Decision Time on Iran

National Review:

If the choice is between a nuclear Iran and a bombing campaign that delays a nuclear Iran’s advent while making it less probable in absolute terms, the latter may be the better alternative. But it is a choice the West must make. If military action is not to be taken, then our intellectual and material resources should be focused instead on developing and implementing the most effective possible containment strategy. The worst outcome would be the testing of an Iranian atomic bomb while the West is still in “Let’s engage” mode.

It is not quite the hour to make this choice. The exhaustion of efforts to impose serious sanctions is a necessary prelude. But those efforts should have a defined endpoint. If the Qom revelation and Iran’s subsequent deal-breaking are insufficient to motivate, in the short term, the passage of highly punitive sanctions with enough international support (meaning that of Moscow and Beijing) to guarantee their efficacy, then nothing is likely to motivate their passage, ever. President Obama should make it his goal to force a decision more than to secure passage of this or that sanctions resolution.

Given that leaders of geostrategic wisdom far superior to his, commanding positions of peerless economic and military strength, sat idly for years while the crisis metastasized, we feel no excess of hope.