Calculus Lesson

Charles Krauthammer offers an exceedingly grim calculus lesson. It really requires serious contemplation. There are certain things which must be taken into consideration about Iran. We are running out of time to consider them before we are forced to act.

In his televised Sept. 11 address, President Bush said that we must not "leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons." There's only one such current candidate: Iran.

The next day, he responded thus (as reported by Rich Lowry and Kate O'Beirne of National Review) to a question on Iran: "It's very important for the American people to see the president try to solve problems diplomatically before resorting to military force."

"Before" implies that the one follows the other. The signal is unmistakable. An aerial attack on Iran's nuclear facilities lies just beyond the horizon of diplomacy. With the crisis advancing and the moment of truth approaching, it is important to begin looking now with unflinching honesty at the military option.

The costs will be terrible:

Krauthammer goes on to describe those terrible costs. They are ones, I assure you, that are grim, indeed. We approach this point because of the wholesale failure of the world to unite and see the approaching danger. The useless attempts to try the same old tired 'dialog' and 'negotiate' without ever acknowledging that those things work only when both sides are trying to achieve a solution. Otherwise, they are a waste of time and give the party acting in bad faith additional time to accomplish what it wants.

In the region, Persian Iran will immediately become the hegemonic power in the Arab Middle East. Today it is deterred from overt aggression against its neighbors by the threat of conventional retaliation. Against a nuclear Iran, such deterrence becomes far less credible. As its weak, nonnuclear Persian Gulf neighbors accommodate to it, jihadist Iran will gain control of the most strategic region on the globe.

Then there is the larger danger of permitting nuclear weapons to be acquired by religious fanatics seized with an eschatological belief in the imminent apocalypse and in their own divine duty to hasten the End of Days. The mullahs are infinitely more likely to use these weapons than anyone in the history of the nuclear age. Every city in the civilized world will live under the specter of instant annihilation delivered either by missile or by terrorist. This from a country that has an official Death to America Day and has declared since Ayatollah Khomeini's ascension that Israel must be wiped off the map.

Be assured of one thing: those countries denouncing American "hegemony" the loudest are complaining because they want hegemony for themselves. A nuclear Iran would be the worst danger this world has ever seen.

This is the grim calculus. Work the answers out.