Inevitable Iranian crisis looms without leadership

Examiner.com

What is Israel really up to regarding Iran? Are they genuinely sincere about following diplomatic sanctions to the bitter end or is this the most elaborate ruse since the Trojan Horse? Are they actually planning this very moment for a preemptive strike on Iran’s underground nuclear facilities?

In a country that has never publicly admitted to possessing any nuclear weapons, the questions are anybody's guess as to the real answers.

Iran is not helping the quest for peace with their alarming and increasingly vocal annihilationist rhetoric and their well known and increasing store of uranium and rocketry sophistication. Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cries out that Israel’s existence is “an insult to all humanity. Anyone who loves freedom and justice must strive for the annihilation of the Zionist regime.”

Is it any wonder that Israel may be on the verge of an all-out attack by air on Iran's nuclear facilities?

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a typically non-diplomatic gesture is quoted as saying, Israel is “a true cancer tumor on this region that should be cut off.”

The Israelis are well aware of the major consequences a military attack on Iran could produce in the region. Everyone wants to avoid military action, surely the Israelis above all. A massive counterattack is a given with thousands of rockets launched from Lebanon, Islamic Jihad firing from Gaza and worldwide terror against Jewish and Israeli targets.

But the world should not assume Israel will wait forever for economic sanctions to bring the Iranian government to its knees. Israel will never forget the Nazi holocaust that claimed six million Jews. For them to strike could mean many thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides of a conflict no one can possibly guess the extent would be.

There are six million living in Israel today.

Last-ditch negotiations in Istanbul, Baghdad and Moscow have failed miserably. Time is running out. The Iranians continue to ridicule the peace process contemptuously playing for time until they have the capability of launching a nuclear device.

What to do?

It is clear the Iranians do not take the threat of a U.S. attack seriously. Israelis feel increasingly forced to act before their more limited ordinance, far less effective than the U.S. arsenal, becomes ineffective with Iran’s ever-hardening facilities.
Give Iran a face-saving way out?

Most military experts find that to be a disastrous choice. Iran would continue to hold the means to produce fissile material, either secretly or through a defiant break from any world community agreement. Considering the record of the Obama administration in this growing crisis the past three years, it's hard to see the arrogant Iranians taking any agreement seriously or showing the respect that would be vital for world peace.

What would be necessary is congressional authorization for the use of force if Iran does not negotiate denuclearization. Iran could respond favorably if they knew a strong and bipartisan majority of the American people were for such a demand knowing the alternative was a nuclear Iran.

If the world continues to appease the Iranians much like the British and the French did in the 1930's with Adolph Hitler, America, Europe, the Gulf Arabs and the Israelis will forever be condemned to live under the threat of nuclear blackmail from a rogue regime the U.S. State Department calls “the world’s greatest exporter of terror.”

Let no one doubt that Israel, even with limited capabilities, will attack Iran most likely triggering a regional war.