GOP Vixen

A provocation by Iran could influence our election

Yesterday in my Los Angeles Daily News column (what can I say, I'm a bit behind) I analyzed how Iran could benefit from their high-seas provocations. More:

Considering the timing of their provocation - when press attention was turned elsewhere, as were the eyes of Capitol Hill - what meaning did their actions hold?

Considering recent U.S. military history - aka the suicide-boat bomber plowing into the USS Cole off Yemen in 2000 - the Iranians knew very well that speedboats zipping toward ships constituted a provocative act, regardless of where the accompanying audio originated. If we assume - as cannot be refuted by Iran's release of a five-minute video supposedly detailing the 20-minute incident - that Iran's speedboats were messing around with the warships, this high-seas bullying would be backed up by the pattern of British sailors being taken hostage in 2004 and 2007.

And, finally, consider that if Iran provokes us into a response with its dangerous games, it could alter the course of the election.      

For all of the Ramsey Clark fringe lefties that have insisted we're just dying to attack Iran next, being goaded into battle by the Islamic Republic would turn into mainstream left-of-

center ammunition charging that Republicans are uncontrollably militaristic and not - dare I say - "change agents."      

Iran desperately needs an anti-war president to win in 2008. It needs the heat off its back, particularly as it proceeds with its nuclear "energy" program and forges alliances with anti-American regimes in Latin America. "We must get ready to rule the world ... the Islamic government in Iran is the prerequisite for a worldwide Islamic state," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in fall 2006.

In its Jan. 8 coverage of the New Hampshire primaries, the Islamic Republic News Agency focused solely on Barack Obama's poll lead over Hillary Clinton going into the day's vote. "But I don't want to just end the war, I want to change the mind-set that got us into the war," IRNA quoted Obama, apparently from a rally the day before the primary. No doubt IRNA eagerly interpreted this as a de facto acceptance of American blame.

Obama had already earned points last summer, though, by stating he would meet with rogue leaders including Iran, thus offering legitimacy to a regime that frequently trumpets "Death to America" and "Death to Israel."

Read the whole thing!

Flogger Blogger

   A couple of weeks ago a 14 year old boy in Iran was flogged to death for eating during Ramadan. Iran’s paramilitary police force were to give the boy 85 lashes with a METAL CABLE and they expected him be OK? And this is common in Iran for such minor offenses.

The news from Iran is not all bad though. It seems that when Ahmadinejad is not sanctioning flogging, he does a little blogging. The New York Times positively gushes about what a great guy Ahmadinejad seems to be based on his blogs. They even include poignant passages from the big man in Iran such as, "…the smile of an orphan is more important than the contentment of greedy rulers." That begs the question, what if that orphan happens to be a Jewish child? Better yet, what if that Jewish child was made an orphan because a Hamas nut-puppy lobbed a Katushka rocket into their home killing their parents? Why do I get the impression that such a scenario makes Ahmadinejad smile?

NIE not a get-out-of-sanctions-free card

Continuing with my conversation with U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Zalmay Khalilzad, my Los Angeles Daily News column today focuses on the fallout from the NIE:

"The fact still remains that Iran is blithely in violation of the Security Council resolutions on its uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities, and uranium can be used for malignant purposes as well as benign energy production.

'We must get ready to rule the world,' Ahmadinejad said last year. '...The Islamic government in Iran is the prerequisite for a worldwide Islamic state.'

And in that quest, Ahmadinejad has gotten cozy with other rogue, would-be totalitarian world rulers, like meetings with neo-Marxist regimes in Latin America that puts Iranian interests a little too close to the border of the "Great Satan" for comfort.

'We know that the Middle East for us is geopolitically the most difficult and the most important region,' Khalilzad said. 'In Iran, of course, there's the sanction threat because it wants to dominate the region, ... because of its policies in Iraq and Afghanistan that we talked about, because of its policies in Lebanon, its support for Hamas in Gaza and ... its opposition to the peace process, its opposition to Israel's existence, support for extremists and sometimes terrorist groups. Iran poses a threat in that theater.'

The ambassador said Iran, Venezuela and Russia - a veto-wielder at the Security Council - currently share some common rhetorical ground.

'But at the same time, as you say, they have these economic relations and military relationship in terms of supplying weapons, and we have been obviously engaging the Russians very intensely to get them to reduce that positive engagement and to use their influence to get Iran to suspend its nuclear program,' Khalilzad said. ..."

Read the whole thing!

Ahmadinejad at summer camp

30 years ago -- my, my, how some things never change!!

Offering carrots to Iran carries a heavy price

Check out my Los Angeles Daily News column about carrots and sticks, Barack Obama's dunderheaded grasp of foreign policy, and the reality about a lil' regime called the Islamic Republic of Iran:

"Abbas Khorsandi has a dream of democracy.

In 2004, the economics professor in the Iranian town of Firouzkouh was arrested for helping form the Democratic Party of Iran, along with five other activists located in different cities around the country. Khorsandi was tortured and warned to stop his democracy activism, and was released on bail a few months later after suffering a heart attack.

On Sept. 17, the 50-year-old with two small children was arrested again, taken to the notorious Ward 209 of Evin Prison, where it is believed that those who go in stand a much slimmer chance of coming out alive. Charged with taking action against the security of the government and establishing an illegal organization (political party), Khorsandi has been allowed no legal representation and his wife, who has been told to stop coming to the courthouse to inquire about her husband, has only received information about him through another inmate, a human-rights activist who received a five-minute trial with no representation.

Khorsandi's situation, we're told, is 'grave,' and the only way to save the life of a man with no trial date and whose case is shrouded in morbid silence is to 'make noise.'

Iran has been on the lips of a bigger and richer Democratic Party, the one here in the U.S. Sen. Barack Obama last week expressed his eagerness to meet directly with Iranian leaders to 'engage in aggressive personal diplomacy.'

...'There are both carrots and there are sticks available to them for those changes in behavior,' he said. These bribes could include membership in the World Trade Organization and backing off any aims of 'regime change' - in other words, hanging the Khorsandis out to dry.

Would Obama, swiftly becoming the master of confounding foreign policy, have the campfire singalong with Iran before or after he attacks Pakistan?..."

Read the whole thing!

Also worth noting: On the "Today" show last week, Obama lifted up China as a model example of the value of diplomatic gestures in ensuring progress. There was no indication of the senator believing we should hang our heads in shame for extending a hand to a regime that still leads the world in executions, political prisoners, forced re-education through labor, heinous violations of reproductive rights and religious rights, and the incarceration of journalists and bloggers for exercising free speech.

Oh, his witty irony!

From Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Web site:

"President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said here Thursday that the Islamic Republic of Iran seeks to resolve differences through dialogue and welcomes any suggestion to this end.

President Ahmadinejad made the remark in a meeting with a group of blind persons.

...'Unfortunately, our enemies cannot tolerate to see our success and try to throw obstacles in our way,' said the president."

The picture at the link is priceless, too, with some poor sunglassed guy standing next to Mahmoud. ("There are no blind people in Iran!") Of course, this also opens the floor up to all sorts of cracks, like about the blind leading the blind...

Putin a marked man in Iran? Whatever

Putin calls off -- er, delays -- his trip to Iran because Russian intelligence claims that he'll be targeted for demolition by suicide bombers. I hate to be this flip in the Age of Terror, but I've gotta say: Whatever. Unless we're talking about some Chechens who bought tickets to Tehran, I'm really not buying that something would happen to Vlad visiting a regime that he couldn't be more kiss-kiss, huggy huggy with at the moment. Iran needs veto-wielder Russia to stonewall action against its nuclear program at the Security Council. Iran also needs Putin -- who's pretending to be the great peacemaker in this situation -- to divert attention as they enrich their uranium. And as far as suppliers... well, let's just say they have BFF written all over them.

And let's be serious -- when the Russian secret service is hot on the trail of a supposed assassination plot, it's not exactly something they'd put on the front-page news. Hence the word "secret." It is, however, worthwhile to cook up a bit of faux news as a P.R. stunt: Putin braves suicide bombing threats to trek to Tehran to make "peace" (cough cough)!

A hard-line newspaper in Iran said it all:

"Iran can use the visit to lobby for getting our nuclear dossier out of the U.N. Security Council and Russia can strengthen its opposition to the U.S. through boosting ties with Tehran."

Ahhh, so cozy....

'I'll be back, doofus mullahs!'

Congratulations to Gov. Schwarzenegger for signing a bill today banning the California Public Employees' Retirement System and the California State Teachers' Retirement System from investing in companies that do business in Iran. Hopefully Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's performance at Columbia University would have shown everyone how mad the regime in the Islamic Republic is, but the pension funds still opposed the bill. Too bad, because somewhere you've got to draw a line in the sand and take a stand for what's humane and right. And Arnold did that. Yay to Arnold!

Just when you thought the Ahmadinejad gay jokes were over...

Those freaky-deeky mullahs!

An excerpt from an address delivered by Hasan Rahimpur Azghadi of the Iranian Supreme Council for Cultural Revolution, which aired on Iranian TV -- the land of no homosexuals, as Ahmadinejad told us earlier this week -- on Sept. 3:

"[The Westerners] have transgressed all moral boundaries... The husband and wife are no longer satisfied with one another, and they begin having relations with other men and women. After a while, they start thinking that since they have already experienced this, it is time to try homosexuality. Then, they think this is old-fashioned, and they turn to animals. These things happen in the West. After a while, when they get bored with this, they turn to small children. ... They have now begun turning to objects. There are big factories that produce artificial genitals, and they sell them in stores. A sex shop is a store that sells sex toys."

Er, it sounds like he's speaking from, um, experience...

This goes perfectly with Iranian blogger Ardeshir Dolat's observation that pedophilia gets a thumbs-up where girls are fair game the minute they get their first period:

"I found it incredible when somebody at the UN put it to the terrorist president that she personally knew three homosexuals in Iran, the geezer asked for their names and addresses!! ... However, what is recognised and worse than that not criminal, is pedophilia. ... So having sex with a female child as young as 7 is legitimate and there is no court in Iran that will punish a man for legally having sex with a girl as young as 7."