Faster, Please

National Review
April 1, 2002

While we dither on and on, the brave and the innocent are being murdered throughout the Middle East by the enemies of freedom and democracy. These deaths, from Israeli hotel dining rooms and public markets, to the Arab and Iranian streets, are our responsibility. President Bush announced we would wage war on the terror network, and then permitted his policymakers to paralyze the war, and rollback his promises to take the struggle to the terrorists' homelands. Thus, the Passover massacres. Thus, the ongoing brutality against the Iranian people. Thus, the ongoing incitement to jihad against Jews and Americans in the Palestinian, Iraqi, Iranian, Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian and Saudi press. Thus, the incredible lies in Saudi newspapers accusing Jews of draining the blood of young Muslims for festival pastries, and inventing an anti-Semitic Benjamin Franklin to justify the murder of Jews throughout the world. Anyone who believes that Saudi Arabia is a "moderate" country after all this should be forced to read Mein Kampf daily for a year, to perform a comparative analysis of Saudi publications, and to memorize Hitler's peace plans for Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland.

For those keeping score, the Iranian Islamic Republic's top medical authority, Dr. Seyed-Ali Mahfoozi, announced this week that over 2,800 unidentified bodies have been buried in the last year. This brave proclamation came along with his rejection of government claims that several people killed in recent celebrations of the Iranian New Year, Norouz, were killed by accidental explosions of fireworks. "There are no records at the State's Legal Medicine Administration about any death having resulted due to fire crackers and explosives," he announced.

In other words, they were killed by the secret police.

The most recent victim, Mehdi Kashkouyi, was killed in Djahrom during a celebration of the Norouz Fire Festival, which has been banned by the regime. Kashkouyi was trying to prevent the assault of Bassij (secret police) forces against women celebrating the Zoroastrian holiday.

The violence has spread in recent days to the holiest cities in Iran, including Qom and Mashad and, inevitably, in Tehran itself. In Qom, government forces assaulted Shia holymen, including the children of some of the country's leading ayatollahs, both during the Shia mourning ritual of Ashura (the holiest day of the Shia calendar) and the funeral of the sister of Ayatollah Montazeri, an open critics of the regime who has been under house arrest for years. These Shia leaders consider the Islamic Republic a blasphemous regime, and they, along with their largely youthful followers, intend to continue their public defiance today, as the regime masses ever larger numbers of armed gangs.

These grim developments go unremarked by our "reporters" (even though most of it is available on the Internet, in English), and are greeted with cowardly silence from our leading policymakers. All manner of sensitive information about our military planning leaks from the intelligence community, but not a word about the systematic terror directed against the Iranian people, who look in despair to Washington for the support to which they are so richly entitled. This administration is betraying freedom-seeking people all over the Middle East, just as Bush the Elder did in the last days of the Gulf War, and just as Clinton did for eight shameful years.

Is there no resolve in this administration to right our past wrongs, defeat our enemies, and bring freedom to those who are dying in its cause? Do our feckless diplomats not know that they are writing shameful, terrible pages of autobiography while the terror network plans its next assault against us and our friends and allies?

President Bush has been remarkably consistent and correct: this war cannot be won until it defeats the regimes that sponsor terrorism. Iran is the mother of Islamic terrorism, and it has worked hand-in-glove with Yasser Arafat and the PLO for 30 years. Therefore the only coherent strategy for the United States is one that defeats the Islamic Republic and the PLO, along with the other terror masters in Riyadh, Damascus, and Baghdad.

The talk about peace, and the endless "plans" that emerge from one capital or another, are no more and no less than stalling tactics by those who oppose the president's vision. Peace in this world only follows victory in war. Enough talking, Mr. President. We've given our enemies too much time to plan their next murders. If we continue to dither, we condemn even more innocent people to their graves. Let's roll again. Faster, please.

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