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If President Bush doesn't stop the mullahs, or if he leaves the problem to his successor, his presidency will be judged a failure. He'll get points for recognizing the need to combat Islamic fanaticism, but the verdict will be one of failure because he lacked the necessary political and executive skills to prosecute the war on terrorism effectively, successfully.

Clearly, diplomacy alone won't work. The Iranians are playing for time. But their economy, a wreck, is highly vulnerable to pressure. Unemployment is high. The mullahs have even mismanaged the oil sector--output would be some 2 million barrels a day higher if the industry had been properly managed and requisite investments made. And now the government has imposed gasoline rationing.

So what should the President do now? The U.S. should begin by imposing a "capital blockade"--eliminating or at least substantially reducing flows of investment capital into Iran. A traditional blockade could have serious political repercussions, particularly among Muslim populations around the world. But a capital blockade is not physically obvious: There are no naval vessels or Air Force jets visibly interfering with ships and airplanes. Such a blockade could be implemented gradually to let the world--and Iran--know that we mean business, that we will ramp up the pressure until Iran abandons its nuclear program.

Washington could kick off the process by vigorously endorsing a movement afoot in a number of states, including California and New York, to divest their pension funds of stocks in companies that have links to Iran, particularly in the energy sector. U.S. companies cannot operate in Iran, but a number of foreign entities do.

Surprisingly, the Bush Administration is strongly against such legislation, saying it would complicate efforts to get the cooperation of reluctant allies to enact more sanctions. Our State Department is, as usual, way off base on this. The divestiture move should be encouraged, with Washington telling one and all that these moves are merely preliminary to more forceful economic actions Washington is prepared to take if necessary.

At the same time, the U.S. should seize Iranian assets in the U.S.; the State Department has been dragging its feet here. And we should step up efforts to block access to tens of billions of dollars in funds that Iran's corrupt mullahs and their confederates have salted away in foreign bank accounts.

Washington has also been very slow to work with dissident groups and the large number of disaffected minorities in Iran. It should increase efforts there, not to mention helping antiregime unions.

If these initial moves don't trigger the desired changes in Iran, the U.S. should then announce that we are going to start seizing or freezing the assets of companies that continue to invest in Iran.

After these steps have been taken, the world will be prepared if we then are forced to turn to a more traditional blockade. Here, again, the mullahs are exposed, as Iran imports 40% of its gasoline. The regime virtually gives the stuff away as a means of buying support and now is rationing it, earning even more unpopularity. Cut off that supply and Iran's Islamic fascists will have a severe political problem on their hands.

If all this didn't bring about a regime change and an abandonment of Iran's nuclear ambitions, then President Bush would have to resort to air strikes, which could set the mullahs' nuclear ambitions back a decade or more.

Israel? It has the air capability to disrupt Iran's nuclear program for a couple of years. But make no mistake, if the Israelis struck Iran on their own, the U.S. would suffer the same political fallout that it would if we had done the deed. No one would ever believe the Israelis had carried out such an attack without Washington's approval.

The big question is whether President Bush could make such a monumental move. The State Department would be against it, and the Pentagon, at best, would be politically neutral. Capitol Hill Democrats would also be opposed to using force against Iran, as would many officials from the first Bush Administration.

Yet big things must now be done. Iran is the world's largest funder of terrorism. It's the principal paymaster of such extremist forces as Hamas and Hezbollah. Fanatics fervently believe that when Iran achieves nuclear capability it will dominate the Middle East and be able to cow an already cowering Europe. Within the next decade Iran will have nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles that will be able to reach our shores. Extremists think this will neutralize or seriously mitigate the U.S.' antiterrorist efforts. In their minds those missiles will certainly keep U.S. power out of the Middle East.

The importance of events in Iran overshadows what is happening in Iraq. If President Bush defangs nuclear-obsessed Iran, all his other setbacks and disappointments will fade into insignificance as time passes.

Free Speech--Soviet Style

Most washington politicians don't like free speech much. Oh, they say they do, but actions speak louder than words. Several years ago, for instance, Congress passed the McCain-Feingold bill, which included a provision muzzling advocacy groups from mentioning federal candidates' names 60 days before a general election. Thankfully the Supreme Court just threw that crazy restriction out, but only by a 5-to-4 vote.

Now Washington liberals--with winks and nods from some of the GOP--want to revive a pernicious rule called the "fairness doctrine" that Ronald Reagan killed 20 years ago. The fairness doctrine required radio and television stations to give equal time to all political candidates and points of view. Sounds innocuous, but its effect was to prevent the kind of talk radio we have today. Stations shied away from any overtly political commentary for fear of the Federal Communications Commission's hitting them with fines or perhaps even threatening to not renew their licenses. Of course, the fairness doctrine didn't prevent anticonservative, anti-Republican bias in how news was disseminated. In short, liberals controlled the media, and they had a monopoly.

When Reagan repealed the doctrine, talk radio blossomed, and conservative opinion could be heard vigorously across the airwaves. A little more than a decade ago Fox News rose up to challenge CNN's liberal domination. Within a few years the upstart surpassed CNN and hasn't looked back. (Dispassionate analysis shows that Fox News gives considerable airtime to anticonservative viewpoints, but this balanced approach looks like right-wing bias when compared with the leftist tendencies of traditional television.)

Some Republicans are sympathetic to resurrecting the fairness doctrine because most talk radio hosts vigorously oppose the President's efforts to get a comprehensive immigration reform bill passed this year. True believers in the First Amendment, however, should unite to quash this censorship initiative.

Unforgettable

The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression--by Amity Shlaes (HarperCollins, $26.95). Many histories have been written about the Great Depression, the most searing economic cataclysm this country--and most of the world--has ever endured. Its most disastrous result, of course, was facilitating the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. But Amity Shlaes' new book stands head and shoulders above previous efforts in two profound, insightful ways.

First, she brings together a growing body of scholarship to make an absolutely unconventional conclusion: The economic policies of both Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt were deeply flawed. Hoover's ghastly mistakes brought on the disaster and then deepened it. And while Roosevelt did some helpful things, overall his programs needlessly prolonged the slump. For the first time in American history a recovery from a downturn failed to exceed the heights of the previous expansion. After four years of wild FDR experimentation, unemployment still stood at 14%. Then in 1937--38 the economy underwent another sickening slide, with unemployment reaching almost 20%. Roosevelt and Hoover had night-and-day differences in personality and political skills, but both deserve failing grades in economics.

Second, Shlaes focuses on key personalities instead of on chronicling the Depression, weaving the story around these fascinating figures. She makes clear that the first part of the New Deal, particularly the National Recovery Administration (NRA), was profoundly influenced by the apparent economic success of the Soviet Union and Mussolini's Italy. She tells the fascinating tale of a group of key liberals visiting the Soviet Union in 1927, their trip capped off by a six-hour meeting with Joseph Stalin. Most of those travelers were in no way sympathetic to totalitarianism, but they were impressed with the way central planning seemed to avoid the ostensible flaws of free-market capitalism. Several played critical public roles in influencing policy, and some served in the Roosevelt Administration.

Shlaes has a chapter on the Schechter brothers, New York kosher chicken butchers who ran afoul of the NRA codes, were convicted and sentenced to jail. Their case made it to the Supreme Court, which unanimously threw out the whole NRA.

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