Iran worries John Bolton

Yes, Iran has asked for UN inspectors to take a look at their nuclear program to prove the Iranians aren’t building weapons, according to the International Tribune;

A team of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency will travel to Tehran in the coming weeks at the invitation of the Iranian government to try to clear up longstanding questions about the Iranian nuclear program, the nuclear agency said Monday.

Iran issued the invitation after a flurry of meetings among Ali Larijani, its chief negotiator; Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the nuclear agency, and Javier Solana, foreign policy chief of the European Union.

The purpose of the visit is to “develop an action plan for resolving outstanding issues” relating to the Iranian nuclear program, a spokesman for the Vienna-based agency said. She added that the inspectors would leave for Tehran “as early as practicable.”

Diplomats close to the agency said the move by Iran seemed calculated to stem the rising tide of pressure over its nuclear ambitions. With Tehran refusing to suspend its enrichment of uranium, the United Nations Security Council has begun to deliberate over a fresh set of sanctions against the country.

Of course, they’ll show the inspectors every tiny detail of their program (notice; that’s sarcasm). Yeah, they’re running out the clock on sanctions. They saw Hussein play the same game with the UN for 12 years and they took notes. Hussein just didn’t use his time to build nukes. John Bolton, in the Jerusalem Post, says it’s too late for diplomacy with Iran;

Bolton, however, was witheringly critical of the ongoing diplomatic contacts with Teheran, which he said were merely playing into the hands of the regime.

“The current approach of the Europeans and the Americans is not just doomed to failure, but dangerous,” he said. “Dealing with [the Iranians] just gives them what they want, which is more time…

“We have fiddled away four years, in which Europe tried to persuade Iran to give up voluntarily,” he complained. “Iran in those four years mastered uranium conversion from solid to gas and now enrichment to weapons grade… We lost four years to feckless European diplomacy and our options are very limited.”

I tend to agree with Bolton – and although the responsibility ultimately lies with the president and his failure to act forcibly against Iran, part of the blame has to be visited upon the anti-war-at-any-cost Left. Iran is the source of all evil in the Middle East – they supply Syria (who supplies Hezbollah and Hamas), they gave shelter to al Qaeda and Taliban operatives during the US-backed liberation of Afghanistan, they supply al Qaeda in Iraq as well as Shi’ite militias (the Mahdi Army, for example) and they gave shelter to Mooky al Sadr in the early days of the “surge”.

The reason we ended up doing so poorly strategically in Vietnam is because the our own Left resisted  our incursion into Cambodia to shut down the Ho Chi Minh Trail – a few kilometers inside Cambodia. Without that supply line, the North Vietnamese Army in South Vietnam as well as the Viet Cong would’ve withered and died – and millions of Vietnamese lives would have been saved.

Unless we can stem the flow of weapons, reinforcements and supplies at the source (in Iran), we’re going to learn the same lesson all over again – while the Left dances on the graves of our troops like they did for twenty years after the Viet Nam War.

Just like we have to learn the lesson that Arabs don’t negotiate well with the West all over again – every year.

Pamela Gellar Oshry of Atlas Shrugs is reporting riots in Iran that I’m not reading about anywhere else (Gateway Pundit has videos and photos of the aftermath) and Mike at Lamplighter is reporting another assasination of an Iranian mullah.

Category: Foreign Policy, Historical, Politics, Terror War