WANT OF WILL

Regarding the Iran crisis, Wretchard has this to say:

The most interesting thing about the structure of the standoff between the West and Iran is that what chiefly prevents a regime change in Teheran is not the want of means, but the want of will. The ayatollah's fundamental defense lies in the well-founded belief that the United States has expended too much political capital in deposing Saddam to undertake another regime change operation in Teheran. Safety for the ayatollahs does not consist in the assurance that there aren't enough US ground, air and naval units to smash their regime, but in the calculation that no American President would chance it after three years of political pillorying for OIF.

But he goes on to suggest that in the deadly game we play with Iran, our best ally might in fact be the craziness of Ahmadinejad, whose bellicose and aggressively arrogant behavior may push that will in the direction to enforce a regime change. (Read it all for some excellent analysis). If Ahmadinejad simply smiled and went quietly about his nuclear business, the appeasers of the West would remain fat and happy ("hear no evil, see no evil" is their motto, after all).

But the current President of Iran can be counted on to respond to even the most minimal provocation in an outrageous and probably psychotic manner.

The West's appeasement; want of will; confusion about its own values; --these are the weapons that all the Islamofascist leaders have chosen to use against us--using the smug, cloying politically correct arguments of those who feel righteously and morally superior to disarm criticism (observe Cindy Sheehan and those who idolize her for her behavior for an example of this strategy as it is used by today's Left).

A punch here; a jab there; will make the facade of moral superiority slip; and the rage and delusion will be obvious to all reasonable people--if it isn't already.

Let us hope that among the 50 percent or so of our population who have been gleefully indulging in the intellectual and moral relativism that has permitted the insanity of Iran to marinate over the last 30 years or so; that there is still some small resevoir of reason and objectivity that will eventually awaken them to the world's mortal peril.

In too many of the life-or-death situations that I have dealt with as a physician, "want of will" has led inevitably to loss of life.