Confront Iran the Reagan Way

[Ubiquitous]

Mark Dubowitz 4th July 2017 - The Wall Street Journal

One message of President Trump’s is popular at home with his
political base and embraced abroad by key Middle Eastern allies: The
Islamic Republic of Iran is imperialist, repressive, and—unless we
adopt a new strategy—on its way toward possessing nuclear weapons.
To keep the threat at bay, Mr. Trump should take a page from the
playbook Ronald Reagan used against the Soviet Union.

In the early 1980s, President Reagan shifted away from his
predecessors’ containment strategy toward a new plan of rolling back
Soviet expansionism. The cornerstone of his strategy was the
recognition that the Soviet Union was an aggressive and
revolutionary yet internally fragile regime that had to be defeated.

Reagan’s policy was outlined in 1983 in National Security Decision
Directive 75, a comprehensive strategy that called for the use of
all instruments of American overt and covert power. The plan
included a massive defense buildup, economic warfare, support for
anti-Soviet proxy forces and dissidents, and an all-out offensive
against the regime’s ideological legitimacy.

Mr. Trump should call for a new version of NSDD-75 and go on offense
against the Iranian regime. The administration would be wise to
address every aspect of the Iranian menace, not merely the nuclear
program. President Obama’s myopic focus on disarmament paralyzed
American policy.

Under Mr. Obama’s deeply flawed nuclear accord, Tehran does not need
to cheat to reach threshold nuclear-weapons capabilities. Merely by
waiting for key constraints to sunset, the regime can emerge over
the next decade with an industrial-size enrichment program, a near-
zero breakout time, an easier clandestine path to a nuclear warhead,
long-range ballistic missiles, access to advanced conventional
weaponry, greater regional dominance, and a more powerful economy,
increasingly immunized against Western sanctions. You could call
this scenario the lethal Iranian end-state.

A new national security directive must systemically dismantle
Iranian power country by country in the Middle East. The Europeans,
traumatized by foreign fighters returning from Syria and massive
refugee flows, may support a tougher Iran policy if it means
Washington finally gets serious about Syria. The early signs of the
return of American power are promising: 59 Tomahawk missiles
launched in response to the Assad regime’s most recent chemical
attack, military strikes at Iran-backed militias in southern Syria,
the downing of a Syrian fighter plane and Iranian-made drones, and
281 Syria-related sanctions in five months.

Washington should demolish the Iranian regime’s terrorist networks
and influence operations, including their presence in Europe and the
United States. That means working closely with allied Sunni
governments against Iranian subversion of their societies. The
American offensive has already begun: CIA Director Mike Pompeo is
putting the agency on an aggressive footing against these global
networks with the development of a more muscular covert action
program.

All of Washington’s actions to push back against Tehran hinge on
severely weakening the Iranian regime’s finances. Robust measures
should target the regime’s praetorians, the Iran's Revolutionary
Guard Corps, a dominant force in Iran’s economy. New sanctions
legislation designating the IRGC for terrorism—which the Senate
recently passed with 98 votes—and the more than 40 Iran-related
sanctions imposed this year are a good start. But much more is still
needed: The IRGC’s transfer to Hezbollah of industrial-size missile
production capability based on Lebanon soil could trigger the next
Israel-Hezbollah war. Massive economic sanctions on Iran to stop
these transfers may be the only way to head off this war.

Last but not least, the American pressure campaign should seek to
undermine Iran’s rulers by strengthening the pro-democracy forces
that erupted in Iran in 2009, nearly toppling the regime. Target the
regime’s soft underbelly: its massive corruption and human-rights
abuses. Conventional wisdom assumes that Iran has a stable
government with a public united behind President Hassan Rouhani’s
vision of incremental reform. In reality, the gap between the ruled
and their Islamist rulers is expanding.

The odds that a moderate government will emerge in Tehran before the
nuclear deal’s restrictions expire are poor. Washington needs to
block the Islamic Republic’s pathways to gaining nuclear-tipped
missiles. While aggressively enforcing the nuclear agreement, the
administration should present revised terms for a follow-on deal.
These must address the current accord’s fundamental flaws, including
the sunset provisions that give Tehran a clear pathway to nuclear
weapons and the missiles to deliver them, and the inadequate access
to Iranian military sites that blocks effective verification.

The administration should present Iran the choice between a new
agreement and an unrelenting American pressure campaign while
signaling that it is unilaterally prepared to cancel the existing
deal if Tehran doesn’t play ball.

Only six years after Ronald Reagan adopted his pressure strategy,
the Soviet bloc collapsed. Washington must intensify the pressure on
the mullahs as Reagan did on the communists. Otherwise, a lethal
nuclear Iran is less than a decade away.


--
Dems & the media want Trump to be more like Obama, but then he'd
have to audit liberals & wire tap reporters' phones.

[Mitchell Holman]

Ubiquitous <web...@polaris.net> wrote in news:ojnq8o$u4n$8...@dont-email.me:

> Mark Dubowitz 4th July 2017 - The Wall Street Journal
>
> One message of President Trump’s is popular at home with his
> political base and embraced abroad by key Middle Eastern allies: The
> Islamic Republic of Iran is imperialist, repressive, and—unless we
> adopt a new strategy—on its way toward possessing nuclear weapons.
> To keep the threat at bay, Mr. Trump should take a page from the
> playbook Ronald Reagan used against the Soviet Union.
>
> In the early 1980s, President Reagan shifted away from his
> predecessors’ containment strategy toward a new plan of rolling back
> Soviet expansionism. The cornerstone of his strategy was the
> recognition that the Soviet Union was an aggressive and
> revolutionary yet internally fragile regime that had to be defeated.
>

Aren't you overlooking the fact Iran is
our ALLY in fighting ISIS?


We’re on the same side as Iran against Isis
8 June 2017

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/08/tehran-attack-isis-
iran-west-shia-ally

> Reagan’s policy was outlined in 1983 in National Security Decision
> Directive 75, a comprehensive strategy that called for the use of
> all instruments of American overt and covert power. The plan
> included a massive defense buildup, economic warfare, support for
> anti-Soviet proxy forces and dissidents, and an all-out offensive
> against the regime’s ideological legitimacy.

"Reagan's policy" was to sell arms to Iran
and then lie about it, remember?

[Byker]

"Ubiquitous" wrote in message news:ojnq8o$u4n$8...@dont-email.me...

>
> Only six years after Ronald Reagan adopted his pressure strategy, the
> Soviet bloc collapsed. Washington must intensify the pressure on the
> mullahs as Reagan did on the communists. Otherwise, a lethal nuclear Iran
> is less than a decade away.

Most of Reagan's biographers agree that The Gipper should have pounded the
hell out of Iran back in the early 80s, especially its nuclear facilities,
which were under construction at the time and posed no radioactive hazard...

[Keith Willshaw]

Of course what Reagan really did about Iran was to sell them weapons and
use the money to find the Contras in Nicaragua. We will never know for
sure how far this actually went as White hHouse official shredded the
documentary evidence rather than turning it over to investigators.

[#BeamMeUpScotty]

On 07/08/2017 09:54 AM, Keith Willshaw wrote:
> On 07/07/2017 18:52, Byker wrote:
>> "Ubiquitous" wrote in message news:ojnq8o$u4n$8...@dont-email.me...
>>>
>>> Only six years after Ronald Reagan adopted his pressure strategy, the
>>> Soviet bloc collapsed. Washington must intensify the pressure on the
>>> mullahs as Reagan did on the communists. Otherwise, a lethal nuclear
>>> Iran
>>> is less than a decade away.
>>
>> Most of Reagan's biographers agree that The Gipper should have pounded
>> the hell out of Iran back in the early 80s, especially its nuclear
>> facilities, which were under construction at the time and posed no
>> radioactive hazard...
>
> Of course what Reagan really did about Iran was to sell them weapons and
> use the money to find the Contras in Nicaragua.

What you're saying is that "Jimmy Carter" who had a reason with the
embassy being over run on his watch, had a reason and 440 days to decide
to lay waste to the country of IRAN (and he could have dismantled Iran
one piece at a time) and then build a memorial to the dead hostages....
but Jimmy Carter fucked up. Didn't "Carter" try and fail to rescue the
hostages, and didn't Reagan then decide to rebuild the military that
Carter and Democrats had turned into a useless fighting force because
they were on humanitarian missions to help feed the poor like the God
Damn Peace Corps.....


The Military needs to have a mission to save U.S. lives and to protect
U.S. interests. The world problems are at the feet of the U.N. NOT the
United States. TRUMP is correct, the United States comes first, the
money we paid to the UN was supposed to help the world and if it was
money that was stolen then it wasn't worth wasting and we need to spend
it on the Military to fix problems like IRAN when they they pop up.

It seems the problem isn't Iran so much as it was the United Nations and
the Liberals. It turns out Jimmy Carter was the problem and Reagan was
the fix. Good or bad for Liberals, a strong military and President that
is always ready to fight is the best defense against the likes of the
Iranians.
--
That's Karma

[Topaz]

Our Man in Iran: How the CIA and MI6 Installed the Shah
Leon Hadar - Reason
http://reason.com/archives/2013/02/16/our-man-in-iran
... Topping the list of those successes - if success is the right word
for an operation whose long-term effects were so disastrous - was the
August 1953 overthrow of Iran's elected leader and the installment of
the unpopular and authoritarian Shah in his place. Operation Ajax, as
it was known, deserves that old cliché: If it didn't really happen,
you'd think that it was a plot imagined by a Hollywood scriptwriter
peddling anti-American conspiracies. Ervand Abrahamian isn't a
Hollywood scriptwriter but a renowned Iranian-American scholar who
teaches history at the City University of New York. With The Coup, he
has authored a concise yet detailed and somewhat provocative history
of the 1953 regime change, which the CIA conducted with the British
MI6.

www.tomatobubble.com www.ihr.org http://nationalvanguard.org

http://national-socialist-worldview.blogspot.com

[Zinger]

On 7/9/2017 4:38 PM, Topaz wrote:

The whole point and Plan was to destabilize the Middle East for many
decades. That what the Activities of the CIA in that area encompassed.

--
Amendment II

A well regulated militia, being necessary to
the security of a free State, the right of the people
to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed

[Gronk]

Ubiquitous wrote:
>

LOL