Constant Vigilance

Fire of Liberty

Michael Ledeen has a wonderful piece over at National Review Online on the seemingly lull period of the War on Terror. While it's understandable that the White House, State and Defense Department are suffering from fatigue after some four years of fighting terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq, this is not the time to slack off. If we start getting wrapped up in the diplomatic peacock mating ritual that the Europeans are doing with Iran (I think the peacock with do all his dancing and still won't get the peahen) or refocus our attention on the Israeli/Palestinian peace process we become soft and take our eye off the ball. As Ledeen notes in his article, the United States can ill afford to rest on its laurels of freeing Afghanistan from the Taliban/Al Qaeda and Iraq from the horrors of Saddam and his terror sponsoring government, it has to continue its route of terrorism by focusing on the terror states of Iran and Syria.

One doesn't have to go to far from the borders of Iraq to find two regimes who constantly seek the destruction of the US via their support of their terrorist proxies. As long as these evil regimes continue to live undisturbed, they will continue to shelter, train, arm and provide succor to the terrorists who cross over the Iraqi border to attack our soldiers with IED's and truck bombs. Time is not on our side in this battlefield, we must continue to carry the fight to the terror masters. When you focus on the legs (terror masters) of Al Qaeda and Hezbollah you will eventually bring the terrorists to their knees making them more vulnerable to our attacks. (Think of the rebels taking out the legs of AT-AT walkers in The Empire Strikes Back or the AT-ST's in Return of the Jedi.) It's time to continue this roll-back policy before we get to comfortable in listing to the moderating tones of the Europeans, professional diplomats, political moderates or the MSM. We only have to read the following passages by Ledeen to see how "now is not the time to go wobbly" as Margaret Thatcher famously quipped to Bush 41 prior to the Gulf War:

On Iran, our language is as tougher, and it is most welcome. On the eve of Memorial Day, Secretary Rice proclaimed Iran "probably [?] the most important state sponsor of terrorists, including terrorists who are doing their best to frustrate the hopes of the Palestinian people for a state" and branded it as "a country that does have (an) abominable human rights record." Fine words, but, as in the Syrian case, they do not deal with the matters at hand. Iran is headed toward another phony presidential election on June 17, with the usual charade intended to deceive all would-be appeasers into believing that Iranian elections are like those in Wichita, Kansas. More than 1,000 candidates stepped forward, and the Guardian Council (that is, the Guardians of the mullahcracy) selected six, including one of the country's leading murderers, former president Rafsanjani. The impotent group known as the "reformers" protested their exclusion, whereupon the Great Dictator Khamenei added two of them to the list.

The Iranian people are not deceived, and all reliable reports from Iran tell us that few of them intend to vote. Knowing this, the regime has announced that non-voters will be treated as criminals, deprived of educational opportunities, forbidden to travel, and banned from government employment. Why have our diplomats not denounced the electoral scam and the frantic efforts to compel the Iranians to act in the pathetic comedy? The most authoritative religious figure in Iran, the Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, told Reuters that the Iranians understood the election was a fraud, because the president has no authority. Khamenei holds it all. In open rebellion against the Islamic Republic, Montazeri said that the Supreme Leader "should limit his role to religious matters and to ensuring that laws conformed to Islam." In short, that the Islamic Republic must be dismantled. Meanwhile, the Iranians and the Syrians continue to support the terror war against us in Iraq. Here again, everyone knows it — nobody raised an eyebrow at the recent rumors that Zarqawi had taken refuge in Iran, because everyone knows he has long had Iranian support for his barbaric actions — yet our leaders are strangely unwilling to draw the obvious conclusion: The regimes must go.

I do not understand why Bush, Rice, and Rumsfeld should be less forthcoming than an 83-year-old Grand Ayatollah under virtual house arrest in Qom. In his final days in office, Colin Powell went around the world announcing that the United States was not calling for regime change in Iran, and no one in Washington has gainsaid those words. Nor has anyone called for regime change in Damascus. In each case, official rhetoric, and apparently formal policy as well, are directed toward matters of less significance in the Global War: the nuclear ambitions of the Iranian mullahs, and the domination of Lebanon by the Syrian Baathists and their murderous Hezbollah allies. Yet it is clear to anyone with eyes to see that even these lesser goals cannot be accomplished so long as Assad rules Syria, and the mullahs rule Iran.

Time is not waiting and we should be taking every action in our power (barring war) to end these bloody tyrannies. People in these regimes are ready to topple their governments but just need a slight push from the US. This shouldn't be that hard to achieve with some past successes against the regimes in Europe, Central/Southern America, and Asia throughout the 1980's and today's modern technologies like satellite TV, Radios and the Internet. I hope that the folks in the White House are just in a mere holding pattern for the fog to clear because terrorists don't take breaks unless they're dead.