Few Choices, Raw Imperative

"I believe that faced with a clear red line, Iran will back down - and it will give more time for sanctions and diplomacy.  Red lines don't lead to war, red lines prevent war ... nothing could imperil the world more than a nuclear-armed Iran."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

This is not the first time that the Prime Minister of Israel has resorted to graphic demonstrations to prove a point.  On a previous occasion he came equipped with documentation and architectural plans to impress upon the delegates at the United Nations General Assembly that contrary to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's insistence that the Holocaust never took place, it most certainly did, a fact that should be seared indelibly on the sensibilities of every intelligent human being.

On this occasion it was a graphic of a bomb in process that Mr. Netanyahu used to ensure that his audience understood the fundamentals of preparation and approach to completion of an cataclysmic explosive device, one fully capable of altering the world order.  Entirely re-writing, in its larger capacity the geography of the Middle East and far, far beyond.

"Iran is 70% of the way [to completing the first stage of its progress toward creating a nuclear device] and ... well into the second stage.  By next summer, at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage.  From there it is only a few more weeks before they have enriched enough for a bomb."

His contention, as leader of the country most directly threatened by that acquisition, is that merely claiming the intention to deter Iran from acquiring what it seeks is insufficient to ensure that it does not achieve its intent.  The purpose of a red line is to inform, without equivocation, that one has reached the limit of the designated line identified as "stop right here".  To proceed beyond is to invite whatever precautions to be undertaken to destroy that purpose.

To stop the project from proceeding from the second stage to the third and last.  That represents the only possible, reliable safeguard.  It is not just Prime Minister Netanyahu who warns of Iran's impending date with nuclear destiny, it is the United Nations' own nuclear regulatory [and inspection] authority that has confirmed the situation at its direst.  That action is required is obvious. 

The latest intelligence on the outcome of the sanctions on Iran's economy inform of straitened circumstances.

There is yet hope that another, even stricter round of sanctions may lead Iran to the brink of final abandonment of the nuclear program and uranium enrichment beyond commercial-medical applications.  In the interim, Israel, far more than any other country, including Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, knows its presence in the Middle East is imperilled. 

It has little patience for the kind of patience that the United States is pressing upon it.

And with reason.  A nuclear-armed Iran would represent a lowering and constant threat to the world, but first of all to Israel.  Iran has iterated and reiterated its intention to redraw the map of the Middle East, to release the geography from the presence of the 'cancer' it names the "Zionist entity".  That raw, undisguised threat cannot be dismissed out of hand.

Iran is a terrorist state in support of other terrorist states and militias.  The savagery of its punishment meted out to those it considers adversaries is taken to be legitimate under the canopy of Islam's directives.  "Given the record of Iranian aggression without nuclear weapons, just imagine Iranian aggression with nuclear weapons", reminded Mr. Netanyahu.

The leader of a civilized society, Prime Minister Netanyahu speaks of deterrence, not aggression.  The leader of an uncivil, brutally primitive government, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Grand Ayatollah Khamenei speak of extermination.