Steyn on Iran

Yesterday I sat down to a meal with a group of professionals. It was a very intelligent group, but a group for whom the news is something that is noise in the background or headlines to be scanned. In other words, I'd consider them all average consumers of the news in this country. The topic of conversation turned to yesterday's news of possible U.S. plans to use low yield nuclear weapons against Iran. The general consensus was that everyone was appalled that we would even consider the possibility of using the nukes, and that Iran wasn't bothering us so we had no business there. Needless to say, I was appalled. I'm not rooting for war with Iran, nor am I pleased with the idea that bunker busting nukes may be our best option to destroy Iran's nuclear program, but I realize that both are options that must be considered lest we turn on the news one morning to find that there is a mushroom cloud rising over Jerusalem, London, or Washington D.C. It was not the right time to educate my fellow diners, though, so I just offered the fact that sometimes during negotiations you let the other guy know what may be possible if there are not suitable gains made during the talks.

With this as a background, Mark Steyn has a long but excellent piece on Iran at City Journal. I recommend that even news junkies read it, but it would be a very educational piece for the news challenged. Steyn lays out why Iran should be a concern, how serious a threat the Islamic state poses to the west, and why no options should be ruled out. As I said, it is long, but here are a couple of interesting tidbits:

On Iran's plan to succede the USSR:

In 1989, with the Warsaw Pact disintegrating before his eyes, poor beleaguered Mikhail Gorbachev received a helpful bit of advice from the cocky young upstart on the block: “I strongly urge that in breaking down the walls of Marxist fantasies you do not fall into the prison of the West and the Great Satan,” Ayatollah Khomeini wrote to Moscow. “I openly announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the greatest and most powerful base of the Islamic world, can easily help fill up the ideological vacuum of your system.”

On why Iran's history makes it more of a nuclear concern than, say, a nuclear Belgium:

Anyone who spends half an hour looking at Iranian foreign policy over the last 27 years sees five things:

1. contempt for the most basic international conventions;
2. long-reach extraterritoriality;
3. effective promotion of radical Pan-Islamism;
4. a willingness to go the extra mile for Jew-killing (unlike, say, Osama);
5. an all-but-total synchronization between rhetoric and action.

Go and read the rest. Steyn is never dull, so I doubt that the length of the piece will even be noticed.