Iran: June 2008 Archives

Vis-a-vie Iranian nukes, putting the Israelis in a strategic vice:

“The Israelis have one eye on the calendar because of the pace at which the Iranians are proceeding both to develop their nuclear weapons capability and to do things like increase their defences by buying new Russian anti-aircraft systems and further harden the nuclear installations .

“They’re also obviously looking at the American election calendar. My judgement is they would not want to do anything before our election because there’s no telling what impact it could have on the election.”…

“An Obama victory would rule out military action by the Israelis because they would fear the consequences given the approach Obama has taken to foreign policy,” said Mr Bolton, who was Mr Bush’s ambassador to the UN from 2005 to 2006.

“With McCain they might still be looking at a delay. Given that time is on Iran’s side, I think the argument for military action is sooner rather than later absent some other development.”

This situation is a lot less complicated than AP seems to think it is.  The bottom line from Israel's perspective is they should not have to be the ones who undertake this mission; we should already have done it years ago, whether by engineering the overthrow of the mullahgarchy from within pre-OIF, or via a massive Iraq-style ground invasion to remove the mullahgarchy after Iraq was liberated.  Instead we chickened out, hid behind the striped pants brigade, and now the Iranians are on the offensive, closing in on nuclear weapons capability (or actually in possession of it), and the Jews - both a lot closer to the enemy than we are and their #1 target - are rapidly reaching the point of having to choose between a bad choice and a worse one.

Given the above, the timing of an IAF attack on Iran's nuclear installations is simplicity itself: the sooner the better.  If they strike now they know they have an ally in the Bush Administration that will, quietly, provide whatever non-belligerent assistance it can to maximize the attack's effectiveness.  Waiting serves no purpose; if they're concerned about affecting our presidential election, the logic argues for attacking now, not in the fall or winter.  Certainly not after Lucifer has taken office and transfers his policy flag from Jerusalem to Tehran.  And most to the point, not providing the mullahs with four or six or nine extra months to hit atomic paydirt - particularly when they may do so in as little as two.

As to Iranian retaliation scenarios, c'mon, do you really think the Israelis are - or that we should be - sweating that?  No conceivable counter-strike could be worse than the unprovoked nuclear attack the Israelis - and we - can expect if we sit back and do nothing.  And it would provide newly minted President Hussein with a baptism of fire that would either force him to confront the world as it really is and deal with it accordingly, or expose him for the traitor HE really is and destroy his presidency in its crib.

We have to remember: Iran is already at war with us.  Just ask our troops in Iraq.  All we'd be doing is finishing it - before they can finish us.  If it takes the Jews to finally push us off the untenable schied, so be it.

Here is the "international community's" more or less consensus view on Iranian nukes, courtesy of MEMRI's interview with IAEA chief (in the Get Smart sense of the term) Muhammad El Baradei.  Note the remarkable aspect that even appeaseniks abroad are conceding that the Iranians could have nuclear weapons in as little as six months from now; then have your buzz killed by the self-inflating caveat that that conclusion is only functional if IAEA "inspectors" are granted access to ALL of the mullahgarchy's nuclear installations, which they have never been and never will be.  Then have your morale taken down to the vicinity of your left gonad by remembering that "Dr." El Baradei is, you should pardon the expression, pretty much Ahmadinejad's bitch.

Although, I hasten to add, I partially agree with the "good" doctor about air strikes against Iran.  Given that we and/or the Israelis don't necessarily know where all of their nuclear facilities are located, an Operation Opera on steroids would run the legit risk of escalating the war with the mullahs without taking out enough of the targets to justify the cost and ensuing nastiness.  This would necessitate further attacks to eliminate what survived the first time, which would be more difficult by definition, be more escalatory, and so on.

This is why I have always believed (and still do) we should stop dilly-dallying and just invade Iran, crush the Islamic regime, and be done with it.  The longer we dither, the more likely that the mullahs will strike first, and with more than just conventional weapons.  We can be assured that the latter option is infinitely worse than the former.

Sure, nobody has the balls for that after Iraq.  Which is why my Churchillian wisdom will be inevitably, and bloodily, vindicated.  

With that as background context, look at who is more afraid of Barack Hussein Obama vis-a-vie Iran policy than even Cowboy George himself:

European officials are increasingly concerned that Senator Barack Obama’s campaign pledge to begin direct talks with Iran on its nuclear program without preconditions could potentially rupture U.S. relations with key European allies early in a potential Obama administration.

The U.N. Security Council has passed four resolutions demanding that Iran stop enriching uranium, each time highlighting the offer of financial and diplomatic incentives from a European-led coalition if Tehran suspends enrichment, a route to producing fuel for nuclear weapons. But Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has said he would make such suspension a topic for discussion with Iran, rather than a precondition for any negotiations to take place.

European officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said they are wary of giving up a demand that has been so enshrined in U.N. resolutions, particularly without any corresponding concessions by Iran. Although European officials are eager to welcome a U.S. president promising renewed diplomacy and multilateralism after years of tensions with the Bush Administration, they feel strongly about continuing on the current path.

To quote a Spockian axiom, "A difference which makes no difference, IS no difference."  Here, what ostensible difference there is between the European and Obamanan strategies is how the Titanic's deck chairs are arranged.  The Euros have, as BO rightly points out, failed four times running in its attempts to buy off the mullahs.  This is not because, as BO wrongly argues, the offers haven't been generous enough, or that a verbal commitment to ceasing uranium enrichment as a precondition constitutes recalcitrance.  They've failed because the Islamic Republic wants nukes, they won't be talked or bribed out of making them, and the thing they need from the West to attain them is time.  The West's craven willingness to keep pursuing diplomatic insanity is providing the mullahs with more of that commodity than they know what to do with.

An Obama pilgrimmage to Tehran wouldn't change this dynamic much, other than to completely forfeit any remaining tattered semblance of U.S. prestige and leadership in the stop-Iranian-nukes effort, enhance that of the Iranians immensely, and embolden the mullahs to even greater recklessness once they officially cross the nuclear threshold.  Again, assuming they haven't already.

Where Barry O already wants to go is where the Euros are headed sooner or later anyway.  I suppose that is leadership of a sort.  It reminds me of Samuel L. Jackson's line to Bruce Willis in Diehard With A Vengeance after Willis' John McLain has accused Jackson's Zeus Carver of not liking him because he's white.  "I don't like you because you're gonna get me killed!"

The Euros are going to get themselves killed.  Lucifer would get them AND us killed even faster.  I guess the former are just jealous.

No wonder Ehud Olmert is meeting regularly with Operation Opera's architect.  If they don't do something to try and avert a nuclear Iran, and therefore a nuclear war, nobody else will.  And they'll be the first to regret it.

Left wingnuts are forever trying to play down the distinct possibility that our intelligence estimates of when Iran will cross the nuclear weapons threshold are vastly, complacently overstated.  Ditto the possibility that al Qaeda may in fact have some manner of nuclear weapons capability.  Recall Barack Hussein Obama's "Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, et al are 'tiny countries' that don't pose a 'serious threat'" speech.  As though erring on the side of caution is criminal, but taking whimsical chances with the lives of millions is perfectly okay.

Well, guess what, gentles - things are worse than we thought:

An international smuggling ring that sold bomb-related parts to Libya, Iran and North Korea also managed to acquire blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon, according to a draft report by a former top U.N. arms inspector that suggests the plans could have been shared secretly with any number of countries or rogue groups.

The drawings, discovered in 2006 on computers owned by Swiss businessmen, included essential details for building a compact nuclear device that could be fitted on a type of ballistic missile used by Iran and more than a dozen developing countries, the report states.

The computer contents — among more than [a tera]byte of data seized — were recently destroyed by Swiss authorities under the supervision of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, which is investigating the now-defunct smuggling ring previously led by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

But U.N. officials cannot rule out the possibility that the blueprints were shared with others before their discovery, said the report’s author, David Albright, a prominent nuclear weapons expert who spent four years researching the smuggling network.

So.  Not only will Iran have the capability of churning out nukes within as little as two months, but they probably already possess the means of deploying them as soon as they come off the assembly line.

And, evidently, nobody cares.  Nobody realizes, nobody is willing to face the sober fact, that the "international community," but especially Europe, Israel, and the United States, are teetering on the edge of the unthinkable abyss.  All they still are capable of is chest-puffing about yet another round of useless, toothless "sanctions" that will be irrelevant at best, just like all their predecessors (see the twelve years of sanctions that didn't slow down Saddam Hussein's WMD programs one jot or tittle), or at worst will encourage Iran, convinced time is no longer on their side, to strike us like Imperial Japan sixty-seven years ago - only with a much bigger "stick".

As if to pointedly highlight their oceanic contempt for our galloping impotence, Iran bellicosely reiterated - again - the facts of mullahgarchic life:

Iran said on Tuesday uranium enrichment was its “red line” and would continue, despite an enhanced offer of incentives from big powers to stop activity the West fears could yield nuclear bombs…

The incentive package agreed by the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany last month and delivered by Solana is a revised version of one rejected by Iran in 2006…

The incentives package offers Iran the chance to develop a civilian nuclear program with light water reactors — seen as harder to divert into bomb-making than the technology Tehran is now developing — and legally binding fuel supply guarantees.

It also offers trade and other benefits, including the possibility of Iran buying civil aircraft from the West.

You know, I read things like this and the absurdity of it makes me want to gag.  The fact that this morony is putting my life and the lives of my family in potentially mortal danger is something I know intellectually, but even I have difficulty wrapping my mind around the reality of what it would mean in practical terms.  Not, I suspect, unlike those who were beholding world events in 1939, 1940, and 1941.  "Oh, no, the Japs will NEVER attack US; they know better than to commit national suicide."  "C'mon, all Hitler wants is the Sudetenland - he explicitly said so!  If we give it to him, he'll be satisfied and we can maintain the peace."  Almost nobody in the West had any grasp of the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Adolph Hitler DID want to conquer the world and WAS willing to wage total war to do it, and the Japanese WOULD attack us believing that we were (drumroll) soft and would quickly tire of any attempt at resisting their conquest of the Pacific once we encountered the savagery of their warriors and sue for peace instead.

Thus did our grandfathers go from sitting at home listening to our politicians drone about "peace in our time" to flying bomber fleets firebombing German cities and cutting their way across one jungle-covered Pacific island after another within the space of three years.  Thus did sixty million human beings - including, of course, six million Jews - needlessly perish in a planetary conflagration that could so easily have been pre-empted with a little military action applied early enough to make a difference.

Do we learn from this lamentable history?  Of course not.  It's not in human nature to learn from past mistakes.  Why else do they get endlessly repeated?  And so we keep offering the rabid theocrats in Tehran bigger and bigger dollops of appeasement to cease developing nuclear weapons that they see as the ticket to the return of their Messiah and the Global Islamic Caliphate, and they keep telling us to shove it.  A literally vicious cycle that will continue right up until the the nuclear-tipped Shahab-3s and Shahab-5s and 6's fly for Israel, Europe, and the US, respectively.  And, I imagine, the appeasement dollops grow proportionately.

Well, boys and girls, at least one group in this crisis isn't paralyzed by historical amnesia:

A large Israeli military exercise this month may have been aimed at showing Jerusalem's abilities to attack Iranian nuclear facilities.

In a substantial show of force, Israel sent warplanes and other aircraft on a major exercise in the Eastern Mediterranean early this month, Pentagon officials said Friday.

Israel's military refused to confirm or deny that the maneuvers were practice for a strike in Iran....

The big exercise the first week of June was impossible to miss and may have been meant as a show of force as well as a practice on skills needed to execute a long-range strike mission, one U.S. official said.

The New York Times quoted officials Friday as saying that more than 100 Israeli F-16s and F-15s staged the maneuver, flying more than 900 miles, roughly the distance from Israel to Iran's Natanz nuclear enrichment facility, and that the exercise included refueling tankers and helicopters capable of rescuing downed pilots.

You have to love Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's scolding the Israelis against attacking Iran's nuclear facilities on the grounds that there's "no proof" that the mullahs are building nukes.  That's a hoot considering that his implied threshold of "proof" would be mushroom clouds rising above the atomized remains of Tel Aviv and Haifa - after which he would be quick, I'm sure, to extend Russia's "condolances" for the Second Holocaust that his intereference-running for the mullahs had helped to fruition.

The Jews are not going to sit there like a potted plant and let their enemies gain, mount, and deploy the means of their annihilation against them.  If nothing else, they will ensure that if they do go down, so will the mullahs.

Meanwhile, we were generously given another reminder of Iran's other ability to strike the U.S. homeland, and what, aside from the alleged absence of nuclear ordnance, is holding them back:

Intelligence officials tell ABC News [Hezbollah] has activated suspected “sleeper cells” in Canada and key operatives have been tracked moving outside the group’s Lebanon base to Canada, Europe and Africa…

Suspected Hezbollah operatives have conducted recent surveillance on the Israeli embassy in Ottawa, Canada and on several synagogues in Toronto, according to the officials.

Latin American is also considered a possible target by officials following Hezbollah’s planning…

Officials say the CIA, the NSA, and British and Canadian intelligence agencies began to pick up a steady stream of information - from electronic intercepts, human sources and surveillance - about a possible Hezbollah attack on February 17, just days after the Beirut funeral of Mugniyah where Hezbollah leaders publicly declared they would seek revenge…

[Former CIA intelligence officer Bob] Baer says his Hezbollah contacts told him an attack against the US was unlikely because Iran and Hezbollah did not want to give the Bush Administration an excuse to attack.]

But next year, when the Winnie the Pooh Doctrine is firmly in place?  The sky's the limit, baby.

Thus does Yates' question arise anew: "What rough beast, its hour come round [again], slouches towards Bethlehem to be [re]born?"

The rough beast is on its way.  The Hundred Acre Wood won't know what hit it.

Except by war with Iran AND post-monarchical Saudi Arabia:

Here’s a quick geopolitical quiz: What country is three times the size of Texas and has more than 300 days of blazing sun a year? What country has the world’s largest oil reserves resting below miles upon miles of sand? And what country is being given nuclear power, not solar, by President George W. Bush, even when the mere assumption of nuclear possession in its region has been known to provoke pre-emptive air strikes, even wars?

If you answered Saudi Arabia to all of these questions, you’re right.

Last month, while the American people were becoming the personal ATMs of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in Saudi Arabia signing away an even more valuable gift: nuclear technology. In a ceremony little-noticed in this country, Ms. Rice volunteered the U.S. to assist Saudi Arabia in developing nuclear reactors, training nuclear engineers, and constructing nuclear infrastructure. While oil breaks records at $130 per barrel or more, the American consumer is footing the bill for Saudi Arabia’s nuclear ambitions.

Astonishing it is that it is a top Democrat - Representative Ed Markey (D-MA) - that points out this insanity.  Less astonishing it is that he doesn't grasp the national security implications or wonders why the Saudis haven't pursued solar energy instead (we can't capture and store enough of it to be viable, and that technology is decades away at minimum).

But how perspicacious does one have to be to envision the overthrow of the House of Saud by this or that radical Wahhabist cleric.  Just as Iran is about to become the Shiite Islamist nuclear power, and nuclear Pakistan teeters on falling to the Sunni Islamists, the Bushies' idea of countering that is to conceive a potential Islamist nuclear trifecta?  One that cannot be deterred and is far more likely to join forces against Israel and the West before they turn on each other.  Didn't this president used to stand for stopping WMD proliferation?

Like it or not, the United States is the "counterweight" to Iranian nuclear ambitions, and can only fulfill that duty when it invades Iran and destroys the Islamic regime.  Harrowingly, nobody in official Washington is willing to face up to that duty.  The consequences of THAT - most especially an allied Wahhabist, nuclear-armed Saudi regime - I can guarantee we'll all "like" a whole helluva lot less.

"Chatter" of a different but closely related sort is bubbling its way onto the public radar screen:

An Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites looks "unavoidable" given the apparent failure of sanctions to deny Tehran technology with bomb-making potential, one of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's deputies said on Friday.

"If Iran continues with its program for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it. The sanctions are ineffective," Transport Minister Shaul Mofaz told the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

"Attacking Iran, in order to stop its nuclear plans, will be unavoidable," said the former army chief who has also been defense minister.

It was the most explicit threat yet against Iran from a member of Olmert's government, which, like the Bush Administration, has preferred to hint at force as a last resort should U.N. Security Council sanctions be deemed a dead end.

An attack on Iran's nuclear sites "looks unavoidable," eh?  Funny, I could have sworn I read that somewhere before....

Minister Mofaz is correct, of course.  War with Iran is inevitable because it is the mullahs who want it and are already waging it via a proxy in Lebanan, Gaza, and Iraq.  Doing so indirectly has kept the provocation below the distressingly high threshold of forcing an American response.

Israel's response threshold has also risen a lot higher than it used to be, but as I have pointed out on occasions too numerous to count, in matters of national survival, when pushed to the wall, the Jews will do what they have to do.  An Iranian mullahgarchy with nuclear weapons would be a mortal threat to U.S. interests, but it would be the death knell of the Jewish State.  No Israeli regime, not even the appeasenik squishes of Kaditha, will sit there passively, thumb firmly inserted up its tuchis, and allow Adolph Ahmadinajad to finish the Final Solution Adolph Hitler started.  If the United States won't remove this mortal threat - and it's beyond clear now that the Bushies have punted, and you can count on President Hussein to be even less enthusiastic - the IAF will.

If that means "all-out war from the Iranian terrorist proxies Hamas and Hezbollah" - which, frankly, they should be expecting anyway - then woe be unto the inhabitants of Lebanon and Gaza.  If that means prissy tut-tutting from the "international community," including the intractably Arabist U.S. Department of State, so be it - better to be alive to take the ignorant abuse than, to paraphrase Golda Meir's famous words, deceased fodder for pious mass eulogies, "Never again, again" slogans, and quickly forgotten historical lessons.  And if that means a fifth all-out Arab/Muslim attack in retaliation - unlikely, given the threat Iranian nuclear hegemony would pose to Israel's neighbors as well - well, if the "Third Temple," as Israeli Jews refer to their nation, is about to fall (as it was in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, for example), they have the "undeclared" Samson option by which to take their enemies down with them - including the ones in Tehran.

Time, though, is truly of the essence, both because of how close Iran is to cutting the ribbon on their nuclear weapons assembly line, and because of the virtual certainty of a massive Democrat triumph in our November elections.  A Hussein administration paired with enlarged Donk congressional majorities could punish a pre-emptive, self-defensive Israeli attack on Iran in any number of different ways: "diplomatically" - perhaps by not resisting Israeli expulsion from the UN, or dropping all pretense of even-handedness in the "peace process" and forcing Jerusalem to accept a comprehensive Middle East settlement on her enemies' terms; economically by cutting off all aid to Israel, including military assistance; and even militarily by bombing Israel's own nuclear facilities in the Negev in order to appease Iranian "outrage".

Hey, given the baseline of Senator Obama's radical alliances, I wouldn't put anything past his capacity for "special dispensation".

Whatever those details, the window of opportunity for Israeli action is rapidly closing, and if they don't act now, nobody will - and it WILL be too late.

It may not be obvious to anybody in the Beltway, but it must be to the rest of the world if even German Socialists are sounding the alarm (via Newsmax Insider):

"The threat of another military confrontation hangs like a dark cloud over the Middle East," declared Joschka Fischer, who was Germany's foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998 to 2005.

Writing in the Beirut-based English-language newspaper The Daily Star, Fischer notes that a nuclear-armed Iran would be "Israel's worst security nightmare," and the Jewish state takes Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's threat to annihilate Israel very seriously.

He points to several factors that indicate Israel could be readying a strike on Iran:

• When President Bush recently visited Israel as the country celebrated its 60th birthday, it was expected that Palestinian-Israeli relations would be the chief topic discussed. Instead, it was Iran.  It has been speculated that during his visit, Bush gave Israel the green light for an attack on Iran.
   
• Political pressure is mounting in Israel for action to halt the Iranian threat.
   
• The outgoing commander of the Israeli Air Force has said that the air force is capable of any mission, no matter how difficult, to protect Israel's security.
   
• With the Bush presidency approaching its end and uncertainty about his successor's policy toward Israel and Iran, the "window of opportunity" for an Israeli attack is potentially closing, and that window "is now, during the last months of Bush's presidency."

Fischer observes: "Although it is acknowledged in Israel that an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities would involve grave and hard-to-assess risks, the choice between acceptance of an Iranian bomb and an attempt at its military destruction, with all the attendant consequences, is clear. Israel won't stand by and wait for matters to take their course."...

Fischer concluded: "Iran must understand that without a diplomatic solution in the coming months, a dangerous military conflict is very likely to erupt. It is high time for serious negotiations to begin."

But Fischer does not understand.  Iran doesn't want a diplomatic solution; they could care less about toothless Western "sanctions".  The mullahgarchy wants nuclear weapons with which to annihilate Israel, bring the United States to its knees, and ultimately, dominate the world.  If that means a "dangerous military conflict," so much the better, because that will bring back their "twelfth imam" who will establish the Global Islamic Caliphate for them.

His "serious negotiations" can, in these circumstances, only worsen America's and Israel's position in the "dangerous military conflict" to come.  But that handwriting has already been on the wall for years.

How ironic that it falls to the Jews to save the, um, bacon of the same "international community" that throws them under the bus at every opportunity.  I just pray that Elohim gives the participants of Operation Opera II the same Osirak aim.  They're going to need it.

It was not even three weeks ago that Barack Hussein Obama was insisting that a theocratic, apocalypticist, nuclear-armed Islamic Iran was "no serious threat" because it does not possess the planetary military might of the old Soviet Empire.  After absorbing humiliating rebukes across almost the entire political spectrum for that excusion in idiocy, but for God only knows what reason still being dubbed the "presumptive" Democrat presidential nominee, now he's going before the pro-Israel lobby and audaciously (which is to say Clintonianly) trying to sing the opposite tune:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said on Wednesday Iran posed a serious threat in the Middle East and vowed to stop it from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

"The danger from Iran is grave, it is real, and my goal will be to eliminate this threat," Obama said in a speech to a conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobby group.

"I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon - everything," he said to a standing ovation.

Wow.  For a guy that only last summer expressed his eagerness to travel the world in 2009 Frenching the hindquarters of every U.S. enemy on the planet, he certainly does spread thick the veneer of a born-again neocon, doesn't he?  But look at his exactingly careful choice of terms; while "eliminate this threat" and "I will do everything in my power" do sound sufficiently aggressive to be reassuring to even bigger naifs than he is, they remain, in point of fact, generalities that do not jibe with pretty much all of his rhetoric on the subject of the mullahgarchy.  It would only have taken one follow-up question to burst that faux jingoistic camouflage: "Senator Obama, how would you eliminate the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons?"  His answer, after a fusillade of hems and haws and uhs and ahs and urs and ums, would be: through "aggressive personal diplomacy."  In fact, after the anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, anti-American venom BO has soaked up from the Uncle Jeremiahs, Father Pflegers, and Weathermen Leninists over the past generation, it could not be anything else.

This is how His Eminence differs from the Clintons.  He may be robotically eloquent, he may effuse charm and charisma, but he's not a mind-controller like Sick Willie was.  He could probably get Pope Benedict XVI to like him personally, but he'd never be able to sell him a double bed.  He's an illusionist, not a bamboozler.  He doesn't win over opponents and undecideds by convincing everyone from a Klansman to a Trinity United congregant that he agrees and sympathizes with their specific concerns and agenda; he distracts them with clouds of gaseous, anesthetizing hand-waving until he gets nailed with specifics he doesn't have the ability to slither past, whereupon he beats another hasty retreat to the friendly Enemy Media tall grass and hopes it'll all blow over - until the next rake on the path to the White (?) House.

As it happened, former Israel Defense Minister Dr. Ephraim Sneh was also in Washington, also speaking to a pro-Israel group, and "pre-emptively" called BO's latest bluff:

Efforts by Iran to mislead the international community, including IAEA inspectors, about the status of its nuclear research and its refusal to back down despite three United Nations Security Council resolutions, made it clear that the world community must take “more robust measures” against Iran....

He....warned against the belief, currently championed by former president Jimmy Carter, and his former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski — now a foreign policy adviser to Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama — that the United States can “negotiate” with Iran’s leaders.

Carter urged the Bush Administration on Tuesday to rapidly open negotiations with Iran to impress upon them the consequences of a possible U.S. military attack on their country, because Iran’s leaders are “reasonable people” and “are not suicidal” and could be expected to back down.

Sneh swept aside negotiations as naïve and dangerously misinformed.

“If the Ayatollahs believe that the price for their aggression is five million Iranians dead, they will think that it is worth doing,” he said.

“You have to understand, this leadership [in Iran] is living according to a very extremist, fanatic, messianic Shiite mythology of bringing back the 12th imam. They are not thinking in the way you and I think. And for them, the destruction of the Jewish state [and the United States] is a target, an objective, that is worth a big sacrifice.”

Only they don't think they'll have to pay it, because they look at Carter and Brzezinski and their party and their party's "presumptive" presidential nominee and conclude that even if they were to eschew terrorist proxies and openly launch a barrage of nuclear missiles at American cities, we would not retaliate but instead press all the harder for more "negotiations" to rectify whatever "offense" (doubtless Bush-caused, even more doubtless the invasion of Iraq and the feeble attempt to deny the mullahs nukes) that caused those "reasonable people" to take such a drastic action.

Adds Ken Timmerman:

Sneh is a member of the Labor Party, Olmert’s coalition party in the current government. His remarks and those of Likud Party Benjamin Netanyahu recently demonstrate strongly the consensus within the Israeli political establishment as to danger of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Appearing together with Sneh at an international conference in Herzliya, Israel last month, Netanyahu said that Iran had no fear of an Israeli counter-strike and that “nothing” would stop the Tehran regime from attacking Israel [and the United States] except a pre-emptive strike. [emphasis added] 

I take reports of this "consensus" with a grain of salt given that the governing portion of the Israeli political establishment lacked the courage and competence to even defeat one of Iran's proxy armies in Lebanon two years ago.  Still, it's a far more sober, serious, and realistic consensus than the galloping fantasist version gripping our own poobahry.  That's hardly a surprise, given that Isreal is (1) so much closer, (2) so much smaller (it wouldn't take more than three or four modest sized warheads to incinerate Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Israel's suspected nuclear sites in the Negev) and (3) has had to be sober, serious, and realistic since its 1948 national return for just those reasons.  They do not have, and have never had, the luxury of indulging in willful self-delusion and diplomacy fetishes as official state policy (the "peace process" notwithstanding).  Not when being wrong can result in another Holocaust, only this one of thirty minutes' duration.

Since 9/11, our own margin for error has gotten a lot slimmer.  But such has been our success in grinding down al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, and thus preventing additional homeland attacks, that we, the people, have gone back to sleep, re-embraced clueless complacency, and even heartily endorsed the demonization and villification of the only foreign policy/national security stance - the original Bush Doctrine of pre-emptively eliminating rogue WMD threats before they can metastasize and attack us and our allies - that can actually "eliminate this threat" of a nuclear-armed Iran.  And leading the demonization and villification has been....Barack Hussein Obama.

Here's another exit question for the twenty-first-century Golden Calf: If your "aggressive personal diplomacy" fails, or proves actively counterproductive and encourages the Iranians to attack Israel with nuclear weapons without fear of reprisal, would you, as president, retaliate for the destruction of Tel Aviv by ordering the eradication of Tehran?  Or, short of that, would you order an immediate, all-out invasion of Iran?  And in either case, would you do so knowing the possible cost could include massive, perhaps WMD, terrorist reprisals here at home?  Or would you conclude instead that your "personal diplomacy" had not been "aggressive" enough and intensify your efforts toward a "negotiated" resolution?

If McCain poses that in the inevitable debates, Obama might just go catatonic.

If he doesn't, you'll know he's been getting coaching from you-know-what.

Hey, look!  Hans Blix and his UN weapons Apple Dumpling Gang are back in business!

UN nuclear inspectors will visit Syria this month to investigate allegations that the country was building a nuclear reactor at a site attacked by Israel last September, officials said.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s fact-finding mission is expected to take place from June 22 to 24.

Information about the Israeli bombing of the site did not come to light until April when U.S. officials informed IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei that it believes the facility was a nuclear reactor.

Sounds like Boy Assad has finished scrubbing Dayr az-Zawr, the former site of his North Korean-supplied nuclear facility.  And maybe he's also finished hiding the Iraqi WMD that his late "big brother" Saddam sent him for safekeeping six years ago.

Will a "clean bill of health" from the uncharacteristically-suspicious-of-late IAEA put them back to sleep vis-a-vie Assad's Iranian superiors?  Logically it shouldn't.  Heck, how can a mere three-day inspection verify or discover much of anything?  But since when has logic ever had anything to do with the "international community's" appeasment mania where the mullahs are concerned?

Some of you may draw from that comment - or my avalanche of posts on this topic over the past four years - that I "want" a war with Iran.  Certainly that's the mindset libs attribute to all "neocons" (though, for the record, I have ALWAYS been a "con," so the "neo" prefix really doesn't apply, no matter how big a Matrix mark I am).  It's what CNN clearly thought recently departed former CENTCOM commander Admiral William Fallon - the high-ranking Bushophobic mole in the Bush High Command - would say, Scotty McClellan-like, when he granted them an interview just this morning.

Imagine their disappointment when they got this answer instead:

PHILLIPS: Let’s talk about this article. It was the catalyst. It was the last straw. Tom Barnett made it appear that you were the only man standing between the president and a war with Iran. Is that true?

ADMIRAL FALLON: I don’t believe for a second President bush wants a war with Iran. The situation with Iran is very complex. People sometimes portray it or try to portray it in very simplistic terms we’re against Iran, we want to go to war with Iran, we want to be close to them, the reality is in international politics that many aspects to many of these situations and I believe in our relationship with Iran we need to be strong and firm and convey the principles on which this country stands and upon which our policies are based. At the same time demonstrate a willingness and openness to engage in dialogue because there are things we can find in common.

You know what?  I believe him.  You know what else?  I don't think Bush "wanted" a war with Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime, either.  And guess what: I agree with that, too.

The core point of the lamentably defunct Bush Doctrine was never to seek out "wars of choice" for glory and honor and plunder and whatever other cartoonish motivation neoBolsheviks attribute to those who take national security seriously.  It was to inject some desperately needed hard-headed realpolitik into American foreign policy in a post-9/11 world.  It was to throw off the deadly "diplomacy-only" complacency/obsession that had gotten three thousand American civilians killed in cold blood and, in an age of WMD proliferation, would send a whole lot more into the mass graves right behind them if we didn't start looking at the world and its myriad threats as it, and they, really are.  It was to recognize that we're ALREADY at war at the enemy's initiative, and the path to not just victory but even national survival itself lay in engaging this enemy at our own initiative and bringing the full military power of the planetary hegemon we're supposed to be to bear to eliminate them and the apocalyptic threat they pose once and for all.

Afghanistan was the initial counterattack against al Qaeda and their Taliban hosts.  Iraq was the elimination of a secondary terror regime and acquisition of the geostrategic staging area in the heart of the Middle East for the conclusive military campaigns to liberate Syria and the principle enemy and target: Islamic Iran.

Grieviously, as I've lamented on many a past occasion, President Bush opted to try and win the war by only fighting half of it.  As if, during World War II, the Western Allies had stopped after liberating all of North Africa from the Nazis and begged Hitler for peace negotiations instead of invading Western Europe and finishing the job.  While we have finally thwarted Iranian and al Qaeda subversion in Iraq, we have wasted the past five years on foolish, futile diplomacy with the mullahs that they have openly ridiculed and heaped contempt upon and used the time to build their nuclear weapons capabilities, which have progressed to the point that the mullahs could churn out their first homemade warhead before the year is out - something I made mention of nine months ago.

The real problem isn't that anybody "wants" or doesn't "want" war; it's that not even the "neocons" have the stomach to accept its inevitability.  Even the biggest so-called "hawks" speak in terms of using diplomatic "isolation" and "sanctions" to "force" the mullahs to abandon their nuke-quest.  If this sounds like precisely the "strategy" that the "international community" pursued for twelve years against Saddam Hussein to absolutely no avail, and which he was using to rebuild his WMD stocks and develop nuclear weapons, AND which he had just about bribed his way into getting lifted altogether, congratulations, you're becoming a "warmonger."

I don't say that we're already at war with Iran because I want it to be so; I say it because it is true, and I would rather win than lose when the cost of losing is measured in hundreds of thousands or millions of innocent American (and Israeli) lives.  I look back at the lesson of the 1930s, how a little military pre-emption by the British and French could have averted a second global conflagration in as many generations, and then behold Adolph Hitler with nukes rising up in Persia, and watch helplessly as we repeat all the same mistakes.

Seriously, can there really be found ANYTHING in common between ourselves and a regime that continues to issue public declarations like this?:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predicted on Monday that Muslims would uproot “satanic powers” and repeated his controversial belief that Israel will soon disappear, the Mehr news agency reported.

“I must announce that the Zionist regime (Israel), with a sixty-year record of genocide, plunder, invasion and betrayal is about to die and will soon be erased from the geographical scene,” he said.

“Today, the time for the fall of the satanic power of the United States has come and the countdown to the annihilation of the emperor of power and wealth has started.”

Seventy years ago there was another raving anti-Semitic lunatic who bwa-ha-ha'd his intention to exterminate the Jews and conquer the world.  Nobody paid attention, in Europe or America, even after the outbreak of hostilities.  Only when Hitler had conquered the Continent and was fire-bombing British cities into rubble did the "international community" finally accept that it was in a war for its very survival and start fighting it that way.

Today everybody laughs at his spiritual descendants in the mullahgarchy and their blustering frontman.  But in as little as three months, they'll gain the capability of backing up their "president"'s words.  What if they, and he, aren't bluffing?  Shouldn't we proceed on the assumption that they're deadly serious?  And shouldn't we be as well by taking decisive steps to ensure that we never have to find that out the hard way?  Is not an ounce of prevention truly worth a pound of "cure"?

Particularly when talk with this enemy is not just cheap, but utterly worthless.