by mike Evans
Regarding the first event, the UE3 and U.S. incentive program for August 22, Iran responded with a long document that said they would gladly return to the negotiating table but refused to stop their enrichment activities, which had, of course, been the prerequisite set forth in the incentive plan for negotiations to resume. On August 31, President Ahmadinejad boldly stated via Iranian television, “They should know that the Iranian nation will not yield to pressure and will not let its rights be trampled on.”10 On October 23, Ahmadinejad announced, “The enemies, resorting to propaganda, want to block us from achieving (nuclear technology)…but they should know that today, the capability of our nation has multiplied tenfold over the same period last year.”11 Then on October 27, Iran announced that it had doubled its nuclear enrichment capabilities. “We are injecting gas into the second cascade, which we installed two weeks ago,” an unidentified Iranian official reported.12 An Iranian official also announced Iran would add three thousand new centrifuges to the facilities at Natanz by March 2007 of the type that a BBC expert said could be used to enrich uranium to weapons grade.13
Obviously Iran has no intentions of stopping its nuclear pursuits just because we’ve asked them nicely.
According to all sources, Iran is very close to its determined plan of possessing nuclear weapons capabilities. Pakistan, North Korea, and even Russia can be thanked for the advances in nuclear technology enjoyed by this rogue nation bent on destruction. While the world’s eyes were turned on Israel and Lebanon in the summer of 2006, Iran’s nuclear pursuits slipped under the radar of world leaders. One can but wonder how much additional technological progress was made by the scientists at the enrichment facilities scattered across Iran as Hezbollah lobbed shrapnel-laden missiles into the midst of Israeli cities.
In an interview on CNN in May 2006, Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, said, “The technological threshold [for Iran to make a nuclear weapon] is very close. It can be measured by months rather than years.”14
Of course, the estimates of when Iran might possess the technical capabilities to produce a nuclear device have ranged from the end of 2006 to the prognostications of Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. He told BBC Radio’s Today program that “Tehran could have a nuclear bomb ready between 2010 and 2015.”15
IRAN’S PROXY WARS
Although the kidnappings and missile attacks in the summer of 2006 heightened U.S. awareness of Iran’s threat to worldwide freedom, this had become clear to me as early as 1983. It was a little past 6:00 a.m. in Beirut, and I was standing on a beachhead along the beautiful Mediterranean, talking to a group of marines.
The U.S. Marines stationed at Beirut’s International Airport were just beginning a new day. One marine sentry at the airport gate looked up to see a big, yellow Mercedes truck barreling down on the security gate. The sentry reportedly stated that the driver of the truck smiled at him as he crashed through the gates. The truck was on a course for the lobby of the barracks. The sentries, armed only with loaded pistols, were unable to stop the speeding vehicle.
The Mercedes carried explosives equal to six tons of TNT. The driver rammed into the lower floor of the barracks and discharged his deadly cargo. The explosion was so great that the four-story building collapsed in a heap of rubble. Many of the 241 dead were not killed by the blast itself but were crushed beneath the cinder-block building as it fell in on itself.
Not since the first day of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam (January 31, 1968) when 243 were killed had America recorded such a deadly one-day toll on its military. It remains the deadliest post–World War II attack on Americans overseas.16
In order for the “Great Satan” to be eradicated so that an Islamic divine culture might emerge, violence is condoned. It was Iran’s proxy Hezbollah—the Party of Allah—that attacked the United States’ Eighth Battalion of Marines in their barracks in Lebanon in 1983.
Little did I know at the time that Iran would push America out of Lebanon through its terrorist organizations and would orchestrate a scenario so diabolical that the president of the United States would provide protection for the world’s then most fearsome terrorist organization, the PLO. More than ten thousand terrorists were allowed to board ships for Tunisia as Israeli general Ariel Sharon was told to stand down. This, despite the fact that he and his forces had Yasser Arafat in the crosshairs with a chance to severely cripple terrorism for years to come. Instead, victory was taken from them, and the terrorists gained ground. Israel has suffered the consequences in the form of repeated attacks by Iran’s proxy suicide bombers and Katyusha rocket attacks. In the years since the fight in Lebanon in the 1980s, we have done little but encourage the use of terrorist tactics over and over again. We shake our fists, but in the end withdraw before any real victory.
Today, Iran stands all the stronger for our lack of resolve and inability to truly curb its ambitions. Alan Dershowitz had this to say about Iran’s threat:
One of the reasons I personally was against the war in Iraq—for me it was a very close question, but I came out against it—was because I thought it would divert attention away from Iran, which posed a much more serious threat because religious extremism is always more dangerous than secular extremism. I also worried about the rule of unintended consequences—that the tyranny of Saddam Hussein would be replaced by a tyranny of radical Islamists—and unfortunately those fears have come to fruition.17
Yes, Iran is serious—deadly serious. Their intentions can neither be taken for granted nor minimized. Iran seeks converts to its fanatical lifestyle from every nation, not just among the Arabs. Remember, after all, Iranians are not Arabs but Persians. Theirs is not a racial war but a religious one. Iran wants nothing more than that every knee on earth should bow to Allah and believes that there will be no real peace in the world until the world is Muslim. If you doubt this, just look at the tenor of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s letters to President Bush and the American people that are included in Appendices A and B of this book. If I were to put the message of each into a nutshell, they are both basically saying, “Become Muslim and we shall all live at peace.”
Oddly, President Ahmadinejad’s letters feel strangely parallel to letters the prophet Muhammad sent to his neighbors, and I was told about this by Walid Shoebat, a former Palestinian terrorist, in a conversation I had with him recently:
When the prophet Muhammad sent his letters of warning to all the people around him, there’s two words used at the beginning of the letter, “Aslim, Tuslim.”…Aslim means “Become a Muslim” or “Submit to Islam.”…Tuslim, “then you will be at peace.” So, “Submit to Islam, thou shall then be at peace.”
If you do not submit, then we have to deal or wage war, because it’s not permissible in Islam to wage war unless you warn your enemy and offer Islam to him. This is the message throughout the jihad and the Muslim world: “We come to represent the Lord of the worlds, this world, and the underworld. Become Muslim or die.”18
It seems hard to believe in our politically correct society today when talk of religion in government is so looked down upon, but we are facing a religious zeal in Ahmadinejad and his followers that is like nothing we have ever seen. Perhaps his hero, the founder of the Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, said it best: “I say let Iran go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”19
The Islamization of Palestine was orchestrated through Iran. Palestinians were secular nationalists, not Islamic fundamentalists, before Iran’s influence held sway. It was the Iranian mullahs that indoctrinated the children of Palestine with the dogma of the Islamic revolution and persuaded them to become human bombs.
Hamas, which controls the Palestinian Territory today, is another proxy of Iran, getting much of its financial support and weapons from Tehran, as is Hezbollah in Lebanon with its ten thousand missiles. The world saw Iran’s true intentions the day Israelis intercepted a Palestinian ship, the Karine-A, in the Red Sea on January 4, 2002. The
ship was loaded with Katyusha rockets with a maximum range of twelve miles, as well as assault rifles, antitank missiles, mines, ammunition, and explosives. Most of the weapons were Iranian, and all were bound for Iran’s proxies entrenched in Gaza and Lebanon.
HAMPERED BY TUNNEL VISION
Tunnel vision has plagued Operation Iraqi Freedom almost from the beginning. The desire to depose and capture Saddam Hussein overshadowed the reality of conducting a war to liberate people who really don’t know how to handle liberation. Many, having never been free, don’t know what to do with a freedom that flies in the face of their Islamic theology. It appeared that being controlled by a Muslim madman was preferable to being handed independence by infidels.
An epidemic of violence now grips Iraq, and the prospect of having no vaccine to combat it is demoralizing. Like sharks in a feeding frenzy, the various terrorist organizations, sects, tribes, and Islamic factions feed not only on the chum, but also turn on each other with disastrous results. In the final analysis, it seems that civil war is inevitable and that nation-building in Iraq is not working.
The outcome of the march into Baghdad, and the resulting brouhaha in congressional halls, was that President Bush had lost the ability to deal with other, more outrageous Muslim leaders, such as Ahmadinejad in Iran and al-Assad in Syria. Iran poses a grave nuclear threat, not only to the region but to the world. Peaceful Muslims worldwide are slowly being hijacked by the more radical elements. Iran is becoming a central player in the Shiite versus Sunni sects of Islam, and unfortunately, America, the “Great Satan,” has become the unifying force that all love to hate. Iran rejoiced when, under the tutelage of Ayatollah Khomeini, the American embassy in Tehran was overrun and Americans were held hostage for 444 days. The jubilation continued when Iranian proxies in Lebanon struck a deadly blow to the marine compound that resulted in the United States packing its bags and going home. Today, Iran has focused on Iraq with every intention to drive coalition troops out of that country just as they did Lebanon and create a unified Shiite state from the Persian Gulf to the borders of Syria, and perhaps beyond.
APPROACHING HOOFBEATS
As I write this it is as if four sets of hoofbeats—like the coming together of fronts into a storm of prophetic proportion—are descending on the Middle East. On one front, the coalition forces of Operation Iraqi Freedom struggle to keep a foothold against terrorists and ethnoreligious violence descending toward civil war. On another, Al Qaeda and its other Sunni terrorist brotherhoods shower destruction and death wherever they can, hoping Iraq descends into chaos. From another, Iran, Hezbollah, and al-Sadr’s army brings its own Shiite hope that the present fighting will escalate to apocalyptic proportions, thus ushering forth the Mahdi—“the perfect man”—to spread throughout the world a Golden Age of Islam. And, meanwhile, in the west, Israel stands by, watching quietly and preparing to defend itself once more against any and all threats.
The fact is, while all eyes seem focused on the battle for Iraq, the real danger is Iran, which—with the help of Russia and probably North Korea—stands on the brink of becoming a nuclear power, an accomplishment few in the world—and especially Israel—are willing to let happen peacefully. So, as the diplomatic struggle to end Iran’s nuclear agenda grows increasingly fruitless, Israel’s elite troops practice for an assault on Iran’s underground sites. Helicopters, F-15s, snipers, and trained bomb-carrying dogs have drilled for months in preparation to halt Iran’s ability to use nuclear weapons to attempt to realize their dream to wipe Israel off the map.
The point of no return for Israel will come when Iran has within its grasp the ability to produce a nuclear weapon—the point at which they have finally overcome the technical difficulties in refining natural uranium to include roughly 4 percent uranium-235. Once that point is reached, Iran’s scientists just need to repeat the process enough times to produce the purity of uranium-235 considered weapons grade—something that would be made much easier by the three thousand centrifuges Iran has reported it will be installing at Natanz by March 2007.
If diplomacy with Iran to stop its refinement of nuclear materials continues to prove futile as 2007 progresses, the inevitability of an Israeli strike on key development facilities in Iran will grow. Such an attack could set the stage for every nation in between—Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, and Iran—to become the battleground for World War III that France, Great Britain, Russia, and Germany were in World War II. Certainly if Israel is forced to attack, the skirmish we saw between Hezbollah and Israel in the summer of 2006 will seem like children shooting off bottle rockets in comparison.
Israel has reiterated that it will not allow “atomic ayatollahs” to point their nuclear weapons at Jerusalem. That fear is multiplied by America’s nightmare that nuclear weapons will fall into the hands of Iranian-sponsored terror squads. For this reason, America continues to seek ways to diplomatically persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear program, but the clock is on Iran’s side. The longer Tehran stalls, the closer they get to the knowledge they need to produce weapons-grade uranium—a point that the West cannot let Iran reach, unless, of course, we are all willing to convert to Iran’s form of Islam at the barrel of a nuclear silo. To be sure, while the United States and Europe might possibly delay too long, Israel will not.
Still others sit watching, some more interested than others. The moderate states of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Kuwait are anxious for peace in the region and know they would also be targets of a nuclear Iran because of their friendliness with the West. North Korea pushes forward with its own nuclear program and missile tests, flexing its muscles threateningly toward the Far East and the world. War and genocide rage along ethnoreligious lines in Sudan, where hundreds of thousands have died. Meanwhile, the Taliban is doing everything it can to reemerge in Afghanistan in skirmishes that draw little attention in light of the fighting on the other side of Iran.
It is fair to say that no U.S. president in the history of our nation has faced such pressure in the international arena with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, nuclear threats from Iran and North Korea, a war on terrorism that is losing its focus in the eyes of the American people, and midterm elections that seriously divided his support in Congress. While the last two two-term presidents made tremendous strides in foreign policy in their last couple of years in office—Reagan by seeing the fall of the Soviet Union and Clinton with the end of the war in the Balkans—the last two years of George W. Bush’s presidency will not only define him in the eyes of history, but could also define the future of the United States and Western democracy.
2007 IS THE CRITICAL YEAR
The 1960s produced the television series Lost in Space. While much of that series may have been forgettable, except to today’s cult following, one catchphrase resurfaces from time to time. One of the characters was a child named Will Robinson. His companion was a robot whose attitude toward young Will was always protective. When threatened with peril, the robot would intone, “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!” While the robot could warn of danger, Will was the one responsible to take the proper evasive action to protect himself and/or his family.
Today, we in America are being warned repeatedly about the danger we face from Iran and its headlong rush to acquire nuclear weapons. In late October 2006, at a fund-raiser hosted by Lee Roy Mitchell, founder of Cinemark Corporation, and Norm Miller, of Interstate Batteries, for my Final Move Beyond Iraq television special, Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya’alon, former IDF chief of staff, gave a keynote speech. As he had done in our previous meetings, Ya’alon issued yet another warning of the danger posed by the Iranian government. Among his comments, he said, “Iran is now the center of gravity. The only nation that can shut down 100 percent of Iran’s nuclear program and neutralize their ability to retaliate is the United States.” He went on to say, “It cannot be done in 2008; it will be too late.”20
In talking with Ya’alon, his rationale was clear. Sometime in 2007 or 2008, Iran will reach the
point of no return in its nuclear program. Once they do that, even if they are set back somehow immediately afterward, they can always proceed to produce nuclear weapons in secret later on because they will already have the knowledge of how to do so. Iran must never be able to reach this point in its nuclear research.
If Iran is to be stopped before this, the United States must act decisively in 2007. If we wait until 2008, elections will be too distracting to Congress to be able to rally support for such an effort—an effort that may necessitate military action. With the Bush administration’s policies and plans concerning the war on terror already under tremendous fire at home, it is unlikely those vying for political office will have the courage to do what is right in the face of Iran’s nuclear threat.
Lt. Gen. Ya’alon is only one of many who have cried, “Danger, America! Danger!” And, like young Will Robinson, the decision to act to protect our nation and our families is ours to make, and the plan is ours to execute. The safety of future generations is in our hands. The questions now are: What will we do with this deadly knowledge? How much time do we have to act? Do we have the resolve to win the war on terror regardless of what it takes? Or do we allow ourselves to be swallowed up in the tsunami of terrorism that is certain to engulf the shores of America if the Islamofascists are not stopped?
PART TWO:
THE FINAL SOLUTION WHILE THE WORLD SLEEPS
Chapter Seven
FUMBLING OUR ALLY, IRAN
Ayatollah Khomeini will “eventually be hailed as a saint.”1
