Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri reiterated his call for jihad against the Syrian dictatorship in a message posted on the Internet yesterday. The conflict in Syria pits the Assad regime, Iran and Hezbollah against the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda and the Arab states. Non-Islamist Syrians desiring genuine democracy, including the Christian minority, are caught in-between.

Zawahiri tells Muslims to support the uprising “with all that he can, with his life, money, opinion, as well as information.” The message comes after 25 were killed and 175 were wounded in two suicide bombings in Aleppo of security service buildings. The attacks are believed to have been directly ordered by Ayman al-Zawahiri and carried out by Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq.

He is especially concerned about how foreign powers will influence the Syrian opposition as it looks for outside help.

“Our people in Syria, don’t rely on the West or the United States or Arab governments and Turkey,” Zawahiri says.

His video was released on the same day that the Arab League asked the United Nations to send a peacekeeping force into Syria and agreed to “materially” support the opposition, likely paving the way for military assistance to the Free Syria Army that is fighting the regime’s forces.

The Muslim Brotherhood, unlike Al-Qaeda, is happy to accept foreign military intervention if it will lead to victory. Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi, the top Brotherhood cleric, declared that it is permissible for Muslims to welcome U.N.-backed intervention in Syria if the Arab states are unable to stop the violence.

Al-Qaeda has had an on-again, off-again relationship with the Assad regime. Syria has imprisoned members of Al-Qaeda, as the terrorist group is ideologically committed to replacing the regime with Islamist rule. Assad has also helped Al-Qaeda when their interests have aligned, particularly in Iraq and Lebanon. Relations between Iraq and Syria hit the breaking point in 2009 when the Iraqis released evidence that the Assad regime was backing Al-Qaeda and other terrorists carrying out attacks in Iraq. The relationship has healed since then as Iranian influence over Iraq has grown.

The Iraqi Deputy Interior Minister says that terrorists are crossing the border into Syria and shipping arms to the opposition fighting Assad. The price of a Kalashnikov assault rifle has increased from $100-200 to $1000-$1500 because of the rise in demand, he claims. However, the Iraqi government is backing Assad and could just be trying to substantiate the dictatorship’s claims that it is only fighting “armed gangs” and terrorists.

Since coming to power in 2000, Bashar Assad’s strategy has been to portray his regime as the only thing stopping an Islamist takeover. Secular democratic voices are silenced while the jihadist rhetoric of Islamists is often allowed. The regime recently released a top Al-Qaeda prisoner, Abu Musab al-Suri, who used to lead the terrorist group’s operations in Europe. He oversaw the 2005 bombings in London and was involved in the 2004 bombings in Madrid.

There are two possible conflicts on the table in Washington. One is with Iran and the other with Syria. The Iran conflict is the one that Washington doesn’t want. Its most likely trigger at this stage is an Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear program. Like most of the wars centering around Israel, this one is existential and of no interest to the philosopher kings in D.C. who wage wars with the grand purpose of making the world a better place.

Washington does not particularly care whether Iran gets nukes or doesn’t get nukes. It cares about History. With a capital “H.” Libya got bombed because it was on the wrong side of history. Syria is about to get bombed because it’s on the wrong side of history. There are people in the administration like Samantha Power who would like to bomb Israel for being on the wrong side of history, but they don’t think that even J Street and Peter Beinart could spin that as a pro-Israel move.

Being on the right or wrong side of history is one of those topics that primarily interests Islamists and nation builders on the right and the left who subscribe to a progressive version of history. Things don’t just happen, they happen because a country and a people are riding the history escalator up or down, to the top floor of the mall of the world where the cultivated stores like Starbucks, Nordstrom and the now defunct Sharper Image are located, or the bottom where K-Mart, Payless and Gap take up space.

The Arab Spring was on the right side of history because of its transformative qualities. Supporters of it were on the right side of history. Opponents of it needed to be bombed if they were Arab dictators or disinvited from the right cocktail parties if they were merely columnists and analysts. And at the end of it all through the sublime majesty of democracy and people power, the Middle East would look exactly like Europe, but with a more exotic cuisine.

Israel has always been the hedgehog in the soup of Arab democracy, agitating them, empowering their rulers and causing them to distrust Western benevolence. Now Israeli jets threaten to spill the soup of the Arab Spring by bombing Iran, which may reinforce support for Syria, which will hold up the Arab Spring and halt the progressive escalator of history.

Washington needs the Syrian war to happen, and it needs to keep a conflict with Iran from happening. The great diplomatic problem of Israel has always been that its leader insist on viewing conflicts in practical terms. Israel does not fight wars to make the world safe for democracy, it fights wars because there’s someone shooting missiles as it. This is an unacceptable reason for a war in a postmodern world where wars are fought to preserve the international order, protect civilization, make the world safe for democracy and prove that human rights violations will be punished by the duly constituted body of international jurisprudence.

Self-interest is Israel’s original sin. It was the sin that countless titans of the left from H.G. Wells to Lenin berated the Zionists for. Instead of contributing to the welfare of mankind and participating in the international brotherhood of workers, they went off to rebuild a country that existed only in their holy books and stirred up all kinds of trouble doing it. And since they have kept on stirring up trouble, not in the name of some grand idea, but out of their tawdry interest in defending themselves.

With angry Muslims boiling in European cities, Koran touting terrorists blowing up the modern infrastructure of the world’s capitals and turmoil roiling the hundreds of millions of Muslims who still haven’t managed to get refugee status in the UK or the US, the progressive vision is in big trouble and the only solution is to somehow stabilize the situation. Democracy is the only panacea that the progressive prescription plan covers.

Israel’s insistence on a purely existential view is dismissed as selfish and narrow-minded when the Middle East is headed toward a brave new world where nukes no longer matter because no one is angry anymore because there are no more dictators and democracy is everywhere. While the Israelis see the Middle East as basically static, the progressives see the Middle East as constantly on the verge of a great leap forward to a new more enlightened age.

As a result any affinity between the neoconservatives and Israeli leaders was always going to be limited. The neoconservatives were impressed by Israel’s modernism, but they assumed that it could be copied over to their neighbors and came to resent Israel as an obstacle for not playing a more meaningful role in their grand theory of history. While outwardly the progressives see Israel as very modern, they reject it for not possessing the most vital element of modernism. Transnationalism.

While Israel has more than its share of leftists, its animating philosophy is an ethnic nationalism that is repugnant to the transnationalist. They can find no meaningful globally applicable philosophy that defines its success. Like Japan, Israel is a self-contained wonder. It is a nation, not a philosophy. Its identity is rooted in an infuriating recent and ancient history. It is modern in defiance of the progressive understanding of history– which is why its technology, its human rights and its basic decency are dismissed.

The chatter about a possible Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities has become loud and dangerous.  At one point the Netanyahu government found the extensive discussion related to an imminent Israeli attack on Iran useful, as it expedited Western action against Iran in the form of tougher sanctions.  However, all this talk may now put Israel in a dangerous position wherein Iran may use it as a pretext to strike first.

A February 2 report in the Washington Post that stated “U.S. Secretary of Defense is concerned Israel will launch an attack before Iran enters so-called ‘immunity zone’ when military strike won’t bust Iran’s nuclear facilities.”  Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is reported as saying that he believes that Israel will attack Iran in April, May or June.  The Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote that Panetta thinks that Israel will attack because after the ‘immunity zone’ expires the nuclear facilities will be heavily fortified and a military strike will no longer succeed.

On Sunday, February 5, 2012 President Obama was interviewed on NBC-TV during the Super Bowl pre-game show. In the interview, Obama contradicted his Defense Secretary, saying he “does not think Israel has decided whether to attack Iran over the disputed nuclear program.” The president added, “I don’t think Israel has made a decision on what they need to do, we are going to make sure that we work in lockstep, as we proceed to try to solve this – hopefully, diplomatically.”

In an Earlier NBC program top figures in the U.S. and Israeli defense establishments were interviewed and confirmed that Israel has long-range Jericho missiles whose warheads can penetrate Iran’s nuclear facilities.  According to these experts, while the warheads will be conventional and not nuclear, their accuracy can be depended upon. They further suggested that Israel would employ F-15i fighter planes along with the Jericho missiles that have a range of 2400 kilometers. In addition, they speculated, Israel would use its drones, and flight paths that would conserve fuel consumption.  The experts believe that Israel will not employ cruise missiles from its submarines since Israel does not have enough of them in its arsenal.

According to this same report, Israel would target only those facilities which are critical to Iran’s nuclear bomb weaponization strategy.  American military experts believe that such an attack would delay Iran’s nuclear development by at least two to four years.  Israeli experts however estimate that the attack will set back the Iranian plans three to five years, and that if Iran persists in its plans to acquire a bomb, Israel would then attack again in four years.

U.S. Intelligence assessments prepared in the summer of 2011 concluded that any Israeli attack on hardened nuclear sites in Iran would go far beyond airstrikes from F-15 and F-16 fighter planes and likely include electronic warfare against Iran’s electric grid, internet cables, cell phone network, and emergency frequencies for firemen and police officers.

Israel, according to these intelligence sources, has developed a weapon capable of mimicking a maintenance cell phone signal that commands a cell network to “sleep;” thus stopping transmissions.  The Israelis, they suggest, have jammers capable of creating interference within Iran’s emergency frequencies for first responders.

Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak, speaking at the Herzliya Conference on February 3, 2012, stated that “if sanctions don’t achieve the desired goal of stopping Iran’s military nuclear program, there will be a need to consider taking action.”  Barak views Iran as nearing the stage “which may render any physical strike as impractical,” and he said, “A nuclear Iran will be more complicated to deal with, more dangerous and more costly in blood then if it were stopped today.  In other words, he who says in English ‘later’ may find that later is too late.”

In dealing with the threat of a nuclear Iran, Obama has not merely kicked the proverbial can down the proverbial road; he has actually aided and abetted Iran in its quest for military nuclear capabilities.

Such a grim assessment of Obama’s Iran policy is unavoidable in light of his inaction against Iran for its capture of the RQ-170 stealth drone in December of last year; his silence over Iran’s initiation of 20% uranium enrichment at the underground Fordo facility near Qom; his reluctance to send U.S. aircraft carriers into the Persian Gulf through the Straits of Hormuz;  his hesitation in approving immediate sanctions on Iran’s central bank and energy sector; his silence as Hugo Chavez allies with Iran to develop terrorist and missile bases in Venezuela; his secret attempt to influence Congress to soften US sanctions; and his secret letter of appeasement to Iran.   These inactions are incomprehensible and unforgivable because they have allowed Iran to reach the threshold of becoming a nuclear threat to the entire world.

What can now be done?  All the options are bad. Sanctions have slowed Iran’s progress but not stopped it.  Bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities would certainly inflict crippling pain and would set back Iran’s WMD quest by a year or so; but this course of action brings with it risks of regional upheaval and war, global economic disruption, and Iran-sponsored terror attacks on US and Israeli targets anywhere in the world.  On the other hand, not stopping Iran from bringing the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust has obvious consequences of an even more dire and perilous nature.

How can any country, any national or international leader, dissolve this Gordian knot of similarly evil alternatives?  Israel may have the answer, without an airstrike.

Since 2005 various parts of the Iranian nuclear project have been hit by a series of disasters, which Iran blames on the West, and especially Israel.¹

In April 2006, two transformers blew up and 50 centrifuges were ruined during Iran’s first attempt to enrich uranium at Natantz. A spokesman for the Iranian Atomic Energy Council stated that the raw materials had been “tampered with.”

Between January 2006 and July 2007, three airplanes belonging to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards crashed under mysterious circumstances. Some reports said the planes had simply “stopped working.”

“Stopped working” was also the Iranian explanation for two lethal computer viruses that penetrated the nuclear project’s computer system in 2007, knocking out a large number of centrifuges.

In January 2007, several insulation units in the connecting fixtures of the centrifuges, which were purchased on the black market from suppliers in Eastern Europe, turned out to be flawed and unusable. Iran concluded that some of these suppliers were actually straw companies that were set up by Iran’s enemies to outfit the Iranian nuclear effort with faulty parts.

In January 2007, Dr. Ardeshir Husseinpour, a 44-year-old nuclear scientist, died under mysterious circumstances. The official announcement said he died in a “work accident,” but Iranian intelligence blames Israel.

Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a particle physicist, was killed in January 2010, when a booby-trapped motorcycle parked nearby exploded as he was getting into his car. Some analysts harbor the suspicion that Mohammadi was killed by Iranian agents because of his support for the Iranian opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi, but Iran blames Israel.

In June 2010, reports surfaced that the computer system operating the uranium enrichment site of Natanz had been infected with a new and more powerful cyber-weapon, a deadly virus known as “Stuxnet.”  A highly sophisticated, incredibly invasive, but surgically refined virus, Stuxnet infected 59% of Iran’s computers but targeted only those using the Siemens SCADA software used by Iranian nuclear facilities.  Contrary to Iranian denials, analysts confirmed that this cyber-attack delayed Iran’s WMD progress by at least several years and forced 984 centrifuges off-line.

Itchy trigger fingers can cause wars.  A pre-emptive conventional weapons bombing strike against Iran’s known nuclear facilities could do more harm than good….or at least so say some.[i]

And indeed there is the real and frightening possibility that an Israeli or American attack might unite Iran’s disaffected anti-Mullah 30-somethings into a furious show of patriotism and thus lock in the current mullah-cracy (aka the Islamic Republic of Iran) for another generation.  Such an attack might also have a similar effect on the current Syrian regime; radicalize the Muslim world against the West; ignite Hezbollah on the Lebanese border; re-invigorate a flagging Hamas; endanger US troops in Iraq; spark revenge terror attacks; propel oil prices skyward; trigger a regional war; prompt Iran’s closure of the Straits of Hormuz; and cause stock markets world-wide to plummet.  And then again, it might not.

But what happens if one does not bomb?

Some current analysis suggests that an Iranian Islamist regime armed with nuclear weapons will trigger a regional nuclear arms race; destroy the non-proliferation treaty; increase the danger of miscalculation that could bring on a nuclear exchange; allow Iran to escalate its destabilizing influence throughout the region and the world; threaten Israel and moderate Arab regimes; manipulate energy markets to its benefit; pose as a guardian of Muslim communities even beyond the Middle East; and, perhaps worst of all, share its nuclear technology with its non-state proxies and terrorist groups.  Thus empowered, Iran just might be able to throw its nuclear weight behind the current Syrian regime; radicalize the Muslim world against the West; ignite Hezbollah on the Lebanese border; re-invigorate a flagging Hamas; endanger US troops in Iraq; provide a measure of impunity for Muslim terror attacks; propel oil prices skyward; trigger regional wars anywhere it wants; close the Straits of Hormuz with impunity; and cause stock markets world-wide to plummet.

And to make matters worse, the Iranian nuclear threat may by now be global. Israeli sources disclosed that recently Iran began working on missiles with a 10,000 kilometer (c. 6,200 miles) range, capable of striking targets in the western hemisphere.  But even worse is the slowly emerging reality that Iran and Hezbollah are working with drug cartels in Mexico and with the Venezuelan government to smuggle materials into South America, creating a conduit that could one day be used to smuggle nuclear weapons into South America for deployment against North America.  An Iranian nuclear attack on North America, via long-range missiles or from bases in South America, could involve the detonation of a nuclear device high in the atmosphere to send a massive electromagnetic pulse that would paralyze virtually all U.S.-based electronic defense systems, destroying America’s electrical grid, and shutting down everything from cars to computers to airplanes and refrigerators.  And if detonated closer to the ground, such a device would vaporize millions of Americans.

But Iran does not need to actually drop the bomb.  The moment Iran goes nuclear, other countries in the region will feel compelled to do the same, sparking a nuclear arms race among the world’s most unstable and fanatical regimes and their proxy terrorist forces.  And such threats, without a single missile being launched, would have a devastating effect on the Israeli economy and society:  withdrawal of overseas and Israeli investors, a record number of Israeli emigrants, a sharp decline of Jewish immigration, dwindling tourism, intensification of military-political-economic dependence on the U.S., and the transformation of Israel from a strategic asset to a strategic liability.

Should Iran achieve nuclear military capacity, it will be free to advance its Islamist revolution throughout the world with impunity from attack.  So it may well be that by not bombing, the world, and especially the USA and Israel, will pay a much higher and more horrific price.

But what about the IAEA, inspections, and sanctions?

The problem with the IAEA and its inspections is that it has failed numerous times to detect clandestine WMD activity in countries that are signatories to the non-proliferation treaty.  Such embarrassing gaffs include North Korea, Libya, Russia, China and most recently Syria and Iran.  Moreover, there is no method of enforcement of IAEA inspections.  With complete impunity, Iran recently barred inspectors from the most sensitive and suspicious of its WMD sites.

Moreover, Iran possesses the most clandestine-capable nuclear-weapon technology in history: the gas centrifuge. Gas centrifuge installations can be housed in a room the size of a high school gymnasium, and require very little external power, thus making it almost impossible to detect.  Iran can now make centrifuges on an entirely indigenous basis.

Sanctions have failed to bring Iran to its knees, even though the most recent ones have thrown the Iranian economy into turmoil.  And this is one of the most problematic aspects of sanctions:  in a country where leaders have no concern for the well-being of their own people, sanctions can harm the innocent without influencing the government. Enhanced incentives have not only failed to entice Iran to give up its nuclear program, but they have had the reverse effect of validating its uncompromising policy against making any concessions in the nuclear arena.  Moreover, Iran has successfully evaded US sanctions against its state shipping company simply by painting new names on its ships. Equally problematic is the willingness of Russia, China, North Korea and Venezuela to supply Iran with whatever it needs, including WMD expertise and uranium, to vitiate the effects of the West’s sanctions.[ii]

The Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control reported in November, 2011 that by December 2008 Iran had one atomic bomb. By 2009 it had two, and by 2011, five.  The IAEA garnered evidence that Iran was testing nuclear explosives and working on weaponization (fitting nuclear warheads to nose-cones of missiles). In January 2012 Iran announced publicly that its uranium enrichment site was about to become operational, prompting the IAEA to warn the world that Tehran now has the ability to make whatever nuclear weapons it chooses, within months.

Let’s say you’re Israel.  An enemy dedicated to your destruction is developing the means to wipe you off the face of the earth, with the covert and overt help of world powers like Russia and China.  It’s only a matter of months before that enemy achieves its goals – and when it does you will not be able to stop the mushroom cloud rising over your cities.

So you come up with a sophisticated military plan to strike your foe in an extraordinarily targeted fashion.  And you ask for the help of your longtime ally – virtually your only ally – the United States.  All you want is covert logistical support … and secrecy.  Secrecy is of the utmost importance, since a full-scale aerial assault on your enemy is unfeasible.

Let’s say you’re Israel.  What would you say if the United States promptly proceeded to broadcast your military plans to the rest of the world?

Two little words come to mind.  And neither of them is “thanks.”

That’s precisely what happened this week, when Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced via the Washington Post that “there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June – before Iran enters what Israelis described as a ‘zone of immunity’ to commence building a nuclear bomb.”  What was the point of spilling the beans?  To scuttle the attack, of course.  According to the Post, “President Obama and Panetta are said to have cautioned the Israelis that the United States opposes an attack, believing that it would derail an increasingly successful international economic sanctions program and other non-military efforts to stop Iran from crossing the threshold.”

This has become pattern for the Obama Administration.  Back in June 2010, you’ll recall, the London Times reported that the Saudi Arabians had cut a deal with the Israelis to allow them to use Saudi airspace for a strike on Iran.  Where did the Times learn this?  According to the Jerusalem Post, “The report cited a US defense source as saying the Saudis have already done tests to ensure no jet is shot down in the event of an Israeli attack.  The source added that the U.S. State Department is aware of the agreement.”

Well, isn’t that odd – two blown secrets, two references to the U.S. Defense Department.

The real problem isn’t just the blown secret, of course.  It’s the signal it sends to the Iranian regime.  By letting the cat out of the bag, the United States has signaled to the Iranians that the Israelis are on their own – that the Israelis are in fact a rogue state operating outside the bounds of conventional international politics.  By signaling open opposition to the Israelis defending themselves, the Obama Administration has demonstrated to the Iranians in crystalline fashion that even if Iran develops weapons, and even if the Iranians hand those weapons off to a terrorist group for use against Israel, America may stand idly by.

On January 29, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was interviewed on CBS news.  When asked about the situation with Iran, Secretary Panetta responded: “[I]f they [Iran] decided to [build a nuclear device], it would probably take them about a year …  [and] …if they proceed and [if] we get intelligence…then….there are no options that are off the table” for the US commitment to stop Iran from building a nuclear arsenal.

Sounds good, except for all the “ifs:”  “if they produce” and “if we get intelligence” and “if they decide to do it”

Panetta’s “ifs” create the impression that there may in fact be no threat from Iran, that Iran may not be pursuing nuclear capacity, that there is as yet no actionable intelligence about Iranian WMDs, and that maybe Iran has not decided to pursue a nuclear option.

But facts of which Mr. Panetta must be aware tell us the opposite.

Back in the ‘60s the Shah tried to start a WMD program for Iran but it floundered and was abandoned.  In the mid-1990s the Ayatollahs restarted the program. Iran said it wanted nuclear power for clean energy needs, but in 2002 an Iranian exile group shared with Western intelligence secret Iranian documents revealing a clandestine program to enrich weapons-grade uranium.  The facility at Natanz was built with the assistance of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program.  Under threat of sanctions, the government agreed in 2003 to halt work on uranium enrichment; but in 2006, less than a year after Akhmedi-Nejad took power, the Iranian government announced that it was going to restart its uranium enrichment. No “ifs” about that.

From 2005 onward US intelligence organizations and the Israeli Mossad worked together to locate and sabotage the financial underpinnings of the Iranian nuclear project.  On September 9, 2009, American intelligence concluded that Iran had the nuclear fuel necessary to build an atomic bomb, thanks in part to a hitherto undocumented underground plant near the city of Qom. Most recently in January of this year, Iran announced defiantly that it was going to start an additional uranium enrichment site, fortified to withstand even the most powerful of America’s bunker-busting bombs. No “ifs” about that either.

In May 2011, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akhbar Salehi addressed a regional economic summit in Tehran.  He told his audience that he was optimistic that nuclear inspectors would not find anything amiss when they visited Iran.  Of course he was optimistic. For the past 20 years Iran has done a great job of hiding those of their WMD sites that were devoted to the development of military uses for nuclear weapons.

American efforts to counteract the Iranian threat have been limited to sanctions and efforts to persuade EU allies to cease cooperation with Iranian financial institutions, the most significant of which were H.R. 1905, the Iranian Threat Reduction Act of (May) 2011, and the Senate’s decision in December 2011 to approve sanctions against Iran’s central bank. Although, as has recently become clear, President Obama does not support such actions, even though a nuclear Iran now threatens the American continents, he nonetheless signed these newest and most comprehensive sanctions on December 31, 2011.  No “ifs” in the opinion of Congress nor in Obama’s acquiescence.

Throughout the past decade Iran has argued that it merely wants to generate clean, green electricity with its nuclear program; but a host of reports from the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), thoroughly documented in a series of articles in the NY Times, create the more than merely credible case that Iran has been well on its way for over a decade to developing a nuclear device for military use. The New York Times offers no support for any “ifs.”

The 33-year farce of Western appeasement of Iran may be reaching its denouement. For the last few months, the pace of events have quickened as the West sanctions and threatens, and Iran blusters about closing the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off oil to Europe, and unleashing its terrorist proxies. Just last week Iran’s “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei subtly suggested that Iran would step up its already considerable support of terrorist outfits targeting Israel and the U.S.: “From now on, in any place, if any nation or any group confronts the Zionist regime, we will endorse and we will help. We have no fear expressing this.” Indulging traditional Islamic anti-Semitic language, Khamenei said Israel was a “cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut,” and claimed that the U.S. would suffer defeat and damage its regional prestige if it decides to use military force to stop the country’s nuclear program.

Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has said there was a “strong likelihood” that Israel would attack Iran in April, May, or June of this year, a supposition reinforced by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. And Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in his remarks at the Herzilya Conference that Iran’s “military nuclear program is steadily nearing ripeness and is about to enter the ‘immunity zone.’ From that point on, the Iranian regime will be able to act to complete the program, with no effective disturbance and a time that is convenient for it.” The backdrop of this war of words is the West’s imposition of yet more sanctions, while the Iranian regime once again rope-a-dopes the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, and rumors of American troop concentrations in the region abound.

A constant in all this the diplomatic fencing is the threat of military action by Israel, along with the rumors surrounding such an event and speculations about the extent of Israel’s military capabilities. More important, however, is the unsavory way the Obama administration is using the threat of Israeli military action to influence Iranian behavior, at the same time it positions itself to avoid any responsibility for an attack. Thus Panetta publicly has been warning Israel against attacking, listing all the “unintended consequences” that would follow, at the same time the U.S. demands that Israel do nothing without alerting the United States in advance. However, despite these public warnings to Israel, it has long been clear that the administration’s diplomatic efforts have all been underwritten by the implicit threat that Israel will take unilateral military action. So it is that Israel is made the Dirty Harry of the Middle East, her actions decried by Western nations too cowardly to do what they know needs to be done, as in 1981, when Israel destroyed Iraq’s Osirak atomic reactor only to be condemned by the United States.

For make no mistake, Iran cannot be allowed to succeed in manufacturing nuclear weapons, or even achieving “nuclear latency,” the ability rapidly to produce them when needed. Such armaments in the hands of an Iranian regime besotted with apocalyptic Twelver Shi’ism and religiously sanctioned Jew-hatred would radically reconfigure the Middle East, sparking nuclear proliferation in the region and endangering not just Israel, but a large portion of the world’s oil supply. Yet on her own, Israel can at best delay Iran’s progress for at best three to five years. Apart from the logistical challenges of such a complex attack, nuclear production facilities in Iran have been dispersed into 17 known sites, many of which have been moved deep underground into fortified bunkers and tunnels.

The fallout of such an attack, moreover, could hit Israel hard. By Israeli estimations, Iran’s proxy Hezbollah has stockpiled in Lebanon 50,000 missiles, which can reach every corner of Israel. Following the fall of Mubarak and the ascendancy of the Muslim Brothers, the southern border with Egypt is no longer secure, thus providing an avenue for Hamas terrorist attacks. A beleaguered Bashar al Assad in Syria could distract attention from his slaughter of Syrians by attacking Israel in the Golan. Although the United States has said it would defend Israel in these circumstances, it is not certain how reliable that pledge is in an election year, with a U.S. president who already has shown by his actions a marked dislike for Israel. After all, this is a president who counts Turkey’s Recep Erdogan as one of his closest international buddies, despite Turkey’s naked support for the genocidal Hamas, but who publicly disparages Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. Certainly, Israel would find little sympathy and support in the U.N. or the E.U. after an attack on Iran.

Groundhog Day is the long eternal tragedy of Islam, which always sees its shadow and always ends up with six weeks, six months or six hundred years of more winter. That hopeful time when the bitter cold of winter begins its slow transition into the warmth and renewal of spring never comes for Islam.

In a reversal of the cycle of season, the Arab Spring led to the Islamic Winter, but that is the endless pattern of Islamic attempts at reform and rejuvenation, which rather than finding renewal in their attempts at transformation only go on perpetuating the same cycle of violence, tyranny and oppression.

There is a peculiar tragedy to a religion which cannot escape its own destructive nature, each time it reaches for some form of redemption, its hands come up dripping with blood and it all ends in more bodies and petty tyrannies.

The film Groundhog Day showed us a man who was doomed to repeat the same day over and over again until he learned to use his time to become a better person. Islam has been stuck in its own form of that cycle, repeating the same century over and over again, moving from religious ecstasy to holy war, seeking redemption through religious tyranny, and finding that there was no escaping the internal decay and instability in the veins of its religion.

Islam’s only redemption lies in establishing a theocracy. Its commitment to power and the indulgence of the earthly and heavenly paradise of loot, slaves and violence led to its own degeneration over and over again. Having no other spiritual form than the exercise of power, it has corrupted itself each time, and then attempted to exorcise the corruption through more of violence.

The Islamic leaders of one generation endorse the tyrants whom the Islamic leaders of another generation strive to overthrow. Hardly had Mohammed kicked the bucket than his nearest and dearest were fighting a civil war over supreme rulership. The origins of the Shiite-Sunni split lay not in theology, but in a vulgar power play between Mohammed’s relatives. That greedy infighting has hardened into theological variations, but underneath they remain fixed in the same patterns of warring over power and wealth.

Over a thousand years later the Muslim world is still dedicating all its energies to civil wars and external conflicts whose only true goal is to put money and power into the hands of its leaders. The confrontations between the prominent Shiite families running Iran and the Arab Sunni families running the Arabian gulf states are not theological, though they take place under the guise of theology. They are ethnic and economic conflicts dressed up as religious conflicts.

The ugliest elements of Islam, its bigotry toward Jews and Christians, its endless raids, its need to remove the faintest doubt about the parentage of the children of its women, are pure tribal pettiness distilled into religion by warlords and clan leaders whose understanding of theology did not extend beyond sanctifying the exercise of their personal power.

Islam was a predecessor of power movements like Communism and Nazism, its leader worship grimly real, as any cartoonist who has tried to draw a picture of Mohammed knows, or anyone who has seen Shiites cut their children bloody while crying out in mourning for Caliph Ali. Its theology is still incapable of embracing anything higher than its own will to power. Its objects of worship are its warleaders, its soldiers and its atrocities.

The deaths of the Iranian defence scientists have allowed the regime in Tehran to weep copious tears and sputter outrage about the inequity of assassination as a political tool.  One might think the more natural reaction there might be envy.  Assassination has been one of the outreach tools of the ayatollahs and their regime in Iran since the early days of the Revolution. When the Islamic Republic of Iran was established in 1979, it had two strategies to eliminate its opponents.  At home, it killed its internal opponents – killing 7,900 of them in its first five years alone using techniques many totalitarian regimes have employed, such as, mass executions, tortures, disappearances, and “accidents”. Abroad, it used its embassies and cultural offices to host killers and sent them out after prominent critics.  Many of these critics living overseas were Iranian intellectuals and activists who had escaped from Iran after the establishment of the regime.  In addition to employing terror against its own citizens and émigrés, the Iranian government has also claimed victims from other nationalities.  The Islamic Republic of Iran is one of the world’s most significant sponsors of terrorism.  During its 33 years of existence, it has continually instigated violence elsewhere and pursued indirect war through the use of terrorism throughout the Middle East, Africa, and both North and South America.

Although the Islamic Republic of Iran officials claim that terrorism is strange to them, an immense weight of evidence shows that orchestrated terrorism outside Iran is a major factor in practice of the regime.  The first victims of the Iranian government terrorism were Shahriar Shafigh, the Shah of Iran’s nephew who was assassinated in 1979 in Paris and Ali Akbar Tabatabai, the former press attaché of the Iranian embassy in the United States under the Shah of Iran who was assassinated in 1980 in Washington.  The assassination of Ali Akbar Tabatabai was committed by David Belfield or Dawud Salahuddin, an African-American who converted to Islam and after the assassination fled to Iran.  In 2001, Dawud Salahuddin acted as the major character of the movie Kandahar, directed by one of the Iranian regime’s filmmakers Mohsen Makhmalbaf.  After the first assassinations, many other Iranian dissidents were killed in different parts of the world.

Among the dead are, Dr. Shahpour Bakhtiar (the last Prime Minister of the Shah of Iran), Dr. Abdol Rahman Ghassemlou (the Leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran), General Gholam Ali Oveisi (Tehran military governor), Fereydoun Farrokhzad (the famous Iranian showman, singer, and poet), and many other.  One of the more notorious attacks by the agents of the Iranian government against its dissidents occurred in Mykonos restaurant in Berlin, Germany in 1992 that caused the murder of Sadegh Sharafkandi (the Secretary General of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran) and his representatives and translator, Fattah Abdoli, Homayoun Ardalan, and Nouri Dehkordi.  In April 10, 1997, the Berlin court announced that this assassination was plotted by Ali Khamenei (Iran Supreme Leader), Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (Iran former President), and Ali Fallahian (Iran former Minister of Intelligence).  Two of the terrorists were Kazem Darabi, an Iranian who lived in Berlin and Abbas Rhayel, a Lebanese terrorist and a member of the Hezballah organization.  Other Iranian and Lebanese terrorists were able to escape to Iran and Lebanon.

One of the most significant examples of the terrorist activities of the Iranian government against non-Iranians was the truck bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994.  The Iranian government directed this terrorist activity through the terrorist group Hezballah.  This was one of the deadliest bombings to have ever occurred in Argentina, killing 85 people and injuring 300.  A major motive behind this atrocity seems to have been the suspension of a nuclear technology transfer agreement between Iran and Argentina.  According to Argentine judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, the terrorists who were involved in this act were six Iranians (including Ahmad Reza Asghari, the third Secretary of the Islamic Republic of Iran Embassy in Buenos Aires, who used to work for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard before being posted to Argentina) and one Lebanese man.  Evidence suggests that the terrorist attack was planned in 1993, when Ahmad Reza Asghari attended a meeting with the former President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and his deputies.

In April 2009, Barack Hussein Obama curtsied (some observers called it a “deep bow”) to his royal highness, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, king of Saudi Arabia.  Middle East protocol experts were clear that this was an unnecessary gesture, and that a simple handshake would have sufficed.  The White House denied the curtsy, but videos and photos of the gesture zapped around the Internet telling the truth to anyone interested.   King Abdullah’s only two claims to fame are the two sacred cities of Islam and about 25% of the world’s oil.  One can only wonder which of the Saudi king’s two assets evoked Obama’s obeisance.

It is now beginning to look like this unnecessary, uncalled for, awkward but perhaps telling bit of subservience by the president of the world’s strongest country, the commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful army, and the leader of the free world, to a jihadist Islamo-fascist, imperialist, supremacist, totalitarian, tyrannical, triumphalist, theocratic, apartheid, misogynistic, terrorist-supporting ruler of a petty sheikhdom, may have been a harbinger of future subservience.

Flash forward two years.  A soon-to-be nuclear Iran threatens the entire world, Muslim and Christian, Occident and Orient, and of course Israel and the United States. Yet, during these past two years, Obama has consistently chosen political theatre over substantive action to prevent Iran’s progress toward WMD capacity; a course of action decidedly contrary to the political and economic and security interests of the USA and the free world.  As is clear from the obvious fact that neither Russia nor China nor North Korea will join other nations in imposing economic sanctions on Iran, the much vaunted UN sanctions will in no way impede Iran’s nuclear program.

As Congresspersons Tom Price (R-GA) and Trent Franks (R-AZ) explained:¹

There is no ban on investment in Iran’s petroleum sector. With one exception, there is no ban on banking with Iran, foreign investment in Iranian bonds, insurance for Iranian shipping, or the provision of trade credits to Iran. In short, the resolution will cause minimal economic hardship for the regime, and, like the preceding three U.N. measures, will do little or nothing to impede the regime’s march toward a nuclear military capability. Those provisions that in some way restrict Iran’s conduct are easily circumvented through the use of front organizations and alternate banking relations.

In order to pass this resolution, the Obama administration, due to long-standing objections from Russia and China, jettisoned every proposal that might actually harm Iran’s economy.

The House version of the decidedly tougher Iran Sanctions Act (ISA, H.R. 2194) would, in contrast to the U.N. resolution, accomplish the following: It would fully implement and enforce the 1996 ISA law to encourage foreign governments to direct that all state-owned and privately-owned entities cease all investment in and support for Iran’s energy sector and all exports of refined petroleum to Iran, and would impose sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran and any other bank in Iran that is engaged in proliferation activities or support of terrorist groups. The House bill would also greatly restrict the use of the President’s waiver authority. For more information on H.R. 2194, click here to review the RSC analysis of the legislation.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration requested that Congress not debate the Iran Sanctions Act until after passage of the U.N. resolution. By putting ISA on the back burner, the Obama administration delayed progress on sanctions with actual substance, opting instead to throw its full support behind the decidedly weaker Security Council resolution, presumably in hopes of obtaining a “public relations victory” following passage of toothless U.N. sanctions (emphasis added).

Did Obama so highly value a PR victory that he would subordinate America’s strategic security needs to his political image?  Back in June 2010, it looked like Obama preferred form over substance, rather than a determined effort to stop Iran’s seemingly inexorable march toward nuclear power: either that or he wanted Iran to win. Today it looks much more like he wants Iran to win.

Imagine that the president overnight decreed that women must cover themselves from head to toe lest they be imprisoned. Imagine suddenly a new brigade of morality police appears on the scene to patrol for unacceptable behavior, jailing and beating transgressors on sight. Imagine a new regime of rules that sentenced women defending themselves against rape to death. This is the world that Nazanin Afshin-Jam, a Canadian-Iranian human rights activist, and her family left following the Islamic revolution in Iran. Below, Afshin-Jam recounts her amazing story and successful campaigns to save lives in the Islamic Republic of Iran through her own individual initiative. Addressing an audience at the 2011 TEDx event in Vancouver, Canada, Afshin-Jam reveals her hope to one day create an international body of justice for the victims of human rights abuses in the world.

The world’s largest drug field was formerly in the Bekaa Valley where the land is warm and moist. Reflecting the poor state of agriculture in the Muslim world, some of the most arable land in Lebanon where the Romans raised acres of wheat was turned over to cannabis and opium production. In the ’90s the situation was so bad that 80 percent of the world’s cannabis came out of the valley. The valley helped finance the PLO, Hezbollah and the Syrian army which invaded Lebanon partly to get in on the drug trade.

The Clinton Administration cut deals with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Syrian occupation of Lebanon to try and cut down on production. Officially production went down, unofficially the party never really stopped.

With the Syrians gone and the PLO living off American foreign aid on the West Bank of Israel, the lucrative Lebanese drug trade is in the hands of the Shiite Islamists of Hezbollah. Drugs have turned the Party of Allah into a global narcoterrorist ring with tentacles in Latin America and ties to Marxist narcoterrorists there and up to America and out across Europe and Asia.

There is no contradiction between the Islamic identity of Hezbollah and its drug trade financed wealth. The Mumbai terrorists of the Army of the Righteous, who during their killing spree murdered a rabbi and his pregnant wife, snorted cocaine. The Beslan terrorists of the Islamic Brigade of Martyrs who murdered hundreds of children were running on heroin. Forensic tests conducted on the bodies of suicide bombers have found that they were routinely given heroin before being sent off on their missions. And if we had been able to run forensic tests on the Al-Qaeda terrorists who carried out September 11 there would probably be a miniature pharmacy in their bodies.

The intimate connection between drugs and Islam began with the prohibition of alcohol. The ban on wine and other spirits made the need for alternatives more urgent. Coffee was the safer alternative to alcohol, and the Middle Eastern obsession with it reflected the outlawing of wine and beer. Religiously coffee was also useful as a stimulant and came in handy in some Muslim rites. But there were more efficacious stimulants that could do more than coffee and those were equally popular.

While there were at times attempts to similarly prohibit drugs, they never achieved the same status as the ban on liquor. Hashish in particular had useful religious and military effects. The right drugs could give the devout the illusion of a mystical experience, allow them to stay up all night memorizing verses from the Koran or make it easier for them to kill and for Muslim leaders to control their private armies.

The Order of Assassins, whose name “Hashishin” derives from the substance they were addicted to, consisted of young men given the drug and told that their visions were a foretaste of paradise. While the Hashishin achieved legendary status the same pattern has become commonplace among Muslim terrorist groups who ply their followers with drugs to addict them and direct them along the path of Islamic terror as the road to the paradise of the powder and the needle.

Culturally the use of drugs is far more widely accepted in the Muslim world than alcohol is. The Ayatollah Khomeini even ruled that, “Wine and all other intoxicating beverages are impure, but opium and hashish are not.” In some countries drug use is so widespread that it has practically become a national identity. That is the case with Qat in Yemen, a plant-based amphetamine whose use is so widespread that its cultivation consumes nearly half the country’s water supply.

Four Syrian-bound Iranian trucks carrying raw materials needed to make chemical weapons were recently seized by Turkish authorities as they tried to enter into Syria from southern Turkey. The contents in the trucks reportedly included cylindrical tanks, heat-resistant materials and 66 tons of sodium sulfate.

While the Iranian government denied that the trucks in question were carrying chemical weapon materials, it should be noted that in 2011 Turkish authorities had intercepted two previous arms shipment from Iran to Syria. One of those shipments was an Iranian plane carrying automatic rifles, rocket launchers and mortars.

However, the finding of chemical weapons material in the Iranian trucks — which comes as the embattled regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad edges closer to complete collapse — has renewed fresh concerns over the future security and control of Syria’s vast stockpile of chemical weapons.

Similar fears were raised during the collapse of the Libyan regime of Muammar Gadhafi. In that case, the United States and its NATO allies worked with Libyan rebel forces to monitor Libya’s known chemical-weapon facilities and prevent Gadhafi’s forces from seeking to use or divert chemical-warfare materials.

However, while Western efforts to secure Gadhafi’s chemical weapons and transfer their control over to Libya’s transitional governing authority have gone relatively well, that may not be the case with Syria if the Assad regime falls.

According to Leonard Spector of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, there is “a huge difference” between the Syrian and Libyan chemical-weapons programs, citing Syria’s program as considerably larger, more sophisticated and equipped with both production and delivery capabilities.

In fact, even though it has refused to become a member of the UN’s Chemical Weapons Convention and submit to international oversight, Syria is still widely believed to have one of the most extensive, if not the largest, chemical weapon arsenals in the world

Moreover, that arsenal, which began its development in the 1970s under then-President Hafez al-Assad as a threat against Israel, has continued to grow unabated under Bashar Assad.

To that end, the Syrian regime is reported to have at least five facilities dedicated to its chemical weapons program at al-Safira, Hama, Homs, and Latakia; two munitions storage sites at Khan Abu Shamat and Furqlus; and a chemical-weapons research laboratory near Damascus.

The Syrian chemical arsenal reportedly comprises hundreds of tons of sarin, mustard gas, and the deadlier VX nerve agent. Those blister and nerve agents have been fitted as chemical warheads on Syria’s long-range Scud-B and Scud-C ballistic missiles. In fact, the Syrian government recently armed its medium-range Scud missiles with 600 one-ton chemical warheads.

In addition to its ballistic missile component, the Syrian government reportedly also has tens of tons of sarin agent and mustard gas stockpiled in conventional artillery shells, rockets and bombs.

So now, besieged by mounting threats to his regime’s survival and armed with that lethal weaponry, questions arise as to whether Assad will use his chemical weapons against Syrian protesters and army defectors; against a possible armed international intervention; or divert them to terrorist groups in the region.

Launching chemical attacks against Syrian civilians would certainly engender little surprise, given Assad’s already bloody crackdown on Syrian protesters and the fact his father, Hafez al-Assad, reportedly used cyanide gas in his repression of the 1982 Syrian uprising in Hama.

Articles on FrontPagemag.com and other sites have picked apart President Obama’s latest State of the Union address, both in terms of substance and tone. The speech dragged on and on, with language recycled from his previous State of the Union addresses. The rhetoric was highly partisan. The economic proposals consisted of a laundry list of progressive, anti-private enterprise, big government ideas and so on. However, beyond the specific deficiencies in Obama’s speech, his address was more of an exercise of a state of denial than an honest accounting of the State of the Union.

The most glaring example of Obama’s state of denial was his self-righteous chastisement of others for what he has done himself:

[A]nyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Remember, Obama’s barbs at others is coming from the same man who felt that America had to be fundamentally transformed from the kind of political and economic system that has come down to us from the Founding Fathers.

Moreover, Obama himself has put down America on several occasions while representing the United States abroad. Perhaps it is time for him to admit that he didn’t know what he was talking about when he leveled all his criticisms of the United States in front of foreign audiences. For example, on his very first trip overseas, in Strasbourg, France, Obama said the United States had “failed to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world” and that “there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.”

In addition to his apologies and put-downs of America, Obama has downplayed the idea of American exceptionalism. When asked in France what he thought of America’s claim to an exceptional position among nations, he quipped that “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

By extension of Obama’s logic, since every country would most likely think of itself as exceptional, the idea that America truly is a unique example of freedom, economic dynamism, and goodness to the rest of the world has no meaning. This is moral relativism at its worst, compounded by Obama’s embarrassing habit of bowing to world leaders.

Moreover, as a result of some of his own policies, Obama is helping to bring about a decline of American power and influence, if they are not soon reversed. He is planning to hollow out our military with drastic budget cuts. He is ceding economic power to China. His so-called reset policies with Russia have played into Russia’s hands. Iran is ever closer to developing a nuclear bomb while Obama’s engagement policy has cost us crucial time. The list goes on and on.

A second example of Obama’s state of denial in his State of the Union address involved energy. He still believes the sun and wind gods, with a big dose of government funding, are the answer to our nation’s energy problem.

Because of federal investments, renewable energy use has nearly doubled. And thousands of Americans have jobs because of it.

Somehow, the Solyndra fiasco didn’t make it into Obama’s speech. American taxpayers were the losers to the tune of $500 million. So were the Solyndra employees when the company went belly-up. The only winners in the case of Solyndra were Obama’s campaign contribution bundlers who were lobbying for the Solyndra government loan guarantees.

Obama’s inexplicable decision to block the Keystone pipeline for crass political reasons didn’t make it into his speech either. Obama is inexcusably playing political games to hold on to his environmental base through the election, with good jobs for Americans and increased energy independence cast aside as the sacrificial lambs. Even Obama’s own jobs council has recommended building more pipelines. But then again, Obama rarely listens to the critical recommendations of his own councils and commissions such as his bipartisan deficit reduction commission.

The European Union has agreed to an “unprecedented” set of sanctions against Iran, banning the importation of Iranian oil to its member states while also imposing currency and commodity sanctions on Iran’s central bank. But far from forcing Iran into a corner, the latest sanctions leave a backdoor open to the regime, affording it more time and cover to pursue its nuclear objectives.

Three of the weakest economies in Europe will be hit hard by the oil embargo. Italy, Greece, and Spain import 68% of EU oil from Iran. All three nations are in the midst of a sovereign debt crisis that won’t be improved by the scramble to replace the supply of oil from Tehran.

The EU also agreed to ban sales of petrochemical supplies to the Iranians as well as freezing the assets of Iran’s central bank. Gold, silver, and other commodity deals will also be banned.

But, as proof that these tough sounding sanctions will have the bite of a toothless lion, the ban is not scheduled to take effect for several months — July 1 — as EU nations need time to replace the oil imported from Iran with other sources of supply. This will give the Iranians plenty of time to find other buyers for their oil — if they don’t close the spigot to Europe immediately. The official Fars News Agency quoted one Iranian official suggesting that Tehran should halt sales to Europe now “so that the price of oil soars and the Europeans … have trouble.”

The Iranians have also once again threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, but most analysts see that as a bluff since Iran doesn’t have the firepower to stand up to the US Navy, which would almost certainly be called upon to keep the Strait open.

Some states, such as Greece, pleaded with the EU not to impose any oil sanctions at all, or at least, radically alter the terms of the ban. The Greeks import about 20% of their oil from Iran on extremely favorable terms and covering the shortfall and getting the same deal from other oil producing states will almost certainly prove to be impossible. Considering the precarious nature of the Greek economy and an angry, restive populace, civil unrest is not out of the question if gasoline prices skyrocket.

Thus, another round of sanctions against Iran, designed to bring Tehran back to the negotiating table in order to convince the regime to halt its uranium enrichment program, continues to reveal the paralysis of the world community in the face of a determined, radical, terrorist state that is undeterred in its drive to possess the ultimate guarantee against mocking the prophet. The thought of the most powerful weapon on Earth in the hands of the most irresponsible nation on the planet doesn’t seem to elicit much in the way of urgency on the part of any nation in the world — except Israel, of course. And Prime Minister Netanyahu appears to be in a wait-and-see mode as far as sanctions are concerned — at least for the moment. Washington has warned Israel several times not to attack Iran on its own, but the Israeli government doesn’t seem confident that the sanctions will halt Tehran’s drive to possess nuclear weapons.

There have been 4 rounds of sanctions against Iran passed by the United Nations. Each round in itself is severely underwhelming. Beginning in December 2006, the Security Council banned the sale of nuclear related materials and froze the assets of some regime officials. In March 2007, the UN expanded the asset freeze and slapped an arms embargo on Iran. In March of 2008, the asset freeze was extended again, and member states were authorized to monitor ships and planes headed for Iran as well as individuals involved in the nuclear program.

The last round of international sanctions passed in June of 2010, froze the funds of individuals and businesses connected to the Revolutionary Guards and went after the financial sector of the Iranian economy.

In addition to international sanctions, about a dozen individual states — including the US, the EU, Japan, and Australia — have added their own national sanctions on everything from penalizing companies that do business with Iran to preventing the sale of oil and gas equipment to replace Tehran’s aging oil infrastructure.

Iran initiated a close relationship with Venezuela when Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, hosted the 2000 OPEC meeting in Caracas. (Shireen T. Hunter, Iran’s Foreign Policy in the Post-Soviet Era: Resisting the New International Order [Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010], p. 233, not available on line, quoted here.)  Since then, Iran and Venezuela have consorted with Cuba and Colombia to create terrorist havens and missile bases with missiles capable of carrying nuclear payloads in South America that have the southern half of the USA in their range.  Thousands of Arab and Iranian terrorists have infiltrated our southern border for a decade and reside among us, undetected, as sleeper agents.

How have decades of American Presidents allowed this to happen? — not for lack of knowledge.

In July 2003, A Report Prepared under an Interagency Agreement by the Federal Research Division: Terrorist and Organized Crime Groups in the Tri-Border Area (TBA) of South America (Library of Congress, July 2003, now published in e-book form, and summarized here) alerted us to the threat of Arab and Iranian terrorist camps in South America where, since the early 1980s, Arab terrorists have been sending thousands of their cohorts to the almost inaccessible jungle and mountain region between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay (known as the TBA, Tri-Border Area or La Triple Frontera).

Terror training camps and arsenals have been established, virtually out of the reach of local law enforcement or defense forces; and elements from Hezbollah, al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda, Hamas, and the Lebanese drug mafia operate in partnership, freely and openly in conjunction with local organized crime and corrupt government officials.

The TBA has become a virtual haven for Islamic terror groups and a base for terror operations against South American targets. The large and growing Arab population of these states (in excess of 750,000 by local estimates) provides a community highly conducive to the establishment of Islamic terrorist sleeper cells throughout the area.

On October 6, 2003, U.S. News and World Report alerted the world to a rising new star in the galaxy of anti-American terror-supporting nations: Venezuela. Unlike the TBA where Iranian and Arab terror organizations operate despite efforts of the host nations, Middle Eastern terrorists in Venezuela have the full support and collaboration of Hugo Chavez.

Thousands of terrorists now occupy an unknown number of camps in (northwestern Venezuela), and move about with the support and collaboration of the Venezuelan government. President Hugo Chavez plays host to a growing horde of Middle Eastern terrorists from some of the USA’s most notorious enemies, including Libya, Saddam’s Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Pakistan…These terror groups are known to work in conjunction with the Colombian anti-government insurgency group, FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia = Colombian Armed Revolutionary Forces). They offer FARC terrorists safe haven in mountainous and unpatrolled regions of Northeastern Venezuela.

Chavez by then was America’s newest nemesis, with close ties with Cuba’s Castro and alliances with some of America’s most notorious enemies in the Middle East.

In July 2004 a small local Arizona weekly newspaper, the Tombstone Tumbleweed, reported that two groups of Middle Eastern infiltrators were caught by the Border Patrol (originally here. Now no longer available on line, but reproduced here and here).  The Tumbleweed verified that a flood of Middle Eastern males were caught entering Arizona illegally from Mexico.  A Border Patrol officer reported that since October 1, 2003, agents in the Tucson sector apprehended 5,510 illegals from countries other than Mexico, Central or South America, including large groups of non-Spanish speaking males.  About two-thirds of these were of Middle Eastern origin and spoke Farsi or Arabic. A large number of these, and other groups of similar ethnicity, escaped capture and disappeared into the United States.

Legal entry into the USA is very easy for citizens of Saudi Arabia, and normal legal channels are open for citizens of most Arab countries. So why sneak in illegally via Mexico if you are in the USA on legitimate business? It seems more than likely that some are terrorists who, once they have eluded the Border Patrol, can connect with established contacts in the American Muslim community and become sleeper agents preparing for future terror attacks within this country.

In December 2004, US concerns about security south of the border were heightened when a Libyan-flagged cargo ship with an Egyptian captain and Sudanese first officer was seized in Honduras, carrying 900 tons of unreported explosives.  The ship was bound for Venezuela.

Concerns were ratcheted even higher when an al-Qaeda agent, captured in 2004, revealed an al-Qaeda plot to move nuclear materials into cooperative South American countries for future nuclear attacks on the USA.  In chilling corroboration of this report was the theft, just a month earlier, of a crop-duster in Mexico, which disappeared into the United States.  The suspected thief, Adnan ash-Shukrijumah, is one of the world’s most wanted terrorists and a high-ranking official in al-Qaeda.  He trained as a pilot in flight schools in Florida and Oklahoma, and shortly after 9/11 he trained as a nuclear technician, along with three other al-Qaeda sleeper agents, at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada).  While there he stole 180 pounds of nuclear waste from McMaster’s nuclear reactor.  Nuclear waste can be used to create nuclear “dirty bombs.”  Later he was singled out by bin Laden to serve as the field commander for the next terrorist attack on U.S. soil, a nuclear attack code-named “the American Hiroshima.”  Attempts by American law enforcement agencies to access information on him from McMaster University have been rebuffed on the basis of student confidentiality. The latest “FBI Most Wanted” reports (1/19/2012) indicate that he is still at large, with his crop-duster.

If a war begins in the neighborhood of the Persian Gulf, it will likely have less to do with a slugging match between Israel and Iran, than a simmering Sunni-Shiite war that is about to flare up into regional violence through a combination of factors dating back decades and recent events in the region.

The rise of a fanatically violent Shiite Islamist state has done more to destabilize the region than anything else. As much as Sunni Arabs prattle on about Zionist conspiracies, a few million Jews sandwiched in a narrow strip of land against the Mediterranean are no threat to them. But a rival version of Islam that is spearhead by a non-Arab ethnic group and placed at the service of a powerful military machine and an oil economy is what keeps them up at night.

The fall of Saddam put Iraq up for grabs and raised the prospect of a Shiite superstate with a vast military and massive oil reserves. It also tipped Syria and its leftover Baath Party run by a variant Shiite sect directly into Tehran’s paws. Add nuclear weapons to the Iran-Iraq-Syria trinity and you are looking at the worst nightmare of every Sunni Arab prince living in polished oil mansions near what he still insists on calling the Arabian Gulf.

A Shiite superstate will checkmate the Sunni oil monarchies and leave them no choice but to beg America to garrison them with so many troops, air bases and nuclear missiles that they might as well be the 51′st through 59th states. Using foreign soldiers to protect themselves isn’t all that objectionable to the fat lazy oil monarchies who already use armies of foreigners to do everything for them. But the American troops who saved the Saudis and Kuwaitis from Saddam also gave Bin Laden a pretext for turning the conflict on its axis.

The Gulf Sunni Arab princelings know that a massive infusion of American troops will bring out more Bin Ladens, and even the American military hierarchy which knows to salaam to the princes will lose patience fast when the Khobar Towers bombing repeats itself enough times. Americans fighting their own people will quickly turn their countries into another Afghanistan. On top of that the Americans won’t stay there forever.

The Gulfies could develop competent armies, but no Muslim state trusts its own military. If all those billions and billions in state of the art American military equipment were put into the hands of competent generals, instead of the cousins and nephews of the royal family, then very shortly the generals would be running the country. And even if they could trust the generals, the locals have no reliable military tradition except as caravan raiders and have gotten a little too used to the good life to fight for any other reason than an outburst of Koranic fanaticism by the third son of the family.

The Persians have a long proud military tradition. The Egyptians and the Syrians picked up something from their European colonizers. But the Gulfies are not good for much except beating their Filipino maids and getting high on hashish and blowing themselves up to get to paradise. The Iranian military even in its current state would clean their clocks faster than you could say, Alakazam and they know it.

What the Gulfies lack in military skills, they more than make up for in underhanded cunning. If they can’t import an infidel army and they can’t build their own army, then they will follow the honorable tradition of finding a counterbalance to the enemy. The Gulfies have been nurturing the Muslim Brotherhood and funding Al-Jazeera. Combine the two with an American administration eager to win over the Muslim world by reforming American foreign policy and the Gulfies got their own Arab Spring.

The real purpose of the Arab Spring was to create a Sunni Islamist superstate or regional alliance to counter the threat of a Shiite Islamist superstate. With the Muslim Brotherhood sweeping across North Africa all the way to Egypt, the harvest includes semi-secular states with competent armies and if Syria can be tipped into that camp, then Iran will lose its puppet and the Sunni superstate will have a military tipped with top of the line American and Russian equipment, funded by Gulfie oil money and backed by the lunatic fanaticism of Islamist fighters.

With America in decline, the Gulfies touched off the Arab Spring to create Janissary armies, but this time composed of devout Muslims, to keep the Shiites at bay. Iran pushed back contesting Saudi influenced territory in Bahrain and the Emir of Qatar is demanding that his slaves in Washington get cracking and “liberate” Syria for membership in the Sunni Caliphate.

That just leaves one wild card. Not Libya, which has been swung into the Sunni Islamist camp the hard way with NATO jets and Libyan Islamic Fighting Group terrorists. Not Turkey, which has repressed the last of its secular military, and is now pushing for Sunni regime change in Syria. The regional wild card is the only non-Muslim state in the area. Israel.

The theological relationship of Sunni and Shiite Islamists to Israel is murderous. The ascendance of Mohammed and the triumph of his Caliph successors was supposed to put an end to an independent Jewish existence. The triumph of Islam was directly measured through the subjugation of Christians and Jews. As the more apocalyptic of the duo, the Shiites would like to wipe Israel out to showcase their own private little armageddon. Turning the Jewish state into dust, or at least its inhabitants, would help lock in their case to being the rightful successors of their genocidal prophet who had purged the Jews from his part of the desert.

The Sunnis tend to be more patient. They want Israel gone, but they also recognize it as a valuable pawn in their own games. Rather than being a disruptive influence on the region, like Iran, it’s a unifying force that gives Muslims a common enemy and a common aspiration. Israel is a theological enemy, but useful in practice. And whatever happens they cannot allow the Shiites to wipe it out. Like comic book supervillains, they have to be the one to kill the superhero or their existence is meaningless.

Whoever is blowing up Iranian nuclear scientists and facilities, it isn’t likely to be roving teams of Mossad agents, most likely it’s Iran’s own internal divisions being exploited by some combination of Western intelligence, Israeli intelligence and the intermediaries between the local Iranian opponents of the regime carrying out the attacks and foreign intelligence agencies who are almost certainly Iran’s own neighbors.

Congressman Ron Paul showed in the January 17th Fox News debate why he would be so dangerous as president and commander-in-chief. He believes, in a twist on the Judeo-Christian Golden Rule, that our Islamist enemies are only assaulting us because we assaulted them first. Sorry, appeaser-in-chief Paul, but the Koran commands devout jihadists to use whatever means are necessary to destroy all infidels, no matter what we have done or plan to do to them.

As part of an exchange involving the appropriate response to al Qaeda and their Taliban supporters, Paul exclaimed:

My point is, if another country does to us what we do others, we’re not going to like it very much. So I would say that maybe we ought to consider a golden rule in — in foreign policy. Don’t do to other nation… what we don’t want to have them do to us.

Paul even offered the absurd analogy comparing our killing of the mass murderer Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil, where he was provided a sanctuary, to the Communist Chinese government deciding to go after a Chinese dissident seeking freedom in the United States. Newt Gingrich properly labeled this comparison “utterly irrational.”

Ron Paul may have some good ideas on reining in the power of the Federal Reserve and on the need to control federal spending. But he is clueless in dealing with our Islamist enemies. He either does not understand or refuses to believe the ideology that drives them. They want to kill us because our nation is governed on the basis of principles derived from Judeo-Christian beliefs including the true Golden Rule. They hate us because of who we are, not for any alleged harm that we’ve ever caused them.

Only three years after the United States won its independence, when there was no Jewish state for Muslims to resent, and no American troops on Muslim soil, Thomas Jefferson, then U.S. ambassador to France, and John Adams, then U.S. Ambassador to Britain, learned from a Muslim ambassador to Britain why the Muslims were so hostile towards Americans. Jefferson and Adams were attempting to negotiate a peace treaty with the Muslim “Barbary pirates,” an exercise that ultimately proved to be futile.

As Jefferson and Adams later reported to Congress, the Muslim ambassador explained to them that Islam

Was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman [Muslim] who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.

All that Ron Paul needs to do is take a look at the Koran itself, cited by that Muslim ambassador more than 200 years ago, to understand the source of the  jihadist ideology that we are still fighting today.

Here is a sample:

• “Kill the disbelievers wherever we find them.” (Koran, 2:191)

• “O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends: They are but friends to each other.” (Koran 5:51)

• “Shall I tell you who, in the sight of God, deserves a yet worse retribution than these? Those [the Jews] whom God has rejected and whom He has condemned, and whom He has turned into monkeys and pigs because they worshiped the powers of evil.” (Koran 5:60)

• “I will inspire terror into the hearts of unbelievers: you smite them above their necks and smite all their fingertips off of them.” (Koran, 8:12)

• “So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them; surely Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.”

•  “[F]ight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book [Christians and Jews], until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” (Koran, 9:29)

• “When we decide to destroy a population, we send a definite order to them who have the good things in life and yet sin. So that Allah’s word is proven true against them, then we destroy them utterly.” (Koran, 17:16-17)

Islamist apologists argue that the Koran also contains verses calling for tolerance and understanding.  If the verses written while Muhammad was living in Mecca, where he and his followers were then surrounded by much stronger non-Muslim populations, constituted the entirety of the Koran, they may have had a point. However, the milder verses were superseded by the far more war-like and intolerant verses written during Muhammad’s time in Medina where he successfully launched his jihad of conquests against non-believers, especially against Jews who refused to convert to Islam. Moreover, when one examines the real meaning of jihad according to Muhammad from other primary sources such as Bukhari (the Hadith, which are oral traditions relating to the words and deeds of Muhammad), the fact is that 97% of the jihad references are about war and 3% are about so-called inner struggle.

Worried about aggravating Iran, the United States has announced that it is postponing missile-defense drills with Israel. Dubbed “Austere Challenge 12,” the exercises had been planned for months and were intended to send a clear message that the United States and Israel were prepared to protect themselves from Iran’s mushrooming missile threat. In fact, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last month pointed to the exercises as evidence of America’s “unshakable” commitment to Israel. Now that the exercises have been delayed, the mullahs are getting a very different message.

A U.S. European Command official assures us that “It is not unusual for such exercises to be postponed,” which is true. But timing is everything when dealing with aggressors. Washington’s intentions are good—to avert an accidental war—but the perception in Tehran is that Washington blinked. That means the mullahs won this round. And as with all aggressors, that emboldens them and encourages them to push harder, to take more risks and to make dangerous miscalculations that invite the very thing Washington is trying to avoid.

One recalls how the Carter administration reacted to Moammar Qaddafi’s unilateral claim over the Gulf of Sidra, a huge chunk of the Mediterranean Sea universally considered as international waters. Anyone who crossed Qaddafi’s so-called “line of death” in the Gulf of Sidra would face military attack. President Carter canceled annual freedom-of-navigation naval exercises in and around the Gulf of Sidra to avoid confrontation and to keep things calm in the region.

But the message Qaddafi heard was that America was weak, and so he pushed and miscalculated. U.S. intelligence soon unearthed evidence that Libyan agents were planning to hit Marine One with a heat-seeking missile; Libya was caught red-handed sending tons of military hardware to communist forces in Nicaragua; and Qaddafi’s army of terrorists was at work all around the globe.

Vowing to enforce the principle of freedom of the seas, President Reagan ordered the U.S. Sixth Fleet to resume its exercises. When the exercises began in the autumn of 1981, Qaddafi lived up to his word and sent several warplanes into international airspace to enforce his line of death. Authorized, in Reagan’s words, to pursue attacking Libyan warplanes “all the way into the hangar,” U.S. F-14s responded with deadly force and made it clear to Qaddafi that there would be no payoff for recklessly disregarding international norms—only costs. “We sent a message to Qaddafi,” Reagan said. “We weren’t going to allow him to declare squatter’s rights over a huge area of the Mediterranean in defiance of international law.”

The moral of the story is that in international relations, every action and non-action sends a message. The postponement of Austere Challenge 12 sends the wrong message. Just when the pressure was building on the mullahs—on the economic front, in the Strait of Hormuz, vis-à-vis European energy imports, at the IAEA—Washington put Austere Challenge 12 on hold and relieved the pressure.

It’s important to note that these U.S.-Israel exercises were wholly defensive. As The Washington Post reports, they were “designed to test multiple Israeli and U.S. air defense systems against incoming missiles and rockets.”

Think about that. These weren’t provocative naval maneuvers off Iran’s coast or massive air exercises feigning attacks across the skies of the Middle East. These were missile-defense exercises designed to test U.S.-Israeli forces in deflecting inbound missile threats.

Defense is the operative word here. To cut through all the relativistic confusion, consider this everyday example: Which one of the following would you call provocative—a cop strapping on a bullet-proof vest or a gunman loading his weapon?