Please. You sound like all those clueless people that will conclude after Iran gets nukes that at least BHO did all he could to stop Iran.
Concrete steps, not rhetoric, will determine whether or not President Obama did all he could. If, for example, Iran attains such weapons and the U.S. had not even made an effort to seek truly crippling sanctions, then I won't be able to conclude that he did everything he could to prevent the outcome. Of course, there are other measures, too, but that's just one example.
Of course, under the auspices of the UN no less, and never-mind the fact that for all intents and purposes the UN has been hijacked by the OIC. Thus, any international agreement administered by the IAEA would inevitably become a bad joke. Not to mention that you want to use Iran of all places as a laboratory, with Russia no less who pokes its finger in America’s eye just for fun every chance it gets. Yeah right. I may be gullible, but buddy I’m not that gullible.
IMO, the U.S. will need to play a leading role in any verification regime. Leaving the effort to the UN will not be effective. Lebanon's evolution following UNSC Res. 1701 offers one example. The stakes are too high to leave verification to the UN.
In actuality, Israel has to be ready to take action within a few minutes notice.
My guess is that Israel's risk assessment is not materially different from my own thinking: a near-term decision (probably within a year or less) will likely be needed, but an imminent one (matter of days) is not. After the passage of this weekend, I believe it will be clear that Israel did not share Mr. Bolton's dire assessment.
Moreover, if Israel needs to, it can and will strike the Bushehr plant in the future if the plant is viewed as contributing to an existential threat. It won't let artificial timelines and theoretical pontificating about the plant's being immune from attack get in the way of trying to assure its own survival.
Actually, if Bush had listen to the Defense Department instead of the State Department, we would never have occupied Afghanistan and Iraq.
I'm not aware of anyone in the Defense Department who testified before the Congress that the U.S. should respond in Afghanistan solely with air and/or missile strikes, albeit on a much larger scale than President Clinton's retaliation. I am well aware from testimony before the Congress and Senate that the Defense Department all but dismissed risks of insurgency in Iraq (had they reviewed that country's history--Sunni-Shia rivalry/tensions/animosities--and experience when power collapses in authoritarian states, the only conclusion was that the country faced an extremely high risk of insurgency). With respect to Afghanistan, the idea was that once the Taliban was swept from power the country could rapidly be transformed into a democracy (had they bothered to study the experiences of Imperial Russia, Britain, and the Soviet Union and also recognized that Afghanistan's history, culture, and structure made the rapid evolution of a liberal democracy remote at best and stable central government very unlikely in the near-term, the overly idealistic course that was adopted could have been avoided). In the end, democracy is not achieved and sustained via regime change. It depends on institutions, traditions, societal structure, etc.
And when it came to ground invasions, General Tommy Franks advanced a "go light strategy" under the radical--and ultimately, disproved hypothesis--that modern technology made large manpower commitments unnecessary. In doing so, he disregarded General Anthony Zinni's "Desert Crossing" simulation on Iraq which demonstrated the need for substantial manpower in Iraq and considered an insurgency one of the most likely scenarios. General Eric Shinseki's warning about the need for substantial manpower was swiftly dismissed and all but ridiculed.
