To Iran With Love

Sadly, this doesn't surprise me at all:

President George W. Bush rejected a plea from Israel last year to help it raid Iran's main nuclear complex, opting instead to authorize a new U.S. covert action aimed at sabotaging Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program, the New York Times reported.

Israel's request was for specialized bunker-busting bombs that it wanted for an attack that tentatively involved flying over Iraq to reach Iran's major nuclear complex at Natanz, where the country's only known uranium enrichment plant is located, the Times reported Saturday in its online edition. The White House deflected requests for the bombs and flyover but said it would improve intelligence-sharing with Israel on covert U.S. efforts to sabotage Iran's nuclear program.

The covert efforts, which began in early 2008, involved plans to penetrate Iran's nuclear supply chain abroad and undermine electrical systems and other networks on which Iran relies, the Times said, citing interviews with current and former U.S. officials, outside experts and international nuclear inspectors who spoke on condition of anonymity. The covert program will be handed off to President-elect Barack Obama, who will deciding whether to continue it.

According to the Times, Bush decided against an overt attack based on input from top Administration officials such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who believed that doing so would likely prove ineffective and could ignite a broader Middle East war.

Any reader of this space knows that I have been one of the few neoChurchillian voices in the blogosphere making the case that war with Iran is inevitable, and thus it is to our advantage to attack first - before they obtain a nuclear weapons arsenal - than to dick around timidly and ineffectively with useless sanctions and covert actions that assume we've got all the time in the world to de-nuke the mullahgarchy, and wake up one day to an Iranian nuclear ultimatum, or a sneak nuclear terrorist attack on our cities.  A growing possibility given that their first warhead could have rolled off their indigenous assemblyline as much as five months ago.  Said reader also knows that I thought the Bush Administration would invade Iran, just as it did Iraq, early in his second term when his warchest of political capital was guaranteed to be at its apex, both to remove the burgeoning Iranian nuclear threat and to help stabilize Iraq by removing Iranian meddling and subversion through its Shiite proxy forces.

Regrettably, the Bushies took their near-defeat in 2004 (the closeness of which was completely unnecessary and the product of timid assumptions and the strategy they spawned) over the liberation of Iraq as a near-death experience, and it de-neo-con-ized (i.e. castrated) them.  The second Bush43 term became, from a foreign policy perspective, the second Bush41 term - timid and "realist" to the core.  That was typified by the aforequoted horrible "advice" from SecDef Gates, who'll you'll notice is not missing a beat from the changing of administrations.  Think Red Barry will keep even that covert dilly-dallying going after next Tuesday?  We know what Gates will advocate, don't we?

We also know that Israel's Kaditha-ite regime wasn't really serious about turning Iran's nuclear facilities into a parking lot, either, or they would have done so regardless of what the Bushkins urged.

All of which means that it's the Obamunists who will have to "pay later" for the failures of its predecessors to read and heed the glowing handwriting on the Middle East wall - as no less than Sick Willie's second SecDef just pointed out:

William Perry, who headed the Pentagon during a 1994 nuclear standoff with North Korea, predicted on Thursday that President-elect Barack Obama will soon face a nuclear crisis with Iran.

Iran is "moving inexorably toward becoming a nuclear power," with ominous implications for the Middle East, Perry said.

"It seems clear that Israel will not sit by idle while Iran takes the final steps toward becoming a nuclear power," Perry told a conference on foreign policy challenges facing the incoming Obama administration. The former Clinton administration defense secretary held out hope that more vigorous U.S. and international diplomacy could reverse North Korea's nuclear weapons program. But he was less confident about stopping Iran's ambitions.

"President Obama will almost certainly face a serious crisis with Iran," Perry said. "Indeed, I believe the crisis point will be reached in his first year in office. So on the nuclear front, President Obama will face a daunting set of problems, none of which can be solved unilaterally."

In one statement, "The Refridgerator" both states the problem accurately and displays the Beltway establishment's deliberate obtuseness and cowardice in refusing to confront it seriously.  The truth is this "serious crisis with Iran" not only CAN be solved unilaterally, MUST be solved unilaterally, but it cannot be solved any other way.  Diplomacy cannot solve it because the mullahs cannot be talked out of their pursuit of nukes; economic carrots or sticks cannot solve it because of why they want nuclear weapons: to (1) be recognized as a major global power and (2) eventually conquer the world for Islam.  That cannot be done until the United States is removed as planetary hegemon, and that cannot be accomplished without the use of nuclear weapons.

The only way to avert a nuclear war with Iran is to pre-emptively destroy the mullahgarchy using overwhelming conventional military power.  And only the United States has the means and proximity to carry out this blessed, holy mission.

Tragically, what it no longer has is the will to do so.  That mettle was torn out of President Bush years ago by the Fifth Columnist Left, and his FCL successor plans a "new direction" that, were truth in advertising a requirement, he'd be forced to call "tough, direct surrender without preconditions".

They say that you know you've gotten old when you see the same cycles start to repeat themselves.  The world's 1930s-esque slide toward global conflagration pre-dated me by a generation, but that cycle is definitely coming round again, with consequences even more horrific than our parents and grandparents could have imagined.

Winston Churchill passed away the year after I was born, but I can hear him now, spinning and weeping in his grave at the same time.