"We are at the brink"

Michelle Malkin has done a fine job of taking comprehensive stock of the coming war with Iran- which will be harder and more costly by far than the war in Iraq, but most likely will turn out to be unavoidable.

The question may turn out to be whether we fight it before, or after a nuclear exchange between Iran and Israel, with all the international and human consequences that would suggest.

It has been said- rightly, I think- that we are currently fighting World War III: a global war against Islamofascism in which Iraq is only a theatre. There are naive folks on the Left who seem to believe if Saddam Hussein did destroy his weapons of mass destruction, rather than merely smuggle them out of the country (a dubious premise, despite the fact that the media take it as an article of faith; it doesn't account for his failure to defuse the whole situation and save his own regime by doing so under UN supervision, as both the peace agreement that ended the first Gulf War and seventeen Security Council resolutions required; for the massive truck traffic into Syria and Lebanon observed by satellites in the weeks leading up to the current war; or for Mossad's intelligence leading Israel to the strong and consistent belief that those trucks contained Saddam's WMD), we somehow would be safer or otherwise in a stronger position if we hadn't decided to take out Saddam.

There is only one sense in which this is arguably true. Admittedly, it's a significant sense: because we are so heavily committed militarily in Iraq, we can't fight Iran right now. And again- we may have to. We cannot allow it to become a nuclear power. The likely consequences would simply be unthinkable.

But that point not only can be overdone; it usually is. If we weren't fighting Al Quaeda and its allies in Iraq, only the most naive can believe that we wouldn't be fighting them elsewhere- perhaps somewhere where we're not at present. Nancy Pelosi and her friends on the Left to the contrary, we are, in fact, at war. It was nothing less than war that was declared upon us on 9/11, not by a mere criminal conspiracy but by an international movement supported by more than one nation state, Iran being a prime example. Hostilities are ongoing.

The enemy's resources, too, are finite, and to a significant degree are also tied down in Iraq. No mujahideen in Iraq- whether native or foreign- can simultaneously be in Afghanistan, or in some third place . And while both the Islamofascists abroad and the Democrats at home are trying to argue that it's for appearance's sake rather than because Iraqi security forces are close to being ready to take on the main burden, our military committment in Iraq seems likely to become much less restrictive in the near future.

But it's still going to be necessary for the United States to mobilize to a degree which it hasn't since World War II. Iran is a large country of varied and difficult terrain in an awkward geographical location. What worked twice in Iraq would not necessarily work in Iran, even in a conventional kind of war. Winning a war against Iran, while simultaneously engaging the Islamofascist enemy on an ongoing basis in Afghanistan and the remainder of Islamofascism's homeland, may well end up requiring an effort on the level of that which we put forward in World War II.

But we have no choice. Only the most willfully self-deceived doubts that Iran will build nuclear weapons if it achieves the capability- and given the fanaticism of the current Iranian government, it seems extremely likely that a nuclear strike against Israel would be the inevitable outcome. Israel would doubtless respond in kind- and so the nightmare we've feared so long will begin.

That scenario cannot be allowed to happen. And short of all-out war, it's becoming increasingly hard to see how it can be avoided.

HT: Right Side of the Rainbow