OUTSTANDING - AT 9:01 A.M. ET:  More on Iran.  The Times of London publishes the best editorial on Iran that I've read in months.  It sets the scene perfectly for President Obama and what the president faces.  A must read:

Winston Churchill described the actions of Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. The nuclear diplomacy of Iran is constructed more simply: it is one lie after another. Western diplomacy has proved susceptible to the tactic. A US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in December 2007 concluded that Iran was “less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005”. Documents obtained by The Times reveal that this assessment was worthless.

Nice to have clarity of thought, isn't it? 

...Iran has sought a nuclear capability. Its efforts have been accelerated in the past decade. The prospect of an Iranian bomb is alarming.

First, a nuclear-armed Iran will feel little constraint in supporting its terrorist proxies, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, with money and materiel.

They're not very constrained now.  Becoming a nuclear power will give them a sense of invincibility.

Second, a nuclear stand-off in the Gulf is unlikely to replicate the stable deterrence of the Cold War. In the adversarial relationship of the old superpowers, the threat of massive retaliation deterred the Soviet Union from military expansionism. Communism was brutal, but the Soviet gerontocracy after Stalin was risk-averse. Iran’s leadership is not like that.

An absolutely critical point, ignored by the armies of "multiculturalism" in America.  The Russians wanted to live.  The Iranian regime is part of the "we love death more than you love life" fringe of militant Islam.  We have a very childish tendency to laugh off that ideology, but we learned on 9-11 that it's very real.

Third, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seeks the annihilation of Israel, a sovereign member of the United Nations. The notion that his noisome anti-Semitic rhetoric is somehow explained by a faulty translation from the Farsi is one of the more bleakly fatuous suggestions of recent diplomatic debate. Israel was founded by a people that had doggedly clung to survival through persecution, pogrom and genocide. Israel’s leaders have not only the right but the historic obligation to take at face value the threats of a religious millenarian who looks forward to a second Holocaust while denying that the first one ever happened.

Finally, someone says that clearly, without a nod to the fashionable leftist antagonism toward Israel. 

Fourth, Iran invariably seeks to aggravate regional disputes. It was not the aggressor in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, but its retaliation included mining international waters and attacking Kuwaiti oil tankers.

We have to assume our Navy is preparing to counter new moves like that.

Finally...

Anticipating the end of America’s brief post-war nuclear monopoly, Churchill also declared: “We ought not to go jogging along improvident, incompetent, waiting for something to turn up, by which I mean waiting for something bad for us to turn up.” Sixty years later, that is precisely what Western diplomacy is doing.

COMMENT:  All right, Mr. Obama, just what are you going to do about it? 

December 14,  2009