Playing Softball With Iran

The New York Times reports that Hezbollah is training terrorist insurgents in Iran, to attack U.S. troops in Iraq. I'm just shocked, shocked I tell you! You can read the article here. I'm not sure if anybody is really surprised about this, but I am wondering why we continue to play softball with Iran. We hem and haw, while they actively support the killing of our troops. We fart around while they strive to build a nuke. Am I the only one that sees this as, well, um, foolish? Perhaps we could send an even clearer sign of weakness to our enemies, but I doubt it.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Faoud Ajami has interesting things to say about this situation. He acknowledges that we've pussyfooted around for far too long:

"We tell the Iranians that the military option is "on the table." But three decades of playing cat-and-mouse with American power have emboldened Iran's rulers. We have played by their rules, and always came up second best.

Next door, in Iraq, Iranians played arsonists and firemen at the same time. They could fly under the radar, secure in the belief that the U.S., so deeply engaged there and in Afghanistan, would be reluctant to embark on another military engagement in the lands of Islam."

I love the analogy of "flying under the radar," since that's exactly what our planes should be doing when delivering their clear response (of the 2,000 pound, guided variety) to the imams in Tehran. You can read that article here.

There is no way to tap dance around the fact that Iran is actively supporting the attacks on our troops. They continue to get a pass, and it's frustrating as can be. I'm not sure why we're not hurling cruise missiles at Iran, the way we used to do so with Iraq, but I suspect that it's due to our current posture. We may not be best aligned to conduct large scale military operations against Iran at the moment.

I'm hoping that changes, and changes very soon. Enough is enough. I would like to see clear military pressure being put on Iran. I would like to see us demonstrate the only thing that the inhabitants of that country (and more to the point, their leaders) understand: military might. I don't think that we need to launch a full scale invasion of Iran, but we need to be prepared to, in order to follow up our limited air strikes.

Your thoughts?