Bolton sounds the alarm

John Bolton said in an interview to the Jerusalem Post that came out on Friday that he's "very worried" about Israel's wellbeing, the Bush administration doesn't recognize the urgency of the situation with Iran, and the only remaining options are regime change or a last-resort military intervention. Instead, he says, the administration keeps clinging "to the dangerous and misguided belief that sanctions can be effective."

"We have fiddled away four years, in which Europe tried to persuade Iran to give up voluntarily. Iran in those four years mastered uranium conversion from solid to gas and now enrichment to weapons grade.... We lost four years to feckless European diplomacy and our options are very limited."

"The State Department has adopted the European view [on how to deal with Iran] and other voices have been sidelined," he said. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "is overwhelmingly predominant on foreign policy."

Asked where this left Israel, Bolton said simply: "Israel's options are as limited as those of the US, except that you are in more danger in that you are closer. I hate to say that."

A depressing picture, and from this corner of the world it supersedes other matters--even the continuing jihadist advances and successes in Gaza and Lebanon. External responsibility for the ongoing Iranian fiasco--that is, the failure of the Free World to do anything about the growing threat, when not actually abetting it with trade and diplomatic cover--lies initially with Khomeini-loving and Shah-hating Jimmy Carter; it also lies with the foolish ideas about converting Iraq into a democracy, which produced the ongoing imbroglio there, one of whose results has apparently been the ascendancy of the "realist," diplomatist camp in the State Department over the true realists like Cheney and Bolton who understand the stark reality of an enemy like Iran that's very serious in its ideology and its intentions.

I hope it won't be written that democracy, with its fecklessness and cavalier attitude toward threats, carried the seeds of its own demise.

How much better it would be if the attempted terror attacks in London and Glasgow and the scares in the U.S.--which blessedly haven't harmed anyone but the perpetrators--would be enough to wake people up to the nature of the jihadist threat and ambitions.