More than a month after Barack Obama’s “deadline” for Iran to reply to his various attempts at diplomatic engagement expired without a peep out of the administration, the Islamist regime sent up a signal that they continue to view Washington’s effort at appeasement with contempt. Iranian television announced today that the country had launched a rocket into space capable of carrying satellites. The Kavoshgar rocket was the third Iranian satellite launched in the last year and a half and is an indication that they are pressing ahead with developing a missile program to compliment their nuclear-weapons project.
The rocket is said to have carried a rat, two turtles, and worms into space in what we are supposed to think is a scientific program with only peaceful intentions. Meanwhile, the rat that the Iranians left on the ground, Holocaust-denying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, bragged that the launch was “just the start” of a new era of development, though he claims it’s all for science, not military threats. The point here is that this launch, like so many other Iranian provocations, proves that Tehran thinks it can act with impunity and that Obama’s declared intention to stop it from gaining nuclear capability is something to be laughed at. Last week, reports noted that the United States is stepping up its efforts to protect Persian Gulf countries against Iranian missile attacks. The Iranians seem to be reminding other nations in the region that the Americans aren’t to be taken seriously.
Whatever the actual implications of this particular launch, it is certainly a sign that while the West has spent the last year talking about talking and immersed in diplomatic dithering, the Iranians are proceeding at full speed to develop both nuclear arms and a system that could potentially deliver a device to a target. News reports filtering out of Washington claim that the United States is preparing to ask the United Nations to enact sanctions against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, the military group that controls the nuclear-arms program. But we already know that neither China nor Russia will never let serious sanctions pass. In fact, we knew that a year ago but Obama’s feckless attempts to appease both nations by betraying our allies in Eastern Europe as well as the Chinese human-rights movement in the intervening months have only reinforced this realization. After the expected failure at the UN, the administration’s next option will be to ask our European allies to join us in unilaterally imposing these sanctions. But given the reluctance of many of our European friends to give up doing business with Iran, the outcome of this gambit is far from certain. Even if the West unites to back sanctions against the Revolutionary Guards, this will take many months, providing even more time for Iran to make further nuclear “progress.” Meanwhile, the regime will continue secure in its knowledge that Obama will not actively support Iranian dissidents, some of whom seem to have given up on reversing the fake election that put Ahmadinejad back into office last summer. Barack Obama’s lapsed deadline and the prospect of many more months of failed “engagement” are just what Ahmadinejad and the mullahs who control Iran wanted.
