A reminder of what we face

The Telegraph had a couple of articles today which serve as a sobering reminder of the nature of the Iranian regime.

The first hints at how Iran might strike back if threatened.

Iran held secret talks with Shia militant leaders from Iraq and Lebanon only days before the country's nuclear negotiators threatened America with "harm and pain", independent sources in Teheran have revealed.

The Iraqi firebrand cleric, Moqtadr al-Sadr and the chief of the armed Shia group Hizbollah in Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah, held separate consultations with leading officials in Teheran.

Al-Sadr commands thousands of fighters in Iraq, with the power to destabilise further the country and target British and American troops, while Hizbollah's missile-wielding fighters are stationed on Lebanon's southern border with Israel. The revelation of their visits to Teheran has stoked fears that Iran's Shia clerical rulers are drawing up plans to wage a co-ordinated proxy war, using foreign Shia militias, in the worsening dispute with the West over its nuclear ambitions.

The second illustrates the human toll exacted by this brutal regime.

She is the female figurehead of what she hopes will become a new Iranian revolution. Now, after almost 25 years in exile, the world is beginning to beat a path to her door.

Maryam Rajavi wants those who visit her near Paris to know what sort of regime Iran's mullahs are running.

As the leader of the largest exiled Iranian opposition group, she talks angrily of the 15-year-old boy flogged to death for eating during Ramadan, and the girl of 13 buried up to her neck and stoned for a similarly trivial "crime".

When she describes the punishments meted out by Iran's rulers, a picture of the limp bodies of two hanged men suspended from a crane is projected onto a screen.

She waves a large bound book that, she says, contains the names of 21,676 people who have died resisting the clerical regime. Another 120,000 people have been executed since the mullahs took power in 1979, she claims. Now Iran's rulers are trying to develop a nuclear weapon.

"We have always said that a viper cannot give birth to a dove, but nobody believed us," she told the Sunday Telegraph. "Only a fraction of the true nature of this regime, which is a brutal dictatorship of religious fanaticism, has come to public attention."

Let me say I am not opposed to sanctions. I don't believe military action should be the first option. It should be our last option. I would support crippling sanctions, and that would have to include an embargo on Iranian oil.

However, I fear that some who support sanctions against Iran as the only legitimate option do so because they feel it wouldn't cost us anything. It's the easy way out. Prevent a few Iranian diplomats from traveling, prevent the sale of a few Persian rugs, and we'll be fine. Iran will come around.

But, Iran is the chief state supporter of terrorism. As the article explained, Iran is weighing its options among its terrorist clients, planning how it might use them. And the regime already terrorizes its own citizens.

This regime cannot be allowed to possess nuclear weapons. There is no easy way out, but backing down will only cost us more in the long run. We cannot defeat evil on the cheap. If the UN imposes sanctions, they had better be costly so that we feel it in our pocketbook. Perhaps enough pressure could be brought to bear that way, and combined with internal unrest, it might be enough to influence change in Iran.

But if not, Iran is betting it can ride out any storm. All the doom and gloom talk lately about Iraq, and how the Bush administration has goofed up and is losing support, can only give Iran hope that we have no stomach for a fight.

I'll respect anyone's belief that military action is not an answer, but only if they can explain to me how Iran would not be more dangerous in the long run.

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