"Go it alone"

So, let me see here -

a country that was so recently fought to a standstill by a guerilla army barely twenty or so miles over its Northern border is now planning how to take on a country 600 miles away:

[One senior Israeli source] said there was a need to understand that "when push comes to shove," Israel would have to be prepared to "slow down" the Iranian nuclear threat by itself.

I mean, not that I'm questioning their capability to do so. Even though it would mean violating Jordanian airspace, at the very least - or Syrian, which would undoubtedly cause some kind of retaliation from Syria. Iraq we can discount - they're too busy fighting each other to worry about airspace.

Then they'd have to worry about the possibility of bombers being shot down (Iran, unlike Iraq, hasn't been through 13 years of sanctions and retains an anti-aircraft capability) and the sticky problem of POWs that would offer.

Never mind the inevitable retaliation from Iran, which even if its WMD programs were "degraded" retains a large conventional military, as well as support for Hezbollah.

And I'm sure there's no way the U.S. could be sucked into the conflict, even though some in Washington are working overtime to that very end:

"We are creating a situation where everything we're going to try short of military force is going to fail," said Ilan Berman, an Iran expert at the American Foreign Policy Council, which favors an aggressive approach. "By the spring of next year, we're going to be looking at very serious discussions about next steps, including military options."

(By the way, from that last link:

"The mullahs have terribly mismanaged the economy. They're economically vulnerable," said Peter Brookes, an Iran specialist at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research center.

Doesn't that sound so much like the sort of "Saddam will be overthrown by his own people" arguements floated just before the invasion of Iraq? "All we'll have to do is impose sanctions and the Iranian people will rise up against their oppressors and a new day of democracy and peeance freeance and kitties for all will reign in the Middle East...")

Meanwhile the U.S. Congress releases a highly questionable report on Iran, including this interesting graphic:



which not only shows the range for a missle the Iranians DON'T EVEN HAVE (the Shahab-4) but is also inexplicably centered on Kuwait. (Is this a mere recycling of a similar map of Iraqi missile ranges from 1990?)