Bush invokes the specter of World War III

This is how President Bush responded – during a nationally-televised news conference yesterday – to a question about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s admonition against military action to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities.

But, no doubt, anti-Bush political pundits will be waxing indignant for days about his “war-mongering” justification for a preemptive strike against Iran. Never mind that his was only a politically-incorrect, not a factual, faux pas.

Therefore, here, for your edification, is a clarification of Bush’s congenitally-undiplomatic words.

First and foremost, notwithstanding Putin’s Machiavellian admonition, no international statesman would deny, in earnest, that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons.

More to the point, however, none of them would deny the reasonable fear that if Iran were allowed to develop nuclear weapons, it would either launch them directly at Israel, or provide them to one of their terrorist proxies to “wipe Israel off the map”.

Furthermore, under either scenario, it’s very likely that once Israel is hit, then all of its peripheral enemies – like the Syria, Hezbollah, et. al. – would pounce on it like vultures devouring a mortally-wounded deer.

Yet many pundits seem more outraged by Bush’s intent to prevent these doomsday scenarios than they are by Ahmadinejad’s intent to execute them. Of course I readily concede that, where dealing with Iran is concerned, Bush may just be an idiot savant. Because even though he has bungled almost every other foreign policy initiative, he seems positively clairvoyant in this respect.

Nevertheless, trust me folks, Iran will never be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. Because I maintain that Israel will do to its nuclear facilities what it did to Iraq’s in 1981, and to Syria’s just weeks ago. Moreover, just as Iraq and Syria were too intimidated to retaliate, the Iranians will huff and puff but they will only blow hot air….

But even if Iran manages to launch it’s pre-ordained crusade to wipe Israel off the map, and the U.S. retaliates in kind (as everyone assumes it would be obliged to do), I doubt the nuclear fall-out would spread much beyond the Middle East. After all, no major power (like Russia or China) would risk escalating this regional conflict into World War III just to answer Iran’s Caliphatic prayer for Armageddon.

Game over!

NOTE: This is not to say that – if the U.S. tag-teams with Israel in bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities to smithereens – Russia would not seize the opportunity to drop a few bombs on some of its unruly former satellite states (like Ukraine and Georgia) to reinforce its “sphere of influence” as a resurgent superpower. But here too, the U.S. would not risk escalating this regional conflict by attacking Russia in their defense.

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