Herbert E. Meyer offers this situation as a metaphor, to contemplate when considering what we should be doing about Iran:

To think clearly about the looming crisis with Iran, close your eyes and imagine that you’re standing outside your children’s school. It’s 2:55pm, and you’re chatting amiably with other parents while waiting for the 3pm bell to ring. Suddenly you see a man running toward the school, holding a hand grenade and shouting: “I hate kids. I welcome death.”

Now, what do you propose to do?

Hat tip to Rick Ballard.

UN Ambassador John Bolton (a college classmate of mine) is one of two Americans nominated by Sweden’s former deputy prime minister Per Ahlmark, for playing a major role in exposing Iran’s secret plans to develop nuclear weapons. The American left must be, as they say, having a cow.

Richard Beeston of The London Times contemplates possible US military action against Iran and the Iranian response:

Experts agree that America has the military capability to destroy Iran’s dozen known atomic sites. US forces virtually surround Iran with military air bases to the west in Afghanistan, to the east in Iraq, Turkey and Qatar and the south in Oman and Diego Garcia. The US Navy also has a carrier group in the Gulf, armed with attack aircraft and Tomahawk cruise missiles. B2 stealth bombers flying from mainland America could also be used.

The air campaign would not be easy. The Iranians have been preparing for an attack. Key sites are ringed with air defences and buried underground. Sensitive parts of the Natanz facility are concealed 18 metres (60ft) underground and protected by reinforced concrete two meters thick. Similar protection has been built around the uranium conversion site at Esfahan.

“American air strikes on Iran would vastly exceed the scope of the 1981 Israeli attack on the Osiraq centre in Iraq, and would more resemble the opening days of the 2003 air campaign against Iraq,” said the Global Security consultantcy.

Lieutenant-Colonel Sam Gardiner, a former US Air Force officer, predicted that knocking out nuclear sites could be over in less than a week. But he gave warning that would only be the beginning.

Iran has threatened to defend itself if attacked. It could use medium-range missiles to hit Israel or US military targets in Iraq and the region. It could also use its missiles and submarines to attack shipping in the Gulf, the main export route for much of the world’s energy needs. “Once you have dealt with the nuclear sites you would have to expand the targets,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Gardiner. “There are another 125 to deal with including chemical plants, missile launchers, airfields and submarines.”

While this huge US offensive is underway Iran would almost certainly deploy its most powerful weapon. It would unleash a counter-attack through proxies in the region. Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia militia, would attack Israel. Moqtadr al-Sadr, the militant Iraqi Shia religious leader, could order his Mahdi Army to rise up against American and British forces in Iraq. Iranian-backed groups could wreak havoc against Western targets across the world.

Beeston may have misidentified Iran’s most powerful possible weapon, when he fails to discuss the possibility of Iran attempting to use WMDs against US forces in Iraq.

The Iranian Islamofascist regime has always manifested an obsessive hostility toward the United States combined with a penchant for extreme violence. In 1979, using “student” surrogates to provide a thin veneer of separation from official responsibility, they violated International Law, invaded the US Embassy, and took US diplomatic personnel hostage. Iran is generally believed to have arranged the 1983 suicide bombing of the US Marine barracks in Lebanon, which killed 241 US servicemen. In 1984, William Buckley, CIA Station Chief in Beirut, was kidnapped, and subsequently tortured to death by Iran. The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, is generally believed to have been contracted by Iran to Libya as retaliation for the accidental shooting down six months earlier of Iran Air Flight 655 by the US Vincennes.

It is impossible to imagine that Iran would fail to respond to a US or Israeli attack on its nuclear weapons production facilities with anything less than attacks on US military personnel (and/or civilian targets) by means featuring the greatest lethality within its power.

Assuming that the Iranian response were to be somehow thwarted, or proved unsuccessful in compelling this administration to withdraw from the Middle East, as (Osama frequently reminds us) the Beirut barracks bombing persuaded an earlier administration to withdraw from Lebanon, once the air campaign imagined by Richard Beeson is completed, the door will certainly be open to land invasion and regime replacement.

We just have to hope that the Ahmadinejad regime does not have a completed bomb ready to use on US forces at the time of the final Mullah-dammerung, or that US theatre defense is effective enough to preclude successful delivery.

Gerard Baker, writing in the London Times, suggests that it’s time to start facing up to reality and becoming prepared to do what is necessary:

If Iran gets safely and unmolested to nuclear status, it will be a threshold moment in the history of the world, up there with the Bolshevik Revolution and the coming of Hitler. What the country itself may do with those weapons, given its pledges, its recent history and its strategic objectives with regard to the US, Israel and their allies, is well known. We can reasonably assume that the refusal of the current Iranian leadership to accept the Holocaust as historical fact is simply a recognition of their own plans to redefine the notion as soon as they get a chance (“Now this is what we call a holocaust”). But this threat is only, incredibly, a relatively small part of the problem.

If Iran goes nuclear, it will demonstrate conclusively that even the world’s greatest superpower, unrivalled militarily, under a leadership of proven willingness to take bold military steps, could not stop a country as destabilising as Iran from achieving its nuclear ambitions.

No country in a region that is so riven by religious and ethnic hatreds will feel safe from the new regional superpower. No country in the region will be confident that the US and its allies will be able or willing to protect them from a nuclear strike by Iran. Nor will any regional power fear that the US and its allies will act to prevent them from emulating Iran. Say hello to a nuclear Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia.

Iran, of course, secure now behind its nuclear wall, will surely step up its campaign of terror around the world. It will become even more of a magnet and haven for terrorists. The terror training grounds of Afghanistan were always vulnerable if the West had the resolve. Protected by a nuclear-missile-owning state, Iranian camps will become impregnable.

And the kind of society we live in and cherish in the West, a long way from Tehran or Damascus, will change beyond recognition. We balk now at intrusive government measures to tap our phones or stop us saying incendiary things in mosques. Imagine how much more our freedoms will be curtailed if our governments fear we are just one telephone call or e-mail, one plane journey or truckload away from another Hiroshima.

Something short of military action may yet prevail on Iran. Perhaps sanctions will turn their leadership from its doomsday ambitions. Perhaps Russia can somehow be persuaded to give them an incentive to think again. But we can’t count on this optimistic scenario now. And so we must ready ourselves for what may be the unthinkable necessity.

Because in the end, preparation for war, by which I mean not military feasibility planning, or political and diplomatic manoeuvres but a psychological readiness, a personal willingness on all our parts to bear the terrible burdens that it will surely impose, may be our last real chance to ensure that we can avoid one.

Iraqi Shiite militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr visited Tehran over the weekend, and pledged his support and that of his so-called Mahdi Army to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime, if it is attacked.

AP report.

There must have been some great minds along the Larry Wilkerson lines restraining the US military commanders from dealing with this noisy self-appointed holy man when his personal militia began acting up in the early days of the US occupation. al-Sadr actually led uprisings against US forces already in 2004 in Najaf, but was saved by taking shelter in a mosque while Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani negotiated to save him.

US policy in the War on Terror has been too often influenced by namby pamby-ism and too frequently has featured undue deference to the bigotry and superstitions of Mohammedanist fanatics. Can anyone imagine the US military command supplying copies of Mein Kampf to Waffen SS prisoners during WWII, and requiring POW camp guards to treat the Holy Bible of Nazism with respect? Would we have allowed some particularly belligerent Gauleiter in Bavaria to retain his own Werwolf resistance militia? Weakness in dealing with these kinds of troublemakers only leads to greater insolence, and further and worse trouble down the road.

Iran Deploys Human Shields to Protect Nuclear Bomb Facility

Isfahan – Iran on Sunday gave a fresh show of its determination to press on with its disputed nuclear programme, enrolling about 1 000 athletes to form a human shield in front of a key nuclear facility.

The demonstration, which took place in front of just a handful of journalists, was held under winter sunshine outside the main gate of a uranium conversion facility near the historic central city of Isfahan.

“Since we have reached this technology indigenously and with our own scientists, we will safeguard it at any cost,” the director of the facility, Behrouz Samani, said at the event.

Around him were about 1 000 sportsmen and women of all ages and from across Iran, who were wearing free T-shirts brandishing the slogan: “Nuclear Energy is our Legitimate Right.”

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IRNA, his official news agency reports that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Damascus yesterday told a radical Palestinian group that Middle East has become “the locus of the final war” between Muslims and the West .