough to know for Pakistan to get their own bomb. He since disseminated it around the Muslim world. It's ludicrous to think that it's ten years for a sophisticated, advanced, developed country that wants these things very badly. It's ludicrous to think it's going to be like that. And the point is, if preemption means anything, it means that you take a guy at his word. This is how corrupted the whole debate's become in the United States. Because we didn't find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, supposedly that makes the administration a bunch of liars. The point is, Saddam behaved as if he had those weapons. Iran is behaving as if it wants to use those weapons, and we should take them at their word.
HH: I want to go back to a paragraph in the City Journal piece, which caught me short, because I hadn't considered it yet. "Why blow up a Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires? Because it's there. Unlike the Iranian infiltration into Bosnia and Croatia, which helped to radicalize not just the local population, but Muslim supporters from Britain and West Europe, the random slaughter in the Argentine has no strategic value except as a demonstration of muscle and reach." And you're right, Mark Steyn. That one is always kind of put off in the category of we can't figure that out, so we won't attach to it significance. But of course, it has the significance of demonstrating whenever and wherever they want.
MS: Exactly, and they smuggled the bomber for that job in through that, what they call the tri-border region in South America, that Paraguay/Argentina/Brazil border area that's very murky, and is becoming, in fact, like the tribal areas on the Pakistan/Afghan border. Now would it have been any more difficult to smuggle a dirty nuke through that porous tri-border area? And if they had a dirty nuke, and they wanted to give it to one of their client groups, becuase Iran are the people who basically put Hezbollah, and to a certain extent, Hamas, in the big time. Would they have any qualms about doing it? No. Guys got up in 1994, in Buenos Aires, and went to a Jewish community center, and they got blown apart, because former Iranian government ministers...we're not talking about sort of guys, six degrees of separation here. We're talking about a former education minister and a former speaker of the Iranian parliament. I mean, this is a regime explicitly committed to worldwide terror.
HH: Let's talk about the objections made to preemptive action, Mark Steyn. First, the United States military cannot accomplish the mission, the critics say. Your reaction?
MS: Well, I do think if you are talking about a ground invasion, that there is some truth in that. But the fact of the matter is that I do believe that if it were to be a matter of air strikes, or even a full-scale Naval blockade, and certain other activities, that the military is capable of doing that. And if it's not, incidentally, if it's not capable...I mean, this barely qualifies as the old thing they used to talk about in the Cold War, the two front war. I mean, these are basically, if they are two fronts, they're adjoining fronts in Iraq and Iran. If there were any truth to that, that the predominant hyper-power of the age cannot act against two neighboring countries simultaneously, then that is a very serious issue. I don't believe it's the case.
HH: Objections two and three. Striking Iran will cause Iran to strike against our troops in Iraq, and an attack on Iran will unleash Iranian-sponsored terrorism around the world.
MS: Well, you know, Iran is, between itself and its client state, which is Syria, is doing as much as it can in Iraq right now. And if it could do more, it would be doing more. So it's basically doing as much as it can in Iraq right now. I don't believe it would be doing any more, regardless...I think they'd be more upset about it, because you'd be hitting them back where it hurts. And I think that's really the lesson here. We come back all the time to this strong horse/weak horse thing, that if we keep coming up with excuses about why we can't do things, then we deserve to lose. And the fact of the matter that this whole issue is always presented in terms of things we can't do. We have to find ways to be able to do them, because otherwise, they're going to get the run of the planet.
HH: And finally, the objection America's position in the world will crumble if we attack Iran, and besides, there are other ways of deterring this nuclear program?
MS: Well, you know, I don't think there are serious ways of deterring it, if you mean going through the United Nations, because essentially, Iran has two votes on the U.N. Security Council who would entertain at the very most, ineffectual sanctions that would hurt the people imposing the sanctions more than Iran. Russia and China are not going to agree to any diplomatic action that has any real meaning. So in a sense, if you want to go the boring old ineffectual, transnational route, at the best, you'll get some feeble trade sanctions that will, so that the regime will be able to dance around the way Saddam did with the Oil For Food thing.
HH: And now, what about the argument, Mary Steyn, that we can knock it down, but they'll rebuild it?
MS: Well, you know, that may well be true. I think we have to accept the fact that nukes have gone freelance, that basically, there's going to be a lot more nuclear powers around the world in ten, fifteen years time than there are now. And that's why it's important not to put it in non-proliferation terms. You know, the problem with the Non-Proliferation Treaty is that it treats Iran the same way it treats New Zealand. I wouldn't sleep more uneasily in my bed at night if New Zealand had announced that it had acquired nuclear weapons. But I would if Iran has, and so we have to stop talking about it in terms of proliferation, and address it in terms of those regimes who simply cannot be allowed to be nuclear powers. And if that means you have to bomb the facilities every five years, or every two years, then you have to be prepared to do that. But even if there were to be another fifteen nuclear powers by the year 2015, Iran should not be one of them.
radioblogger.com |
