The World Will Not Wait

The Jerusalem Post's Caroline Glick reports:

Last week Iran began enriching uranium in a second network of centrifuges. Just as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has dropped nearly all pretenses about his intention to achieve nuclear weapons, so too he makes it clear daily that he intends to use such weapons to annihilate Israel.

The world's reaction to Iran's behavior is depressingly instructive. Russia tells us that we are being paranoid and continues to build the Bushehr nuclear plant. The Europeans cluck disapprovingly and threaten to pass a weak, "reversible" sanctions resolution in the UN Security Council whose main target is American security hawks. For his part, US President George W. Bush continues to adhere to the call for sanctions.

And so we have Israel. With Iran speeding up its program, Israel may have as little as six months to launch a strike on its nuclear facilities before they can start churning out atomic bombs.

The gents at Powerline report:

The U.S. government has expressed concern over "mounting evidence" that Syria, Iran and Hezbollah are planning to topple the government of Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora. At the same time, Walid Jumblatt, longtime leader of the minority Druze community in Lebanon, says that Syria is sending arms to Hezbollah without impediment. "As long as the Syria-Lebanon border is not being monitored effectively, the flow of weapons will continue and there will be instability," Jumblatt said during a visit to Washington. He added that the image of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has soared in the Arab and Muslim world because of the tough resistance his fighters put up against Israel[.]

The consensus of "expert" opinion is that round two of the Israel-Hezbollah war is both inevitable and imminent. The only difference is over whether Israel or the Hezbos, with UNIFIL "peacekeepers" as passive or active allies, will take the initiative.

Ms. Glick also reports that Egypt, which is supposed to be stopping the Palestinian importation of weapons into Gaza, is instead aidding, abetting, and protecting it - perhaps in preparation for something a lot bigger:

Over the weekend, Egypt announced that it was deploying 5,000 troops (or "police" forces) along its border with the Gaza Strip in northern Sinai. The deployment was necessary, Egypt announced, to prevent Israel mounting a serious operation against the massive weapons smuggling that is quickly providing Palestinian terrorists with the means to transform Gaza into south Lebanon.

The fact that Egypt wishes to prevent Israel from stemming the flow of weapons to Gaza - which Egypt itself is supposed to be cutting off - should tell us all we need to know about Egypt's intentions....

Over the past decade, Egypt has been assiduously preparing its military for war against Israel. From the ideological indoctrination of its forces, to its massive armament programs, to the relocation of its military installations, units and logistical bases to both sides of the Suez Canal, to the training of its troops to fight "an unnamed country on Egypt's northern border," Steinitz warns that Egypt has done more than Iran to ready its forces for war against Israel....

Egypt protests friendship and pretends to combat terrorism and prevent weapons smuggling into the Sinai. Yet under this friendly guise, Egypt has legitimized Palestinian terrorists and stood behind the massive weapons smuggling operations. As Steinitz puts it, "Egypt is to Palestinian terrorism what Syria is to Hizbullah."

"The weapons to the Palestinians are brought in through Egyptian ports and El-Arish and are imported by land from Sudan. Those latter imports have to traverse Egypt on their way to Gaza. There is no way that the Egyptian government is not colluding with the weapons shippers."

[O]ver the past eight months the weapons being shipped to Gaza have been sharply upgraded. Egypt today is overseeing the import of sophisticated anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, as well as upgraded Katyusha rockets to Palestinian terror groups.

And now Mubarak is sending 5,000 "policemen to the border." ...Israel has no way of knowing who these forces are, whether they are police or commandos or infantry or anti-aircraft units. Steinmetz warns that "If Israel does nothing to prevent their deployment today, there is no reason to doubt that in a year or two there will be tens of thousands of Egyptian troops along the border with Israel."

So Israel faces round two in Gaza against Hamas as well, and that may be the least of their worries. And this at the same time that Iran is busily building nukes. No wonder Ms. Glick uses the word "encirclement."

And the original Hamas provocation that started all the fighting in the Holy Land this past summer - the kidnapping of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit - and the purpose for which the IDF "incursed" into Gaza - to secure his release? Guess who successfully thwarted that?

Israel has accused Iran of scuppering attempts to win the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli corporal captured by Palestinian militants near Gaza, by paying the militant Palestinian Islamic group Hamas £30 million not to agree to a prisoner exchange.

Dan Gillerman, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, said Teheran paid Khaled Meshaal, the hard-line Hamas leader who lives as an exile in Damascus, to ruin any chance of a negotiated settlement to this summer's Gaza crisis. "The Iranians paid him £30 million in order to avert and sabotage an imminent release," the ambassador said in New York.

"I informed the Security Council of news that we received, that we have every reason to believe that the Iranian regime has bribed Khaled Meshaal. I believe that the Security Council is worried about this and I hope that these worries will be translated into action very swiftly."

Negotiations brokered by Egypt's intelligence chief appeared to be moving towards a deal two months ago that would have seen Cpl Shalit exchanged for around 1,000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, only to collapse suddenly.

Only thing that surprises me is that the Iranians didn't add the stipulation that the thousand Pal terrorists be turned loose first before Hamas reneged an Shalit's release.

Does anybody wonder why soon to be ex-Senator Rick Santorum has been Jeremiacally going around the state of Pennsylvania speaking of "the gathering storm"? And does anybody in the Bush White House smell what Santorum is cooking?

Evidently not:

“We’ve got a lot of issues with Iran,” President Bush told a news conference last week. “The first is whether or not they will help this young democracy succeed,” he said, referring to Iraq. He said the “second issue” was whether Iran would help the Lebanese government [see above], and that the “big issue” was “whether or not Iran will end up with a nuclear weapon.”

The heart sinks. Can anyone — let alone the President — possibly believe that the mullahs might help Iraq succeed? The only “success” they are interested in is the humiliation of America and the domination of Iraq. Can anyone possibly believe that Iran might help the Lebanese government? The only thing they care about is the destruction of that government, the slaughter or domination of the Maronite Christians, and the creation of an Islamic Republic under the thumb of Hizbollah. And finally, how can anyone possibly believe that the “big issue” is whether or not Iran will get nukes? The issue is American lives, now being taken in Iraq and Afghanistan by Iranian weapons, killers, and managers. This is not new; it has been going on for twenty-seven years, and we have yet to respond.

Indeed, the Bushies appear fully and firmly committed to doing nothing at all to stop Iran's designs on the Middle East, the destruction of Israel, or their bringing America itself to its knees:

It is more likely that the President knows we are at war with Iran, but has chosen — wrongly, in my opinion (but then I wasn’t elected either) — to delay our response. That could be due to any number of reasons, ranging from a belief that he had to give the Europeans every chance to force the Iranians to abandon their nuclear project, to purely domestic calculations that he lacks sufficient political capital to directly challenge the mullahs. But whatever his reasoning, it reinforces the original failure of strategic vision that has characterized the Iraqi and Afghan enterprises from the beginning. Once you see that Iraq and Afghanistan are battlefields in a larger war, you must figure out how to win that war, and not the one that was drawn up on the Power Points before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, based on the false assumption that we would fight a series of limited wars, one country at a time....

Lacking a regional strategy, our military is essentially fighting a holding action in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there is clearly a premium on avoiding casualties.

And if the premium is on avoiding casualties, it then by definition cannot be on winning the war. The last war we fought with such a misplaced premium was...Vietnam. You do the math.

Mr. Ledeen has:

[T]he only way we can demonstrate we are going to win is to defeat the terror masters [aka Iran and Syria]. Without that, the populations of Iraq and Afghanistan are entitled to doubt our ability to defeat the terrorists. And it is utterly misleading to claim that we will eventually be able to entrust the future of the war to Iraqi and Afghan forces. They cannot win a war by fighting on their own territory alone, any more than we can, no matter how effective they turn out to be.

And in four days, if the pollsters are to be believed, the American people are about to put into legislative power the party for whom it is 1974 all over again, that wants to bug out of Iraq, and after that Afghanistan, and after than the Middle East altogether, while impeaching President Bush AND Vice President Cheney simultaneously in order to carry out the coup de' tat that fell short in 2000 and install Nancy Pelosi as Hillary Clinton's Oval Office seat-warmer, and whose viewpoint of and on the war against Islamic Fundamentalism is encapsulated here. And the terror masters are counting on it.

Didja notice this in the news the other day?

Iran test-fired dozens of missiles, including the Shahab-3 that can reach Israel, in military maneuvers Thursday that it said were aimed at putting a stop to the role of world powers in the Persian Gulf region.

And some cut & run conservatives are cool with the notion of Speaker (or President) Pelosi?