Finish Line Looms on Iranian Nukes

According to Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, the mullahs will have the capability to start manufacturing nuclear warheads, and therefore back up their threats to "wipe Israel off the map" in, not ten years as the CIA has idiotically suggested, but a few months:

Appearing before the Knesset’s defense and foreign affairs committee to deliver his annual intelligence report, Meir Dagan also declared that Iran "will not stop with one nuclear bomb.”

He said "technology independence” doesn’t mean Tehran will actually have a nuclear device. But "it does mean they’ll be able to enrich uranium with centrifuges,” columnist Uri Dan writes in the New York Post.

"Building a bomb would only be a matter of time.”

And not much time, either - as little as a year from now, as a matter of fact. Given that Tehran has also obtained medium-range ballistic missile capability that has brought most of Europe within the range of the nukes they will very shortly possess, one would think that that would finally focus the weak minds of the EUnuchs on taking more direct action to neutralize this mortal threat.

One would be a hapless optimist:

Dagan called for an intensification of international diplomatic pressure on Iran.

But Aharon Zeevi, Israel’s chief of military intelligence, said the current lack of pressure can be blamed on the Europeans.

"I had meetings with senior officials in Europe,” he told Uri Dan. "And their position is, why should we fear Iran’s nuclear weapons? After all, we lived under the nuclear threat after World War II. And besides, either you or the Americans will solve the problem.”

If we could be assured of limiting Iran's aggressions to Europe, I would be tempted to sit back and let the Euros fend for themselves. But, of course, no responsible American leader would do that, just as there is no such assurance. And sure enough, according to an article in the German publication Der Spiegel, a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities is in the works (h/t CQ):

According to Ulfkotte's report, "western security sources" claim that during CIA Director Porter Goss' December 12 visit to Ankara, he asked Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to provide support for a possibile 2006 air strike against Iranian nuclear and military facilities. More specifically, Goss is said to have asked Turkey to provide unfettered exchange of intelligence that could help with a mission.

DDP also reported that the governments of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Oman and Pakistan have been informed in recent weeks of Washington's military plans. The countries, apparently, were told that air strikes were a "possible option," but they were given no specific timeframe for the operations.

In a report published on Wednesday, the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel also cited NATO intelligence sources claiming that Washington's western allies had been informed that the United States is currently investigating all possibilities of bringing the mullah-led regime into line, including military options. Of course, Bush has publicly stated for months that he would not take the possibility of a military strike off the table. What's new here, however, is that Washington appears to be dispatching high-level officials to prepare its allies for a possible attack rather than merely implying the possibility as it has repeatedly done during the past year.

This would certainly make sense given not only the short time frame involved but also the likelihood of such an air campaign being successful in its objective of destroying or at least significantly setting back the mullahgarchy's nuclear program. Hitting widely dispersed and reinforced targets in Iran would not be nearly as easy for the IDF as knocking out Saddam Hussein's Osirak facility was a quarter-century ago. The former would put Israeli fighter/bombers at the extreme end of their flight range absent either American air-to-air refueling or return landings at U.S. airstrips in Iraq, meaning we would have to get involved to some degree regardless. So why not launch the attack ourselves, since our doing so would be less inflammatory to the fabled "Arab street" than the Israelis pulling that trigger?

However, Brother Hinderaker isn't buying it, based upon this graf in a Jerusalem Post story on the Der Spiegel "scoop":

Although Der Spiegel could not say that these plans were concrete, they did note that according to a January 2005 New Yorker report American forces had entered Iran in 2005 in order to mark possible targets for an aerial assault.

Rocketman attributes that New Yorker report to the noted Bushophobic liar Seymour Hersh (the "journalist" who leaked and egregiously exaggerated the Abu Ghraib story during the 2004 presidential campaign, among other things), and therefore casting, for him, doubt on the credibility of the Der Speigel story.

All I can say is that I hope that the proverbial stopped clock is right in this case. By the very act of making a crazy neoNazi warmonger like Mahmoud Ahmedinejad their "president" and international mouthpiece, the mullahs have made unequivocal their determination to plunge the entire world into a cataclysmic war for the global Caliphate. It is a determination that will not be stopped by politics or diplomacy or internal insurrection of the Iranian people, but only American military power.

The "Supreme Leader" and his "Guardian Council" have committed to the path of nuclear brinksmanship because, in the classic mindset of all modern dictators with global ambitions, they believe the West to be decadent and weak. The time to disprove that mindset yet again is now - before their atomic fangs grow into place.