It's Time To Choose, Alright

....but not for the mullahs:

Bush issued this same ultimatum maybe five hundred times and yet here we are, still wringing our hands over whether Russia and China will agree to one more turn of the economic ratchet. Ask yourself: If you’re Khamenei, knowing per the North Korean example that the West will go on negotiating with you forever even after you’ve got the bomb, why not plow ahead and build one? Then you can come back to the table, nuclear leverage in hand, and bargain for some sort of treaty in return for sanctions being lifted. The One and the media may believe that the time for talk is over, but the grand lesson of the Iranian nuke kabuki over the past seven years is that it’s never really over.

Until they've got the nuclear means to (1) deter any military attempt to take out their nuclear facilities and arsenal or effect regime-change in Tehran outright (And, just as a reminder, I believe they've had those means for a full year now), and (2) deploy said means against Israel and the Great Satan, as they have, after all, long promised to do.  Then, and only then, will it really be over.  Or, in other words, far, far too late.

Again, just as a reminder, nothing will stop the mullahgarchy from getting AND USING nuclear weapons except American military power.  The six years the Bushies wasted on endless, pointless, feckless, worthless negotiating and UN masturbating and empty sanctionizing redundantly demonstated this truth beyond any reasonable doubt.  Which makes Jake Tapper's argument non-functional:

My friend Olivier Knox of AFP reminds me that in May, former Bush State Department official Nicholas Burns testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about Iran, and said: “Some continue to argue that the only way to halt Iran’s accelerating nuclear research effort is through American or Israeli air strikes. But, there is no convincing scenario where such use of military force would work effectively to end the Iranian nuclear program. Even worse, air strikes would undoubtedly lead Iran to hit back asymmetrically against us in Iraq, Afghanistan and the wider region, especially through its proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas. This reminds us of Churchill’s maxim that, once a war starts, it is impossible to know how it will end. An America that is already waging two difficult and bloody wars should be wary of unleashing a third. Choosing military power at this stage would surely be precipitous and unwise.”

Burns is wrong.  Once a war starts, it is entirely possible to know how it will end, if we have the will to make sure it ends in victory.  My lone overlap with Tapper is that I've never been sanguine about airstrikes alone; I've always believed, and still do, that nothing less than an Iraq-style invasion of Iran will eliminate their nuclear threat by eliminating the mullahgarchy itself.

In that sense, it is indeed too late by virtue of who the American people foolishly elected as Bush's successor.  But then he never did what needed to be done, either, when the window of opportunity still was open.

And yet the reality of Armageddon remains.  The choice facing Barack Obama on this issue is between a bad and a worse, between war and disaster.  There are no other options.  Not talk, not sanctions.  War on our terms or disaster on theirs.  Sacrificing hopenchange versus "secure phones throughout government begin ringing. Including one on the President’s nightstand."

He's already made that choice.  Which makes the famous "3 AM" ad even more ominous than it was a year and a half ago.