DEALING WITH IRAN, OR NOT

The Telegraph of the U.K. is reporting that British defense officials are going to meet to discuss contingency plans in case the U.S. attacks Iran. While their sources say that such an attack is not thought to be imminent, some believe it is almost inevitable. This is a very valid opinion, given the hoplessly inept response so far of the U.N., which is drawing fire from the editors of the Washington Post, and even more harshly from David Warren.

This has been another week of infamy at the United Nations -- they have strung quite a few hundred of them together -- and while one can’t refer to a “low point” in an institution that is morally bottomless, the failure to do anything even mildly credible about the nuclear threat from Iran is at least worthy of note.

Three weeks after the urgent matter of Iran’s non-compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was referred to it, the Security Council issued a non-binding presidential statement. The members could not even draft a Security Council resolution. They could not bring themselves to repeat the grave charges tabled by their own International Atomic Energy Agency, nor formally acknowledge that the IAEA had presented the case to them for action. They found no fault in the Iranian president’s repeated promises to “wipe-out Israel”, or in his public musings about the Koranic apocalypse being at hand.

Instead, they expressed “serious concerns”, about e.g. "Iran’s decision to resume enrichment-related activities”, and called upon that country to “take steps ... which are essential to build confidence”. After which, Iran replied with a huge public raspberry.

...I shall never have the space in these short columns to begin pealing through the U.N.’s layers of perfidy and shame. Instead, I will refer my reader to the current (April) number of the monthly Commentary magazine, where the field is staked by Claudia Rosett, a journalist who has been covering this U.N. beat remorselessly for the Wall Street Journal and New York Sun.

But apart from all that, we must remember that even if the U.N. were honestly managed, and staffed by sages and saints, it would not be the appropriate forum for dealing with threats from such rogue states as Iran. For success in such a confrontation requires discipline, nerve, and tactical skill, under bold leadership. This can never be provided by a club that consists of nearly 200 members with conflicting interests, or by a Security Council in which several veto-wielding powers devote their joyful energies to tripping each other up. The U.N. can be a forum for formal and informal diplomatic exchanges; a “clearing house” of some sort; but it cannot offer transnational solutions to real world crises, because there are no such solutions to be had.

Sovereignty exists at the national level, where governments armed with police and soldiers tend national interests and cultivate the means to enforce their interpretation of a national will. This is the unchanging reality through the foreseeable future. Forget about “speaking truth to power”. The only way to say boo to Iran is with a bigger power. Read: the USA and a "coalition of the willing".

Amen.

Of course, if the U.S. does strike Iran, we can expect the Iranians to respond with terrorism.

Whether we like it or not, international diplomacy can never be a substitute for military power when facing unreasonable persons who are in charge of governments. Just as the League of Nations was impotent when faced with Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese militarists, so the U.N. is impotent when faced with either brutal, fascistic leaders or fanatical ideologues. As long as Iran (and North Korea, for that matter) is run by brutal tyrants who are used to getting their way through the use of fear and intimidation, they can never be trusted to comply with agreements or to set aside their ambitions. International diplomacy did not defeat the Fascists, and it did not defeat the Communists, and it will not defeat the Jihadists.