Hoover Digest

What to do about Iran’s nuclear ambition is a problem whose complexity we are all busy admiring.  It is already clear that no approach to the problem comes without significant costs and, besides which, offers no guarantee of success.  And if there are any optimists out there, as there were before the Iraq war, I haven’t run into them.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: If it’s “unacceptable” for Iran to get a nuclear weapon, or to be no more than the turn of a screwdriver away from one, and if at the same time the Iranian regime is determined to obtain one or to get that close under cover of the nonproliferation treaty’s terms for “peaceful” nuclear programs, then you have to (1) change Tehran’s mind, (2) rescind your view and accept a nuclear Iran, or (3) stop the program by force.

No one likes these choices.  Writing in the Washington Post, Ivo Daalder and Philip Gordon of the Brookings Institution set out a proposal for the hardcore sanctions involving an oil embargo and a ban on foreign investment in Iran.  If Russia, China, and India won’t go along, they say, the United States and Europe still have the capacity to turn Iran into an isolated North Korea-like pariah state.

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Printed in both The Washington Times and Hoover Digest

Based on accounts from the scene, things have clearly taken a turn for the worse in a hurry in
Darfur. At the U.N. summit in September 2005, countries included an affirmation of their “responsibility to protect” their populations and the necessity for collective action to protect people when a government fails in this basic responsibility—or worse, as in the case of the Sudan government, is actively complicit in war crimes against civilians. It would be tragic if, having declared this bold new principle, governments couldn’t bring themselves to act on it effectively in Darfur.

The problem is as it was: The Janjaweed militias—armed bands of killers, marauders, and rapists of Arab origin set up to fight a burgeoning armed resistance movement—have acted in conjunction with forces of the Khartoum government or at its behest to terrorize the black African population of Darfur, the Texas-sized western region of Sudan. The militias, often operating with assistance from helicopter gunships flown by the Sudanese military, have destroyed whole villages, driving millions of Darfuris into internally displaced persons (IDP) camps or across the border into refugee camps in Chad.

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Printed in both The Washington Times and The Hoover Digest

CHISINAU, MOLDOVA—At the checkpoint where my car is stopped, it is pretty clear from those in attendance—in assorted military garb or the ill-fitting suits that remain the uniform of the lower ranks of the successor organizations to the KGB—that there is a list inside the guardhouse with my name on it. So I will not, after all, be visiting Transnistria, the region of the former Soviet republic of Moldova that saw the worst violence in the breakup of the USSR and remains under the control of a local strongman, Igor Smirnov, who maintains his Stalinist grip thanks to an extensive security apparatus and a 1,300-strong contingent of Russian “peacekeeping” troops.

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