Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism: A Call to Action by George Weigel

Author:George Weigel [Weigel, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group
Published: 2009-02-03T16:00:00+00:00

Former CIA director R. James Woolsey, who has also been sounding the warning signals about the Iranian threat for years, agreed with Timmerman's approach in January 2007 testimony before the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the U.S. House of Representatives. Stressing that there are no “easy answers” to the very difficult problem Iran poses, Woolsey, “convinced that the Iranian regime is fundamentally incorrigible,” but “not yet ready to propose an all-out use of military force to change the regime and halt its nuclear program,” argued that “we should opt for trying to bring about, nonviolently, a regime change” by engaging “with the Iranian people, not their oppressors.”9

Both Timmerman and Woolsey argue that any engagement with the Iranian regime gives it a legitimacy it has demonstrated that it does not deserve, and would be, in any case, read as weakness by President Ahmadinejad and by the mullahs who are in ultimate control of Iranian politics. Late in the day as it may be, the more prudent course, Timmerman and Woolsey suggest, is to recognize that the current Iranian regime is in a de facto state of belligerency against the West, and to conduct the war from our side through political means, primarily by separating the Iranian people from the Iranian regime. Tim-merman's and Woolsey's specific suggestions for conducting such a war-including extensive public diplomacy, massive financing of reform groups in Iran, economic sanctions to defund the regime's adventurism, and revamped western broadcasting to Iran-may be found in their works referenced in the notes at the end of this book. The primary point to be stressed here is that, if deterrence cannot work visa-vis Iran, something must be made to work. And if the strategic goal in Iran is regime change, which both the magnitude of the threat and the likely impossibility of deterrence suggest it must be, then specific tactics must be aimed at effecting regime change in Tehran as soon as possible. Whatever the passions of the apocalyptics in control of the Iranian government, it is not easy to believe that the majority of the Iranian people are eager to become a national suicide bomb. That suggests a direction for policy even at this late date.

A policy of regime change in Iran will not be easy to sell in a world accustomed to appeasement. That is why a declared policy of regime change in Iran ought to be accompanied by a bold and dramatic stroke on the part of the United States, suggested in early 2007 by former secretaries of state George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger, former secretary of defense William J. Perry, and former senator Sam Nunn: the United States should, in concert with as many allies as it can gather, particularly from among the present nuclear powers, declare that its settled policy is the pursuit, over time and with careful monitoring, of the abolition of nuclear weapons throughout the world. Shultz and his colleagues fear, with good reason, that “the world is now on the precipice

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