Iran's Gangster Government

By Alan Caruba

Two hapless Americans, Shane Bauer and Joseph Fattal, have been held hostage in Iran for eighteen months. Hikers, they and Sarah Shourd, were taken prisoner in what is generally described as “an unmarked border area between Iraq and Iran.”

As much as I sympathize with their problem, I keep asking myself how can three Americans, two aged 29 and one 32, have been so oblivious to the danger of hiking anywhere near Iran, let alone in northern Iraq? Their naiveté is appalling. The world is filled with other places to hike.

Ms. Shourd was released by the Iranians on a $500,000 bail in September and you can bet that it was provided by the U.S. via the Swiss ambassador, our go-to guy there.

On Sunday, Bauer and Fattal, charged with illegally entering Iran for the purpose of espionage, were subject to a judicial hearing before Judge Abolghasem Salavati, the Iranian version of Vlad the Impaler. Their lawyer was not given the opportunity to meet with them before the three-hour session to prepare a defense. This is what passes for justice in Iran.

Lawyer Masoud Shafii said that he had requested that “they are freed immediately. We reject all the charges, and I think the 18 months they’ve already served is more than enough.”

This is the equivalent of Iranian kabuki theatre because justice has nothing to do with the fate of the two hikers. They, like every other hostage the Iranians have taken since their 1979 revolution, are just bargaining chips, pawns to be used in their endless war with America and the West.

It began with 52 American diplomats and embassy staff that were held for 444 days until the day Ronald Reagan took the oath of office at his first inaugural.

Does Barack Obama today look any less weak than Jimmy Carter did? The answer is that America and other nations, Great Britain and France for example, have grown so accustomed to negotiating with the Iranians over their hostage nationals that it has become “normal” to do so.

It is a very bad “normal” and it ignores the criminal, fascist nature of a regime for whom hostage taking is routine. Indeed, Iran “is open to a deal, saying the country would be willing to negotiate an exchange for Iranian prisoners held in the U.S.—a notion the U.S. has rejected”, according to The Wall Street Journal.

For now the two hikers will remain in jail before an equally bogus trial is held. Reporting for The Wall Street Journal, Farnaz Fassihi wrote, “Analysts say that the hiker’s case has become caught up in Iran’s internal political rivalries and its standoff with the West over its nuclear program.” You think?

Bauer and Fattal will be set free only if the U.S. agrees to a secret deal with the Iranians and that will be a bad deal for the U.S. If there is no deal, they will rot in an Iranian prison, guilty of extreme stupidity.

No matter their fate, there are far greater future options at stake. The closer the Iranians get to weaponizing nuclear materials, the closer the world gets to running out of options to stop them.

The deal I would offer them is to put those hiking morons on the first plane out of Tehran or expect a couple of guided missiles to arrive at the several known nuclear facilities in Iran.

Even Bill Clinton let fly a few to try to kill Osama bin Laden and managed to blow up a Libyan aspirin factory thanks to bad intelligence. Still, it sent a message.

Think about it. The Iranians don’t have missiles that can hit the U.S. homeland. Their navy would be obliterated by ours in hours. We already have 50,000 troops in Iraq and others in Afghanistan. If you think they are there on “training missions”, you’re dreaming.

Not only do we have nukes, but the Israelis do as well and they need to send a signal to their “neighbors” in the Mideast, most of whom are praying they nuke Tehran anyway.

It’s not like we haven’t been patient and forbearing in the face of years of insults and threats. It’s time to send an “or else” message, but I doubt that day will arrive for at least two more years; say sometime after January 2013 when Barack the Uncertain is sent packing to Chicago.

Like the final days in office of Jimmy Carter, the Iranians have concluded that America has elected a sissy.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Memories of Munich, Threats from Tehran

By Alan Caruba

By 1938, Hitler had already made plans for the conquest of Europe or at least the parts he could not get without firing a shot. He had annexed Austria earlier that year.

In Munich, Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland was handed over to Germany by England, France, and Italy. The Czechs were not invited to participate. Despite the Versailles Treaty after World War One, under the Nazis Germany had rearmed while the rest of Europe looked on.

Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, returned home to claim that he had bought “peace in our time.” Well, he had bought a little time but few had any doubts about Hitler’s ambitions. Even Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, had bought a little time by signing a secret treaty dividing Poland with Hitler. A year after the Munich treaty, Germany invaded Poland and World War Two began.

History has an unfortunate, but utterly predictable, way of repeating itself. The same mistakes are made over and over again by men who have not taken the time to read history or who think that, by dint of their own personalities, they can change it. Barack Obama thinks he has been selected by the gods of Marxism to fulfill that destiny for America. When not “transforming” America, he yearns for a new world order based on diplomacy, but diplomacy has long been defined as telling lies on behalf of one’s country.

His Director of Intelligence, Dennis Blair, just got pushed out of the job for daring to tell him the truth about the world and these days Obama evokes snickers every time he ventures into the thicket of foreign policy and Hillary is no help.

In the history of the United States, no previous president has ever had less experience for the job. In contrast to George W. Bush who told nations he would invade you if you posed a threat, most of the world’s leaders have concluded Obama is an empty suit, a dunce, and an easy mark. The Iranians openly mock him while the rest have the decency to do it behind closed doors.

If you want to find those most wedded to insane notions of their role in history, just visit Tehran where the ayatollahs and their chief stooge, Mamoud Ahmadinejad, believe they must bring about Armageddon to ensure the return of the mythical Twelfth Imam who apparently lives at the bottom of a well.

Once the Islamic Revolution had solidified its grip on Iran in 1979, their top priority became the ability to make nuclear weapons. They have never ceased in this quest. As in 1938, the world looks on.

Iran is the new Nazi Germany circa 2010. It bears a lot of similarities, the most obvious of which is its intense hatred of Jews that is manifested in denying the Holocaust and with daily threats to wipe Israel off the map.

The irony of this is that Iran’s Arab neighbors—Iran is Persian, not Arab—have reached the point where they hate Iran even more than they say they hate Israel. The radical Shiite Iran is an anathema to the mostly Sunni Arab nations of the Middle East and the notion that it might acquire nuclear weapons has them casting their eyes lovingly on Israel.

The Iraqis have no love for the Iranian’s ideological extremism. That’s why Iyad Allawi, a secular Shiite, along with secular Sunni political allies, won the recent elections there. Iranian bombs and terrorists have killed more Iraqis than the U.S. military.

You cannot look around the region without finding a nation, other than Syria, that regards Iran as anything other than a menace, either directly or through proxy forces such as Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in the Gaza strip. Members of Osama bin Laden’s family are said to be guests of Iran.

The Israelis have made no secret of the fact that they do not intend to let Iran join the nuclear club. President Obama has said similar things, but his word is totally unreliable and everyone in the Middle East knows it.

He may have thought he was earning brownie points by being abusive to Israel, but all he managed to do was raise questions about his treatment of a U.S. ally. It is no secret either that Obama has long associated with notorious anti-Semites such as Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan.

There’s never been a whole lot of trust among the leaders of Middle Eastern and North African nations for one another, but there is likely none so far as the U.S. President is concerned.

This is why it is the Saudis have been quietly breaking bread with the Israelis for quite a while and a coalition of sorts exists to support whatever it intends to do to render parts of Iran radioactive. This is not to say that U.S. military and intelligence representatives haven’t held similar discussions with the various parties.

An extraordinary flotilla of U.S. war ships has been building up in the Persian Gulf and there no doubt there are other preparations for war occurring. One can only hope that overt U.S. policy towards Israel is a gigantic deception to make the Iranians think the U.S. will stay out of the fight.

As with Munich in 1938 when the momentum toward war was already too strong and too obvious to all of Europe and the rest of the world to ignore, the Iranian regime is begging for war. It will get it. There is simply no way to use diplomacy when you are negotiating with crazy people.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

World Leaders Behaving Foolishly

This photo is not of a barbarshop quartet or a skit on Saturday Night Live. These are world leaders, men in whom millions have placed their trust for decisions that will affect their well being. Only the Chinese leader with his back to the other three seems unaware of how foolish they appear to be with their smiles and "thumbs up" gestures. This is international diplomacy reduced to a fraternity house photo.