Coming to a Tel Aviv Near You?

As we horrifically yet (thus far) passively take in Iran's meteoric hurtling towards the first truly pan-Islamic nuclear bomb, one can not help but be reminded of yet another instance where our 40th President, Ronald Reagan, was emphatically on his game, and light years ahead of his time, back in the glorious 1980s known now as tempus temporis Ronaldus Magnus.

Looking back on the signs of these times, the more virulent the assaults on the ideas and the man proffering them, the more dead-on accurate they and he were.

With his introduction of supply-side economics to the nation, President Reagan sought to undo fifty years of failed Keynesian thinking, and it was met with open loathing from Everyone, save for the American people themselves, who elected the man with 40 and then 49 states but never seem to register on the Things That Matter radar of those who constitute Everyone.

President Reagan's prescription for undoing the Jimmy Carter Malaise Effect, deep tax and federal Leviathan spending cuts, was derisively dubbed Reaganomics. As he duly noted, that moniker fell from the vernacular the moment it started working so magnificently.

If Not Evil, Than What?

His 1982 Evil Empire speech drew cascades of catcalls from the Media and the Intellectual Powers That Be, who scoffed at his insistence on calling a Soviet bane a bane as frightfully simplistic and an unnecessary incitement to even further brutal action (as if any outside provocation were ever either necessary or culpable).

Better, the Better Minds told us, to whistle past the plenteous Gulag graveyards than to call attention to them and even, Heaven forefend, predict a proximate end for the regime doing the multitudinous dirty works.

But as we came to find, his words resonated and echoed in their repeated whispers and tappings in the political prisons and intellectual dungeons throughout the nations behind the Iron Curtain. They replenished the spirits of those in the deepest holes of No Hope, and started a freedom prairie fire on the otherwise barren wastelands of the Oppressed World.

And rather than embolden the Communists, it was the worrisome assertive reminder of what they themselves surreptitiously knew but did not wish to admit; it was the mirror of impending doom held up so as to force them to take in the grisly visage.

Arguably, the posit most rapidly and summarily dismissed was President Reagan's call for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a technological shield to protect us and our allies from the threat of nuclear attack, first publicly presented in March of 1983.

This, too, earned a sneering appellative, Star Wars, so named so as to attempt to discharge it as mere Hollywood fantasy from the former Warner Brothers golden boy.

It was said it would escalate the arms race, that it would tip the delicate balance of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that was supposed to have been keeping us safe from annihilation up unto that point.

This Is It

Instead, so imposing an impediment was it to Soviet plans for world domination that it became bartering chip number one at every summit meeting thereafter, and responding to its mere contemplation was a substantial contributor to the Soviet economic collapse to very nearly follow.

The President never promised immediate SDI advancement miracles, only that through the hard and great work of which he knew the American people were eminently capable we would one day reach this safeguarded point in time.

And as we moved forward on the notion, tentative progress began to be made, until the eight year hiatus from history that was the High-Chair Presidency (otherwise known as the Bill Clinton Administration) saw to the end of all funding for and thereby any furtherance of the endeavor.

We Launch in Four, ...

Now we have Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's rabid and repeated insistence on depriving the planet of the one Jewish state, and wantonly and laughingly ignoring the effectiveness eternal that is the United Nations and pressing inexorably onward towards possession of the Bomb.

And with their vision of themselves not as a nation-state, but as the crusading leaders of the global Caliphatic movement, their acquiring the proper nuclear technology would quickly metastasize into Hezbullah, Al Qaeda, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and myriad iniquitous others all also in possession of variations on this deadly theme.

And with their pan-Islamic approach, and the fundamentalist's absolute disregard for his own Earthly existence, we lose any advantage of deterrence that MAD may have provided us when the party on the other side of the Atomic Table was the Soviet Union.

President Ahmadinejad's seeking to be the catalyst of the Quranic Apocalypse affords us no such luxury. To paraphrase former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, we have not this assurance so long as they hate us living as much as they are unconcerned with, or actually relish their dying.

(Would Have) Been There, Done That

Were it only true that we were fervently into Year Twenty-Four of the pursuit of suitable nuclear protection, as President Reagan envisioned with a very different, and in actuality far less dangerous enemy in mind. We may very well have acquired, by now, the ability to stop the one or few bombs that Iran will very soon be capable of lobbing at us.

Hesitation merely lessens and worsens the choices one has in confronting evil. This quarter century lost has thinned considerably the alternatives herd, and the pickings therein are now extraordinarily slim. Had we adhered to this particular aspect of the Reagan defense vision, it would be one being made from a position of much greater strength.

We are left now with the equivalent of the descriptives in the old saw about the terrible impending blind date, "She is ugly, but she more than makes up for it by being stupid".