Countdown To Armageddon (10/3/09)

Remember the grievous mistake that George W. Bush made in going back to the UN for an eighteenth anti-Saddam Hussein Security Council resolution and yet another round of Hans Blix l'il white golf-carted weapons inspections around Iraq to every place in the country that DIDN'T have WMD stockpiles?  And remember how Blix and the boys didn't find any because Saddam had used the six months before the ultimate U.S.-led invastion to ship all his chemical weapons and nuclear program materials to Syria?

You can see what's coming, cantcha?:

Allowing access within two weeks of the announcement would in effect give Tehran almost a month after its September 21st acknowledgment of the plant’s existence to obscure evidence, they said.

David Albright, a former international weapons inspector and president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said it would probably take Iran some time to conceal activities. But, “if you have a month, you have the time,” he said.

A European official who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue said the six world powers “did well” to win Iran’s agreement to permit access. But the official acknowledged that swifter access would have been better…

But Albright said faster is better. “It’s not good that the inspection has taken so long,” he said.

“There is no reason it could not have happened yesterday,” he said. “It should have.”

If the Iranians had found out earlier that we knew about the Qom plant, they probably would have because it would already have been cleaned out.  But what difference does it make when the Obamunists will never hold them to any "deadline" because that would run the risk of not being "nice" and having to get "confrontational" and Ahmadinejad breaking his and Barry's eventual Tehran summit date for the grand surrender signing ceremony where we'll let the Revolutionary Guard pound our spears into pruning hooks while B.O. bows down on his own brand new prayer rug (a gift from the Geico Caveman) at Ali Khamanei's feet?

Trust me, folks, there will be no "containing" a nuclear mullahgarchy for the self-same reasons why the West allowed Iran to go nuclear in the first place: it will not have the will, especially while Obama is still POTUS, and the fact that containment only works when all the players are rational.  A gang of mystical theocratic lunatics religiously committed to provoking nuclear Armageddon as the means of bringing back the Shiite Muslim messiah does not fit that definition.

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But on the bright side, ol' Adolph may have one more thing in common with his hero and namesake:

A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots.

A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.

The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth.

The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s birthplace, and the name derives from “weaver of the Sabour”, the name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The name is even on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran’s Ministry of the Interior…

Experts last night suggested Mr. Ahmadinejad’s track record for hate-filled attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past…

The Iranian leader has not denied his name was changed when his family moved to Tehran in the 1950s. But he has never revealed what it was change from or directly addressed the reason for the switch.

In short, a possibly Jewish background kept murky for probably that reason, though not as murky as the secrets of Hitler's family lineage, which may have been anything from a Jewish ancestor to a family history of mental illness, or both, or something else entirely.

How is this good news?  It isn't, really.  Not even meritorious of more than a chuckle or two.  But as bad as this threat has gotten, and as worse as it's going to get (AP's punchline: "The reckoning will come next year."), we've got to forage for scraps of sunlight, however dimmed, wherever we can scrounge them.