Appeasing Iran

From IBD:
Posted 4/5/2006

Terrorism: Intelligence officials are worried that Iranian agents could wreak havoc around the world if we step in against Iran's nuclear program. But should we wait for the day when they can wreak nuclear havoc?
The Washington Post reports that U.S. intelligence officials were spreading the word that a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities would result in Iran deploying operatives to conduct terrorist attacks in Iraq, Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere. The anonymous intelligence sources refused to discuss the evidence for their suspicions, claiming it was classified.

Just as disturbing, Iranian negotiator Javad Vaeedi, speaking in Vienna, Austria, last month, said of the U.S.: "It may have the power to cause harm and pain, but it is also susceptible to harm and pain. So if the United States wants to pursue that path, let the ball roll."

Here again we have the surreal spectacle of intelligence officials — whose job is to collect and protect state secrets — going to the newspapers with information to which they're privy with the aim of undermining White House policy. Do these nameless contacts ever consider that no one elected them to the positions they hold?

Or that they serve at the behest of an elected commander in chief?

Now that America's spying agencies serve under the authority of a director of national intelligence, and it's harder for their competing bureaucracies to play petty turf wars, it appears that intelligence officials with gripes feel entitled to go to the press instead.

Truth is, Iranian and Iranian-backed operatives are already at war with the U.S., and it's been that way for a long time. Iran may have had a role in the Golden Dome mosque bombing in the Iraqi town of Samarra in February. The obvious motivation was to plunge Iraq into civil war and cause our mission there to fail.

Iranian agents are also working against U.S. interests in Pakistan. And let's not forget that it was the Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah that truck-bombed the Beirut Marine barracks in 1983, killing 241 Americans.

If they've been doing all this against us for nearly a quarter-century, appeasing them today won't stop them; it will only embolden them. The last thing the world can do is sit by and let the enemies of civilization who run Iran build nuclear weapons.

If America's spy agencies disagree, they should be presenting their evidence to their boss — the president — not the Washington press corps.