How Do You Solve a Problem Like Sharia?

Blame that pun on Mark Steyn who writes today about confronting Iran:

That moment of ascendancy is now upon us. Or as the Daily Telegraph in London reported: “Iran’s hardline spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies.” Hmm. I’m not a professional mullah, so I can’t speak to the theological soundness of the argument, but it seems a religious school in the Holy City of Qom has ruled that “the use of nuclear weapons may not constitute a problem, according to sharia.” Well, there’s a surprise. How do you solve a problem? Like, sharia! It’s the one-stop shop for justifying all your geopolitical objectives.

The bad cop/worse cop routine the mullahs and their hothead President Ahmadinejad are playing in this period of alleged negotiation over Iran’s nuclear program is the best indication of how all negotiations with Iran will go once they’re ready to fly. This is the nuclear version of the NRA bumper sticker: “Guns Don’t Kill People. People Kill People.” Nukes don’t nuke nations. Nations nuke nations. When the Argentine junta seized British sovereign territory in the Falklands, the generals knew that the United Kingdom was a nuclear power, but they also knew that under no conceivable scenario would Her Majesty’s Government drop the big one on Buenos Aires. The Argie generals were able to assume decency on the part of the enemy, which is a useful thing to be able to do.
But in any contretemps with Iran the other party would be foolish to make a similar assumption. That will mean the contretemps will generally be resolved in Iran’s favor.

In fact, if one were a Machiavellian mullah, the first thing one would do after acquiring nukes would be to hire some obvious loon like President Ahmaddamatree to front the program. He’s the equivalent of the yobbo in the English pub who says, “Oy, mate, you lookin’ at my bird?” You haven’t given her a glance, or him; you’re at the other end of the bar head down in the Daily Mirror, trying not to catch his eye. You don’t know whether he’s longing to nut you in the face or whether he just gets a kick out of terrifying you into thinking he wants to. But, either way, you just want to get out of the room in one piece. Kooks with nukes is one-way deterrence squared.

If Belgium becomes a nuclear power, the Dutch have no reason to believe it would be a factor in, say, negotiations over a joint highway project. But Iran’s nukes will be a factor in everything. If you think, for example, the European Union and others have been fairly craven over those Danish cartoons, imagine what they’d be like if a nuclear Tehran had demanded a formal apology, a suitable punishment for the newspaper, and blasphemy laws specifically outlawing representations of the Prophet. Iran with nukes will be a suicide bomber with a radioactive waist.

I'm always mystified by the people who insist that we cannot stop Iran from getting nukes because we have nukes, as though the presence of nuclear weapons in American hands poses the same moral dilemma they will pose in Iranian hands. There is no moral equivalence between the two.

Granted, the U.S. is the only country ever to use nukes in anger, but that was in 1945 and was done to end a war that had dragged on for nearly 4 years and cost millions of lives. Without the nukes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an invasion of Japan would have been necessary at a cost of untold millions more Japanese military and civilians, not to mention the invading allied forces.

Since then we've had plenty of opportunities to create an "unscheduled sunrise" in some troubled part of the world in order to put a stop once and for all to some irritant, but we've refrained from doing so. We also have not threatened to destroy our neighbors...something which Iran has wished on Israel numerous times.

Given the "religion of peace" which encourages its adherents to kill non-believers, and now apparently has no problem doing so with nukes, the world cannot allow nuclear weapons in Iranian hands...ever.

UPDATE: Iran claims membership in the nuke club.