Iran's Proxies at War with Israel

It is worth remembering, especially at this juncture in the decades-long Middle East conflict, the reason Iran's Mullahs can roll the dice. While their proxies (Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas) launch attacks into Israel, they gamble on U.S. inaction due to political paralysis.

They read the New York and LA Times. They hear the likes of Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha, and Howard Dean on CNN. And they remember Jimmy Carter, whose lack of will led to the ascent of the theocracy in Tehran.

They bank on the purely partisan gamesmanship that has supplanted any coherent long-range plans on terrorism and terrorist states. Americans were once unified after 9/11, but the country has long since become fractured -- first by Howard Dean during the '04 primaries and then by the mainstream Democratic party -- for reasons of political expediency.

The party organ of the Left, the New York Times, routinely censors stories and pictures of the WTC jumpers, the heroes of flight 93, the 500 WMD found in Iraq since 2003, the accelerating reconstruction of Iraq, the horrific attack on Beslan, the aftermath of the Madrid subway bombings, and any other evidence of the widening global conflict promoted by religious extremists against civilization.

Instead, the Times chooses to wage war on America's national security initiatives and to provide a willing channel that funnels propaganda to the enemy. The litany of wartime programs the Times has chosen to expose include rendition, SWIFT, phone-number databases, international calling pattern analysis, and the like. Counter to the Times' claims of government's overreach, not one person has gone to jail nor has anyone even been indicted over these programs.

The Times pretends instead that we are not at war. They ignore the ever-escalating conflict, which was strengthened by the A.Q. Kahn nuclear parts network and the Loral/ICBM debacle under the not-so-watchful eyes of Clinton and Albright. That leads us to the current situation with North Korea and Iran.

Michael Ledeen comments:

Iran has been at war with us all along, because that’s what the world’s leading terror state does. The scariest thing about this moment is that the Iranians have convinced themselves that they are winning, and we are powerless to reverse the tide. As I reported here several months ago, Khamenei told his top people late last year that the Americans and Israelis are both politically paralyzed. Neither can take decisive action against Iran, neither can sustain prolonged conflict and significant casualties. Meanwhile, the Supreme Leader said, the terrorists are all working for Iran, and we will expand the terror war. Don’t think for a moment that they worry about victims in Gaza or Lebanon. They are delighted to see Israel fighting on two fronts, because they will use the pictures from the battlefield to consolidate their hold over the fascist forces in the region. After a few days of fighting, I would not be surprised to see some new kind of terrorist attack against Israel, or against an American facility in the region. An escalation to chemical weapons, for example, or even the fulfillment of the longstanding Iranian promise to launch something nuclear at Israel. They meant it when they said it, don’t you know? The only way we are going to win this war is to bring down those regimes in Tehran and Damascus, and they are not going to fall as a result of fighting between their terrorist proxies in Gaza and Lebanon on the one hand, and Israel on the other. Only the United States can accomplish it.

If national security is the question, the party of weakness (and its media organ - the Times) will never be the answer.

National Review's Michael Ledeen: The Same War

David Twersky has more: War on Iran has begun