Learning to Love Iran’s Nuke … Or Not

“There’s no such thing as monsters,” Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) tells his young daughter in the movie History of Violence. If only that were true. What a wonderful world it would be. But we realists know that it is not true and that monsters come in all shapes and sizes and that they can’t be reasoned with; only put down.

Another day, another ship taken. Skirmishing in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran behaving badly but, calculatingly, not so badly as to cause modern-day America or Britain to react militarily (disproportionately as they say). Extra sanctions maybe; expensive naval escorts. The monsters in this story, the mullahs, are not quaking in their boots.

And all the while the West is distracted by the inconvenience of Iranian piracy, the clock is ticking on the real threat. Soon enough the mullahs will get their nukes. Is there any doubt of that apart from among the starry-eyed? Only action of a disproportionate kind can stop them? Wishing and hoping and dodgy John Kerry…