http://www.nysun.com/article/39450
Iran Is Cuba BY JOHN BATCHELOR September 12, 2006 URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/39450 What's wrong with a revolutionary, terror-sponsoring state, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, acquiring nuclear weapons? The Washington case is that nuclear warheads in the hands of a messianic cult led by the race-supremacist Council of Experts at Qom and the Holocaust-denying Ahmadinejad at Teheran means that the world is again on the brink. Can this be verified? The Iranian Revolutionary Guards cannot prove the negative - that they won't use atomic weapons and Washington can't prove the positive - that Teheran will distribute weapons to proxies to use pre-emptively. Recent history is a good guide to what it means for a revolutionary rogue state to possess a first strike nuclear arsenal while it is protected from United Nations Security Council sanctions by veto-bearing facilitators (i.e. Russia and China), and the record is both dire and prescient. We remember the episode as the Cuban missile crisis, though it is better recalled as a time when America and Russia came so close to mutually assured destruction that principals in Washington and Moscow separately assumed that the last sunset was at hand. In 1962, Nikita Khrushchev, enraged by the forward deployment of American nuclear-tipped missiles in Turkey, launched Operation Anadyr to forward deploy up to forty Soviet medium-range nuclear warhead missiles in the revolutionary rogue state of Cuba. Dictator Fidel Castro, his homicidal brother Raul, and their pet anarchist, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, were delighted: their collective interpretation was that they could now avenge themselves for the Bay of Pigs fiasco of the year before. Soon, in Byzantine secrecy, up to fifty thousand Soviet military personnel, including first-rate combat troops, were billeted throughout the island while the rocket teams made the R-12s and R-14s operational. By accident, an American U-2 discovered the threat on October 16. The defenseless, midterm-election-challenged Kennedy administration panicked. President Kennedy's first instinct was to order air strikes on the missile sites. But when he was told the Soviets would be a less than 100% success, the president blinked. Working through a partisan council of wise men - led by the undisciplined Bobby Kennedy - President Kennedy opened clumsy, inarticulate negotiations with Khrushchev at the same time he ordered a blockade of Cuba and an immediate buildup of an invasion force at nearby Puerto Rico. A week passed without clarity, with finger-wagging hysteria on both sides, and then on Saturday, October 27, all reason failed. First, a drunken Fidel Castro wrote Khrushchev to demand a nuclear launch immediately. Then a Soviet Sam-2 killed a U-2 over Cuba. Simultaneously another U-2 violated Soviet airspace at the Bering Strait and both sides scrambled interceptors with shoot to kill orders. Meantime, an error at a Minnesota airbase mobilized nuclear-armed long-range fighter-bombers and then a radar facility in New Jersey identified a Cape Canaveral test as a Soviet missile launch from Cuba. By late afternoon, when news of the U-2 shoot-down reached the White House, Defense Secretary McNamara was morbid and the Kennedy brothers were desperate. The executive decision was to surrender by offering Khrushchev a secret withdrawal of the Turkey missiles in exchange for the Soviets' announcing publicly a withdrawal of the Cuban missiles. Khrushchev went along with the ploy, boasting about the U-2 kill, " . we received a pledge not to invade Cuba. Not bad!" The general staffs in Washington and Moscow were disgusted with their posturing leaders, and the Air Force tyro Curtis LeMay told Mr. Kennedy in person, it was "the greatest defeat in our history." (The crisis is recounted starkly in Niall Ferguson's bold new book, "War of the World.") Forty-four years later, it is easy to see that the clear winners of the Cuban missile crisis were the criminal Castro brothers. As soon as the warheads reached Cuban soil - and Cuba was a nuclear power - the Castros worked to guarantee themselves a lifelong reign that was so successful it easily outlasted the Soviets. Even as Fidel lies dying now, he is plotting with the mini-me of Chavez to collaborate with the rogue states of Iran, Syria, and North Korea in WMD proliferation. The Castro brothers are a virus that was let loose on the day of the American surrender to the nuclear threat of a rogue state - Saturday, October 27, 1962. Iran is the Twenty-first Century's Cuba, and it is fair-minded to ask if, five decades from now, our children will look back to the Bush administration's surrender to Iran's nuclear blackmail-scheming with Russia and China at the United Nations Security Council as the source of all those catastrophes in Asia to come. 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