Right Pulse

As the terrorists had been praying for and as John Howard had warned. So get ready for Iranian and US nukes to rain down, instead of US convential bombs to take out Iran’s nuke facilities. A lack of political will. From Michael Ledee and Mark Steyn at The Corner:

Ha’aretz reports that Obama will offer Israeli a nuclear umbrella vs. Iran. The “reporter” wonders if that means Obama has accepted the inevitability of an Iranian nuke. Yes, of course I blogged on it. And so did Richard Fernandez.

From Reuters:

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama plans to offer Israel a strategic pact designed to fend off any nuclear attack on the Jewish state by Iran, an Israeli newspaper reported on Thursday.

Which all sounds very nice, but implicit in such a ”pledge” is that the United States now accepts that Iran’s going nuclear and there’s nothing anyone can (or will) do about it. That’s a significant shift.

…Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of those famously “moderate” types compared to President Ahmadinejad, described Israel as “the most hideous occurrence in history” which the Muslim world “will vomit out from its midst” with “a single atomic bomb.” That last bit is worth quoting more fully. Rafsanjani said:

A single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counter-strike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world.

If they were thus calibrating the risks a few years ago, I wonder what they make of this new “pledge”. Richard Fernandez writes:

A combination of tacitly accepting an nuclear-armed Iran and reposing deterrence in Washington could make the Ayatollahs more willing to run the risk. What are the odds that the West can bring itself to enter into a nuclear exchange with Iran if it could not muster the will to prevent Teheran’s acquisition of those weapons in the first place?