“Chatter” of a different but closely related sort is bubbling its way onto the public radar screen:

An Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites looks “unavoidable” given the apparent failure of sanctions to deny Tehran technology with bomb-making potential, one of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s deputies said on Friday.

“If Iran continues with its program for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it. The sanctions are ineffective,” Transport Minister Shaul Mofaz told the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

“Attacking Iran, in order to stop its nuclear plans, will be unavoidable,” said the former army chief who has also been defense minister.

It was the most explicit threat yet against Iran from a member of Olmert’s government, which, like the Bush Administration, has preferred to hint at force as a last resort should U.N. Security Council sanctions be deemed a dead end.

An attack on Iran’s nuclear sites “looks unavoidable,” eh?  Funny, I could have sworn I read that somewhere before….

Minister Mofaz is correct, of course.  War with Iran is inevitable because it is the mullahs who want it and are already waging it via a proxy in Lebanan, Gaza, and Iraq.  Doing so indirectly has kept the provocation below the distressingly high threshold of forcing an American response.

Israel’s response threshold has also risen a lot higher than it used to be, but as I have pointed out on occasions too numerous to count, in matters of national survival, when pushed to the wall, the Jews will do what they have to do.  An Iranian mullahgarchy with nuclear weapons would be a mortal threat to U.S. interests, but it would be the death knell of the Jewish State.  No Israeli regime, not even the appeasenik squishes of Kaditha, will sit there passively, thumb firmly inserted up its tuchis, and allow Adolph Ahmadinajad to finish the Final Solution Adolph Hitler started.  If the United States won’t remove this mortal threat - and it’s beyond clear now that the Bushies have punted, and you can count on President Obama to be even less enthusiastic - the IAF will.

If that means “all-out war from the Iranian terrorist proxies Hamas and Hezbollah” - which, frankly, they should be expecting anyway - then woe be unto the inhabitants of Lebanon and Gaza.  If that means prissy tut-tutting from the “international community,” including the intractably Arabist U.S. Department of State, so be it - better to be alive to take the ignorant abuse than, to paraphrase Golda Meir’s famous words, become deceased fodder for pious mass eulogies, “Never again, again” slogans, and quickly forgotten historical lessons.  And if that means a fifth all-out Arab/Muslim attack in retaliation - unlikely, given the threat Iranian nuclear hegemony would pose to Israel’s neighbors as well - well, if the “Third Temple,” as Israeli Jews refer to their nation, is about to fall (as it was in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, for example), they have the “undeclared” Samson option by which to take their enemies down with them - including the ones in Tehran.

Time, though, is truly of the essence, both because of how close Iran is to cutting the ribbon on their nuclear weapons assembly line, and because of the virtual certainty of a massive Democrat triumph in our November elections.  An Obama administration paired with enlarged Donk congressional majorities could punish a pre-emptive, self-defensive Israeli attack on Iran in any number of different ways: “diplomatically” - perhaps by not resisting Israeli expulsion from the UN, or dropping all pretense of even-handedness in the “peace process” and forcing Jerusalem to accept a comprehensive Middle East settlement on her enemies’ terms; economically by cutting off all aid to Israel, including military assistance; and even militarily by bombing Israel’s own nuclear facilities in the Negev in order to appease Iranian “outrage”.

Hey, given the baseline of Senator Obama’s radical alliances, I wouldn’t put anything past his capacity for “special dispensation”.

Whatever those details, the window of opportunity for Israeli action is rapidly closing, and if they don’t act now, nobody will - and it WILL be too late.

It may not be obvious to anybody in the Beltway, but it must be to the rest of the world if even German Socialists are sounding the alarm (via Newsmax Insider):

“The threat of another military confrontation hangs like a dark cloud over the Middle East,” declared Joschka Fischer, who was Germany’s foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998 to 2005.

Writing in the Beirut-based English-language newspaper The Daily Star, Fischer notes that a nuclear-armed Iran would be “Israel’s worst security nightmare,” and the Jewish state takes Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threat to annihilate Israel very seriously.

He points to several factors that indicate Israel could be readying a strike on Iran:

• When President Bush recently visited Israel as the country celebrated its 60th birthday, it was expected that Palestinian-Israeli relations would be the chief topic discussed. Instead, it was Iran.  It has been speculated that during his visit, Bush gave Israel the green light for an attack on Iran.
   
• Political pressure is mounting in Israel for action to halt the Iranian threat.
   
• The outgoing commander of the Israeli Air Force has said that the air force is capable of any mission, no matter how difficult, to protect Israel’s security.
   
• With the Bush presidency approaching its end and uncertainty about his successor’s policy toward Israel and Iran, the “window of opportunity” for an Israeli attack is potentially closing, and that window “is now, during the last months of Bush’s presidency.”

Fischer observes: “Although it is acknowledged in Israel that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would involve grave and hard-to-assess risks, the choice between acceptance of an Iranian bomb and an attempt at its military destruction, with all the attendant consequences, is clear. Israel won’t stand by and wait for matters to take their course.”…

Fischer concluded: “Iran must understand that without a diplomatic solution in the coming months, a dangerous military conflict is very likely to erupt. It is high time for serious negotiations to begin.”

But Fischer does not understand.  Iran doesn’t want a diplomatic solution; they could care less about toothless Western “sanctions”.  The mullahgarchy wants nuclear weapons with which to annihilate Israel, bring the United States to its knees, and ultimately, dominate the world.  If that means a “dangerous military conflict,” so much the better, because that will bring back their “twelfth imam” who will establish the Global Islamic Caliphate for them.

His “serious negotiations” can, in these circumstances, only worsen America’s and Israel’s position in the “dangerous military conflict” to come.  But that handwriting has already been on the wall for years.

How ironic that it falls to the Jews to save the, um, bacon of the same “international community” that throws them under the bus at every opportunity.  I just pray that Elohim gives the participants of Operation Opera II the same Osirak aim.  They’re going to need it.

[cross-posted at ]