September 18, 2007
France says: "Oui! The time has come to tear Iran a new one."
Okay, I’m paraphrasing a bit; and no---I don’t know how you say that in French.
But my, my, what a difference a few European elections can make. Remember the days when Jacques Chirac’s government was doing shuttle diplomacy around the world to stop the American invasion of Iraq? Back in 2003, the Germans were also taking the fashionable anti-U.S. line.
Since then, national elections have brought conservative governments to power in both Paris and Berlin. The new French leader, Nicolas Sarkozy, is one of the few European leaders to speak frankly about the threat of radical Islam on the Continent. And Sarkozy’s government understands the implications of a nuclear-armed Iran:
France's foreign minister warned Sunday that the world should prepare for war if Iran obtains nuclear weapons and said European leaders were considering their own economic sanctions against the Islamic country. ---CNN.com
The same article reported that the American government is opting for a somewhat more low-key approach:
In Washington, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the Bush administration is committed, for now, to using diplomatic and economic means to counter the potential nuclear threat from Iran.
"I think that the administration believes at this point that continuing to try and deal with the Iranian threat, the Iranian challenge, through diplomatic and economic means is by far the preferable approach. That's the one we are using," the Pentagon chief said. ---CNN.com
You never thought you would see the day when a U.S. Republican administration would seem less hard-line than the French---did you?. But history has shown that the French are not necessarily afraid of conflict; they are simply independent. (Charles de Gaulle gave his American and British counterparts conniption fits; but he was no starry-eyed pacifist.)
I am torn here: I don’t want another major conflict in the Middle East. (It would be nice if the entire region could be neatly excised from the planet and placed elsewhere.) Nevertheless, a radical theocracy with nuclear weapons is a sure recipe for disaster. The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has long been obsessed with martyrdom; and its current president, Mahmoud Ahmandinejad, seems to be spoiling for a fight over his country’s nuclear weapons program.
