All you have to connect are two dots to see that today’s terrorist carnage in Bombay is yet another wakeup call about the 100,000-fold danger of letting Iran get the nuclear bomb — let alone start turning out nuclear weapons on an industrial scale.
We now wait to learn what language(s) are spoken by the terrorists attacking Bombay; where they were trained, armed, and who dispatched them. But the horror of seeing the landmark Taj Mahal burn, of the grenades and gunfire, of counting the dead, of seeing India so bloodied at her main international crossroads — this is an attack not only on India, but on all civilized states. The demands for passports, and winnowing out of American and British citizens is a message that in particular ought to concentrate the minds of President Bush, President-elect Obama, and the fools in America’s “intelligence” community who produced last year’s National Intelligence Estimate implying there is no real urgency to stop Iran.
Diplomatic talks with the Iranians have been going on for years, courtesy of the feckless European Union. The only real squeeze has come from the U.S. Treasury, which, as noted on Pajamas by Matthias Kuntzel, faces such obstacles as gross disregard by many of our erstwhile allies.
Short of a military strike — which may ultimately and in the not-so-distant future be the only way — an idea for leverage on Iran, which President-elect Obama has endorsed, is to try pressure Iran’s gasoline suppliers into cutting off the sales to the mullahs. Here’s an article by one of my FDD colleagues, Orde Kittrie, on that approach. Here’s a piece from The Chicago Tribune, along similar lines. The clock is ticking.
Today, around family dinner tables, over turkey, in the comfort of a free country which has not suffered a major terrorist attack in more than seven years, we have so much to give thanks for. A happy Thanksgiving to all. Our hearts go out to the people of India.
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