It’s time to put in a good word for French president Jacques Chirac.
Last week, Chirac delivered a speech at a French submarine base warning terrorist states of a “firm and fitting response” should they attack France. The response, he said, might use conventional arms. Or it “could also be of another kind”: nuclear.
Chirac, once a hero of the pacifist left for his opposition to America’s Iraq war, has suddenly found himself transmuted into a Dr Strangelove villain in the eyes of his former admirers. “Radical and dangerous,” declared Spain’s El Pais. You’ve probably seen more of the same.
The truth is, Chirac is doing exactly his job.
France has been the victim of Islamic terrorism often in the past, and must worry about Islamic terrorism in the future. Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism: the funder and armorer of Hezbollah and the haven for large elements of al Qaeda.
Until now, Iran’s career of terrorism has been--from the point of view of the ruling mullahs--largely cost-free. What price did it pay for holding 52 American diplomats hostage? Or for the attack on the barracks of US Marines and French soldiers in Lebanon in 1983? Or for sending agents to murder Kurdish leaders in Berlin in 1992? Or for the attack on the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994?
The Iranian mullahs have reason to believe that the world is afraid of them – and not nearly sufficient reason to be afraid of the rest of the world. From their point of view, their pursuit of nuclear weapons has likewise come at a very moderate cost to their position in the world.
That is why they continue.
Chirac has just delivered the Iranians a warning that their next steps may cost them far more dearly. What else should the leader of a great nation say? Why does France possess nuclear weapons at all if not as the ultimate deterrent to the otherwise undeterrable?
The trouble with Chirac’s threat is not that it was delivered. The trouble with his threat is that it will not be believed--in large part because of his own history of weakness in international relations.
The lesson of the past two decades after all is that a state sponsor of terror can gain immunity from punishment by placing the thinnest veil of concealment over its actions When Iran killed those 58 French paratroopers in Beirut 23 years ago--it needed only to take the basic precaution of renaming its intelligence service “Hezbollah” to escape direct reprisal. Why should Iran not expect that a similar fig leaf will work in future?
The time to act against Iran is not at some hypothetical future date, after some imagined nuclear terror attack, but NOW--before it is too late. All this cluck-clucking about “no good military option,” and “Iran’s capability of retaliation” overlooks the brute fact of power, the fact that Chirac’s words ought to have recalled to us: Together, the western alliance utterly dominates Iran and can more than cope with any action that the mullahs might dare. The western alliance could remove Iran’s capacity to wage aggressive war in two weeks of airstrikes--and the more powerfully the western alliance struck, the more it would intimidate Iran from terrorist response.
The restraint upon us comes not from fear of Iran, but from the fatal mistrust of ourselves that has grown up within the democracies of the west. If Iran once again escapes the consequences of its own aggressive actions--if (as now looks probable) it goes nuclear with no more severe punishment than a resolution or two of the IAEA--the great fundamental cause will not be Iranian villainy. It will be the West’s crippling self-inflicted weakness.
David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.
