Counterargument: Michael Ledeen responds
Actually, he didn’t respond to me directly but he does address a key point which I deliberately downplayed in my post The counterargument: Don’t preempt against Iran. In his NRO article titled Iran bubbles over, Ledeen states that
[T]he whole question of Iran, which should be the central issue in the war against terrorism, has been reduced to a fatuous debate over the country’s nuclear program…
As he rightly notes, Iran is the principal state supporting international terror.
Our main enemy, the single greatest engine in support of the terror war against us, whether Sunni or Shiite, jihadi, or secular, Arab or British or Italian or Spaniard, is Iran. There is no escape from this fact. The only questions are how long it will take us to face it, how effective we will be when we finally decide to act, and how terrible the price will be for our long delay.
What Ledeen is saying is that, Iranian nukes, though important, are a side issue. Iran continues to work directly to destabilize Iraq and export its brand of militant Islam. Until Iran abjures militant jihad, it remains a threat. As I said in my first piece arguing for preemption, sooner or later Iranian-supported terror will reach a level that constitutes a casus belli. It could take the form of a single direct attack on the U.S. by Iranian-supported terrorists or a pattern of continued support for terrorist attacks directed against American allies. In the event, an American response would not be preemption. However, the consequences for waiting until there is a clear-cut casus belli could be a large numbers of deaths – particularly Iranian deaths.
Ledeen’s view it that the U.S. cannot afford to wait. Since I remain skeptical about the ability of our nascent ABM system to deal with nuclear-tipped Iranian missiles, I share Ledeen’s sense of urgency about the Iranian threat.
I must admit that I find the Bush administration’s continued attempts to involve the U.N. puzzling. It legitimizes the U.N. as having a veto on American actions. What does the Bush administration expect the U.N. to do? Authorize a preemptive attack? This is never going to happen. As Ledeen points out, Iran is threatening to pull out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Once it does that – which it can “legally” do – on what “legal” basis can the Security Council act against Iranian proliferation?
Three years ago, I understood the logic of the Bush Doctrine – I supported it then and I support it now. I am beginning to wonder if the President is still committed to the doctrine that bears his name.