Iran's At War With Us (Imagine That!)

General David Petraeus has bluntly accused Iran of attacking the “Green Zone” in Baghdad (where our brave diplomats sit, and send emails to one another to determine what’s happening in Iraq). He says that the Quds Force arms, and trains, those who launched the rockets.

The estimable Max Boot takes note of this development over at “Contentions,” and I thought I’d point out that this is old news to us. So I sent a comment to him:

This attack is nothing new, although the forceful words of General Petraeus–which go hand in hand with General Odierno’s similar remarks a couple of weeks ago–suggest that our military leaders are now demanding a serious policy. Good luck to them! As I have written in “The Iranian Time Bomb,” Iran has been at war with us for nearly thirty years, and yet no president, of either party, has seen fit to respond effectively. Every president has negotiated with the mullahs in the hope of striking some “grand bargain.” Indeed, it’s the Bush/Rice policy today.

It is not a question of one president or another, or one party or the other. There seems to be some sort of delusional alternative universe, into which our leaders invariably enter. And it is all the more baffling because our values, our interests, and the conditions within Iran, suggest that support for democratic revolution is quite likely to succeed

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My friend Norman Podhoretz, the savant at Commentary, wants to unleash a military attack against Iran, and he believes that Bush will do this before leaving office. I think he’s wrong, with the caveat that if Iran is caught doing something really really dreadful to Americans, even Secretary Rice may have to go along with a violent response. I doubt this attack on the “Green Zone” is sufficiently egregious, but I fear that the mullahs are so insecure that they may well believe that a war with the United States will strengthen their domestic and regional position. Yes, they’re that crazy; and war with us plays into the lunatic scenario about the return of the 12th Imam, a belief shared by several of the leading tyrants in Tehran.

And yet no senior policy maker in any Western capital seems willing to unleash the most lethal weapon aimed at the mullahs: the Iranian people, who are awaiting our oft-promised support. So far that support has been merely rhetorical. But I still think that the Iranian Revolution is bubbling just below the surface, and I think it’s pretty obvious that the mullahs agree. Dare we say “Faster, Please!”?