Iran's threat, Bush's dilemma

By Aussiegirl

Max Boot delineates the admittedly poor choices facing the Bush administration vis a vis Iran's nuclear threat. This is the biggest danger the West has faced since WWII, I believe.

Would you want to be president and be faced with such difficult choices? Our holiday from history is at an end. It's put up or shut up time for the world's democracies. Either we take out this madman before he starts a conflagration that will kill potentially millions of people, or we cower and accomodate him, choosing to believe that he isn't serious and that we need all that oil, after all. History will judge, and it won't be pretty if we fail to choose correctly.

Meanwhile, this does not appear to be on any politician's radar at all. The democrats are screaming about abortion and domestic spying, as usual, or the latest "Bush outrage", while the Republicans are busy marking up all those earmarks for their petty little political perks and jockeying to see which one will get more than the other.

Storm clouds gather while Fox twitters and natters about the latest breaking developments in the Natalie Holloway case.

Has one Jewish senator or congressman had one public word of condemnation for Ahmadinejad for his despicable and ominous statements about wiping Israel off the map, or his Holocaust denial? Why not?

Why are they seemingly only concerned with a woman's so-called "right" to abort a 9 month old, full-term baby? Inquiring minds want to know.

Where are the serious people we can rely on to lead us through these dangerous times? They are all fiddling and twiddling, while the world approaches apocalypse.

It's so disgusting that I can hardly speak. The completely UNserious attitude towards these very real dangers. For all his inarticulateness, George Bush is the only one who seems to understand that the world is at a dangerous crossroads. Let's hope and pray that he is guided to do the right thing in time.

Iran's
threat, Bush's dilemma - Los Angeles Times

In sum, a
terrorist-sponsoring state led by an apocalyptic lunatic will soon have the
ability to incinerate Tel Aviv or New York. The International Atomic Energy
Agency is concerned enough to convene an emergency meeting on Feb. 2 to discuss
a referral to the U.N. Security Council. This is not a prospect to make the
mullahs quake. They know perfectly well that no serious sanctions are likely.
Their business partners in Russia and China will see to that. Nor do the
Europeans have any interest in embargoing Iran's main export — petroleum — when
oil is more than $60 a barrel. The most that might happen is that some Iranian
officials might have their foreign accounts frozen and their foreign travel
curtailed. That seems a small price to pay for nuclear glory.

What might
stop Iran at this late date? Some conservatives have pinned their hopes on
another Iranian revolution. The CIA and other agencies should do everything
possible to encourage such an uprising. But the chances of regime change in the
near term are not high. Even less likely is a U.S. invasion; the U.S. military
is overstretched as it is.

That leaves only one serious option — air
strikes by Israel or the U.S., possibly accompanied by commando raids. It is
doubtful that bombs could eradicate Iran's nuclear program, but they could set
it back for years, possibly long enough for the regime to implode.