A Valentine from Michael Ledeen about Iran

Call me crazy, but I'm thinking Mr. Ledeen is on to something here in this sweetheart of a column. Make that I HOPE he is onto something when he says this:

But the really big Iranian news came from Europe with the announcement that the EU’s experts have concluded that they have totally failed to deter the Iranians’ nuclear-weapons program. "At some stage we must expect that Iran will acquire the capacity to enrich uranium on the scale required for a weapons program," according to an internal EU document quoted by the Financial Times. As the FT glumly reports, all EU governments have been informed of this conclusion, along with the (obvious) analysis: "the problems with Iran will not be resolved through economic sanctions alone." Or by economic bribes, either. The EU, along with the U.S., have offered all manner of seductive goodies to the mullahs, but it didn’t work, as they surely knew from the beginning. Everybody knew.

Or did they? One has to wonder whether the president and the secretary of State knew it would fail. They certainly gave it unrestrained rhetorical support. If you buy the theory that W’s foreign policy is simply the application of winning poker to geopolitics, then you will think that, just as in the run-up to Iraq, he simply outwaited the Europeans. Knowing diplomacy had no chance, he let them play out the string. Now they must fold, and he is ratcheting up the ante against the mullahs.

This would also explain the timing of our newfound toughness. With the failure of the EU initiative, there was reduced concern that the Europeans would attack us for stepping up the pressure on the Iranians. This is reflected in a series of economic measures taken by European financial institutions, which will make life in Iran even more difficult. It would be really great if somebody found where Khamenei and the other oligarchs have stashed their private loot (I think a lot of it is in China, by the way)...and put it in escrow for a free Iran.

One can dream, can’t one? One can even dream that we will act faster. Please.

Yes, please.