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Posts Tagged ‘Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’
January 31st, 2012 at 5:12 pm
Head of U.S. Intelligence: Iran’s Appetite for Terror Strikes in the U.S. Growing
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James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, was on Capitol Hill earlier today to brief lawmakers on the biggest national security threats facing the nation in the year ahead. While there was some good news (Al Qaeda, for instance, has been substantially weakened by the death of Osama bin Laden and many of its other senior leaders), Clapper’s warnings about Iran were ominous. As the Washington Post reports it:

U.S. intelligence agencies believe that Iran is prepared to launch terrorist attacks inside the United States in response to perceived threats from America and its allies, the U.S. spy chief said Tuesday.

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said in prepared testimony that an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington that was uncovered last year reflects an aggressive new willingness within the upper ranks of the Islamist republic to authorize attacks against the United States.

That plot “shows that some Iranian officials — probably including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime,” Clapper said in the testimony, which was submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee in advance of a threat assessment hearing Tuesday. “We are also concerned about Iranian plotting against U.S. or allied interests overseas.”

Bracing stuff. It should now be clear that Iran poses a greater immediate national security threat to the U.S. than any other nation on earth. And our response — to the extent that we’ve had one — has been woefully inadequate.

One of the great ignominies of President Obama’s tenure in office was his decision not to side with the Iranian dissidents who rose up against the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, missing an opportunity not only to advance our strategic interests in the region but also to put our moral capital on the line for a people yearning to throw off the hand of oppression. At the time, the president was more concerned with preserving his diplomatic options with the mullahs’ regime, even though their actions proved exactly why such overtures would be fruitless.

Though the White House now seems to have a slightly more acute sense of the dangers posed by Iran, the upshot has not been a more effective foreign policy. The current response of choice is to step up economic pressure through the widespread use of economic sanctions by the U.S. and our allies. This will fail to stem the tide of Iranian radicalism. Sanctions and their corresponding decline in economic growth only serve to make life less bearable for workaday citizens. That may make the regime less popular, but in an undemocratic system that’s a development that comes with little cash value.

Khamenei and his ilk are true believers, convinced that history is winding inevitably towards an outcome ordained for them by God. There’s not an instrument of policy sufficient to change that orientation — other than regime change.

October 19th, 2010 at 2:05 pm
From Tehran, With a Warning

A parallel alliance between the world’s governing thugs continues to follow a James Bond movie scenario: buffoonish villains pursuing absurdly dramatic evil.  Other than a shared penchant for casual clothing and over-the-top rhetoric, however, there’s nothing funny about the increasingly close alliance between Venezuela, Iran and Russia.

This week, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is traveling to Russia and Iran to secure cooperation agreements on nuclear enrichment, oil production and other stick-in-the-eye measures to America and its allies.

At some point, Americans will wake up to a clutch of hostile nations that have nuclear weapons in volatile regions.  Hopefully, the Obama Administration is doing much more strategic planning than waiting for a Felix Leiter-type CIA operative to save the day.

August 5th, 2010 at 3:56 pm
Obama Outsources Iran Negotiations to Office of Cultural Sensitivity
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You know that obnoxious college undergrad who tries to prove his worldliness by being overly deferential to any foreign culture he comes across? He won the electoral college.

Buried deep in a report by ABC News’ Christiane Amanpour on the White House’s diplomatic engagement with Iran comes this little nugget:

A senior U.S. official said the administration is waiting to see if Iran comes back to the negotiating table after Ramadan as it has publicly indicated in the past, but there have been no direct contacts with Iran about engagement.

In politics, as in romance, deadlines mean something. And apparently Iran is busy washing its hair on Ramadan.

Let’s be clear: Iran blows us off when we ignore them and blows us off when we try to engage them. They’re irascibale when there are sanctions in place and irascible when there are none. They hate us on Ramadan and they’re not wild about us on Hanukkah.

Mr. President: They’re just not that into you.

May 6th, 2010 at 9:36 am
Mahmoud Dishes on the Other Big O
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Taking a bit of time off from his day job as Iran’s Centifuger-in-Chief, the ever lovable and always insightful Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has confided to ABC’s equally cuddly George Snuffleupagus that he’s been hearing Osama bin Laden is living in Washington.

At least it’s not Lindsay Lohan or John Edwards. 

Someone please tell Janet Napolitano to send a memo suggesting that Osama be kept off White House guest lists.  Since she’s having so much trouble over other lists, she may have missed that potential embarrassment.