Charles Krauthammer speculates on what Israel’s target in Syria may have been. He writes:
Circumstantial evidence points to this being an attack on some nuclear facility provided by North Korea….Pyongyang might be selling its stuff to other rogue states, or perhaps just temporarily hiding it abroad while permitting ostentatious inspections back home.
Second, there are ominous implications for the Middle East. Syria has long had chemical weapons — on Monday, Jane’s Defence Weekly reported on an accident that killed dozens of Syrians and Iranians loading a nerve-gas warhead onto a Syrian missile — but Israel will not tolerate a nuclear Syria.
He notes too:
The Third Lebanon War, now inevitable, awaits only Tehran’s order. …Iran’s assets in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq are poised and ready. Ahmadinejad’s message is this: If anyone dares attack our nuclear facilities, we will fully activate our proxies, unleashing unrestrained destruction on Israel, moderate Arabs, Iraq, and U.S. interests — in addition to the usual, such as mining the Strait of Hormuz and causing an acute oil crisis and worldwide recession.
This is an extremely high-stakes game. The time window is narrow. In probably less than two years, Ahmadinejad will have the bomb. …
The world is not quite ready to acquiesce. The new president of France has declared a nuclear Iran “unacceptable.” The French foreign minister warned that “it is necessary to prepare for the worst” — and “the worst, it’s war, sir.”
Which makes it all the more urgent that powerful sanctions be slapped on the Iranian regime. Sanctions will not stop Ahmadinejad. But there are others in the Iranian elite who might stop both him and the nuclear program before the volcano explodes. These rival elites may be radical but they are not suicidal. And they believe, with reason, that whatever damage Ahmadinejad’s apocalyptic folly may inflict upon the region and the world, on Crusader and Jew, on infidel and believer, the one certain result of such an eruption is Iran’s Islamic republic buried under the ash.
More here.
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