Israel and Iran

This is good news…White Sands Missile Test Phenomenal. What sort of missile, you might ask? It was a THAAD — Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile, an integral part of our evolving ICBM defense capability. Nice accompanying photo, too.

Further on Israel/Hamas/Hezbollah…which more correctly should be called Israel/US/Iran. Robert Tracinski, writing for Real Clear Politics in an essay titled “The War Comes to Us,” leads with:

If, in the face of repeated threats and provocation by an aggressive dictatorship, you refuse to go to war, the war will eventually come to you.

That's the meaning of Iran's de facto declaration of war against Israel--which is, ultimately, a new war Iran is waging against the US. Iran is so desperate for war with the West that it is bringing the war to us, openly and willfully initiating a regional conflict that may soon involve three of Iran's proxies--Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria--fighting against America's proxy, Israel.

The danger for us is that, in seeking to avoid an unavoidable war with Iran, we have allowed Iran to start the conflict on terms that it believes will be most favorable to it.

Mr. Tracinski then proceeds to iterate and reiterate, most logically, what most Israelis and a minority of Americans know to be true: sooner or later we must deal with Iran. Unfortunately, Iran’s leaders appear to be operating under the misconception that they, not us, have the upper hand in this conflict.

Finally, all of this is a distraction from the issue of Iran's nuclear weapons program. Just at the point when the US is trying to get the UN Security Council to condemn Iran, Arab and European nations are now trying to get the Security Council to condemn Israel. More broadly, Iran is trying to make itself and its proxies into champions of Islam in its long jihad against Israel. The Iranians believe that they can head off a war with America by initiating a war with Israel.

For all of these reasons, Iran thinks it has the upper hand. It thinks it can re-assert control over Lebanon and gain the support of the Arab and Muslim nations--while Israel and the US are paralyzed and fail to do anything about it.

But the Iranian regime, blinded by fanaticism, has a tendency to miscalculate and especially to overestimate its own advantage. The situation may rapidly get beyond their control, and it may--and certainly should--hasten American action against Iran.

And finally, Mr. Tracinski closes with…

Iran has revealed its hand, challenging the US and its allies and openly demonstrating its desire to dominate the Middle East through force and terror. While we have been trying to delay the war with Iran, it has brought the war to us, in a manner so obvious that even the mainstream media cannot evade it.

In doing so, they have made their threat to America and its interests more obvious and more urgent--providing a stronger case for war than their nuclear program could provide. There can be no question here about whether Iran really has aggressive designs in the Middle East, whether it really seeks the weapons to attack the US and its allies, and how long it might take for such a threat to materialize. The threat is here and Iran's newest war on the West has already begun.

Iran is risking everything on this new strategy, and the only hope they have of success is the expectation that, as they bring the war closer and closer to America, we won't fight back.

But that means that we have an easy way to blow their strategy to smithereens.

All we have to do is to start fighting back.

All good, no, excellent points. Unfortunately, there are a significant number of Americans that do not take the Iranian threat seriously. In my travels around the left side of the blogosphere this morning I see that if the Left bothers to comment or opine on the Middle East at all, it’s usually in the context of “Bush will use this as a rationalization to attack Iran.” I need to emphasize the “if they comment at all” part. Leftie comment is pretty thin on the ground regarding this subject. But, there is some comment. Maha, for instance, states:

The fact that righties think more war is just the thing to straighten out the mess — and that the Bush Administration is just the crew to carry out the plan — sorta brings home the importance of reality. Some of us are living in it, and some of us, um, aren’t.

And here’s Billmon:

One response, of course, is to try to shift the blame to “outside agitators” – Iran and Syria, in this case. The usual sources are spinning the usual conspiracy theories, and even journalists who should know better are seeing the Iranian devil lurking behind every fresh disaster. It’s not impossible, of course, that the Revolutionary Guards really are giving the Cheneyites a taste of what could be in store if the showdown over Iran’s nuclear program is pursued to the bitter end. Somebody certainly seems to have enhanced Hezbollah’s ballistic capabilities anyway. But imagining that the entire downward spiral of events (many of them initiated by the Americans or the Israelis) is the product of some secret plot by Damascus or Tehran is either the ultimate neocon job or an outbreak in Washington of the kind of hyperactive paranoia the Middle East is justly famous for.

“Reality.” “Paranoia.” Um… as the ol’ saying goes: “It ain’t paranoia when the bastards are really out to get ya.” And they really ARE.