For years, Egypt has run a low-profile military nuclear program. It cannot afford nuclear inferiority to Iran.

As in Bushehr, Egypt can use its reactor to harvest plutonium for nuclear bombs.

Perhaps. But if Iran is not a threat, then Syria won’t attack us, either. Without Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah are powerless. And so the defense minister can retire.

Weapons development has cost Iran more than any potential sanctions. Iran does not have any enemies, and the impoverished country has no reason to spend its last rials for missiles unless it intends to put them to profitable use very soon, before they become obsolete.

Iran cannot carry out a war against Saudi Arabia or Egypt, both of which are supported by the United States. But Syria would find Iranian missiles handy against Israel. After losing Egypt as an anti-Israeli ally, Syria replaced it with Iran, and is now ready to restart hostilities.

After three months of enrichment, no Israeli attack will be able to eliminate Iran’s nuclear stocks.

Every sane person understands that sanctions are futile. Not only they are torpedoed by Russia and China, but even the strongest sanctions won’t break Iran’s back within the few months the ayatollahs need to finish their bomb.

Iran’s Russian S-300 SAM do not change the situation. In the current political climate, the Russians won’t man the batteries with their own personnel, and it would take Iranians months to learn to operate them reliably, if they ever do. Most importantly, the S-300 is too small to defend against a missile strike. Two S-300 will take out some 40 missiles, but Israel can launch about a thousand Tomahawk-type missiles.

Baradei is running on the same democratic reform/fight corruption platform as the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the only major Egyptian political group to publish his proclamations. Just as the Islamist revolution in Iran did thirty years ago, the anti-corruption platform in Egypt has brought together moderates, students, and Islamists. Once the Islamists triumph, even the limited democracy of the Mubarak era will come to an end.

Western diplomats have a fatal habit of supporting the foreigners they know rather than the proper foreigners. El Baradei, who has been talking to world leaders for many years, may gather more foreign support than Hosni Mubarak’s son Gamal, or any other strong leader.

Once Baradei clears the road to democracy, the Muslim Brotherhood will surge to power in the first transparent elections. The Bush and Obama administrations have pushed Egypt for such elections.

The Russians will miss this deadline, too, but the important part is that they are cooperating with Iran despite their talk about sanctions.

Israel has not taken the hint from the Russian delays in launching the Bushehr: we have to bomb the place before it starts operating in order to prevent another Chernobyl in case of attack.

The Armenian genocide resolution would be a heavy blow to the embattled remnants of Turkey’s secular establishment, as it would signify that America does not support them anymore.

Perhaps Obama could send Clinton to do the hack job on the resolution in Congress. So far, he has kept a low profile in urging congress to vote against the resolution. Obama is constrained by his clear electoral promise to classify the Turkish massacre of Armenians as genocide—which, like his other promises, he cannot fulfill.

In order to deal with Israeli Druze, the Red Cross has to identify them as an occupied population.

Unfortunately, the terrorists can lose the elections but win the battle.

The important thing is that neither the UN nor any country objected to Dubai’s decision to bar Israelis—and anyone who looks like an Israeli. May Israel proceed now to bar all Arabs, lest we have another Mabhouh here?

If the war is just and sensible, then the Afghanis must pay the US the cost of fighting it, including cost of the lives lost there. If it’s not a viable war, just get out.

In Israel, suicide attacks waned eventually because the pool of potential bombers is too small, and open to infiltration by security forces. Pakistani and Afghani Islamists possess both safe havens and a limitless pool of recruits.

It is possible that Iran’s brazen defiance is rooted in its certainty that Israel won’t attack even under the best imaginable circumstances. Absent an attack now, Iran would reasonably feel safe in proceeding to enrich its uranium stocks to 80% and weaponize them.

But there is yet another possibility. As we suggested yesterday, Iran and Syria may be planning a preemptive strike on Israel; not a devastating strike, but sufficient to deter Israel from attacking Iran. In that case, Iran would expose its uranium stocks to provoke an Israeli attack against the compound—thickly defended with SAM batteries—and then counterstrike.

Obama’s error is his hallmark confidence-building approach, which calls for incremental steps. But in order to embrace Washington, Assad has to abandon Iran and Lebanon. Certainly, he would require much stronger incentives for that than ambassadorial relations. Obama can woo Assad away from Iran with really big money, but no money has been promised yet, while Iran continues to finance Syrian military expenditures.

Young Assad won’t give up his emotional ties to Nasrallah or his political designs on Lebanon for peanuts, or even for the Golan Heights, which are of little importance to him.

After the meeting, Assad proclaimed that Israel might attack at any time. Just the words he needs to say if Syria is looking to preempt.

Syria knows that it cannot defeat Israel, but it does not need to. Following Sadat’s 1973 example, Assad may be planning a surprise attack on Israel with mid-range missiles to deflect Israel from attacking Iran and force meaningful talks on the return of the Golan Heights.

Foreign troops cannot secure Baghdad from suicide bombers, and have much less hope of prevailing in Kabul.

Abdullah’s defense claims he is not a terrorist. We know, he is a good Muslim.

The peace is unlikely to hold because, as was the case with the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords, it relegates the most important power-sharing questions to later negotiations.

Decades ago, Israel conducted a similar operation with a Syrian passenger jet to obtain hostages for prisoner exchange, but since then has refrained from such spectacular interceptions.

It would be so easy to shoot down a plane carrying Ahmadinejad on one of his foreign trips.

The new sanctions, of course, will work no better than the previous sanctions, but Barak is up to something more important: averting an Israeli military operation against Iran.

The Iranian offer entails no risk for the West: it is unimaginable that the Iranians would steal the rods during the exchange without delivering the enriched stocks for exports. The exchange can take place at any embassy or on the border.

The West refused Iran’s offer because the deal is senseless by now. Iran has already attained 20% enrichment capacity, and can produce the fuel rods by itself. Iranian nuclear stockpiles are running at 2-2.5 tons, while the exchange earmarks only 1.2 tons for export. And the deal does not stop Iran from continuing enrichment.

In the past, the Turkish military used to purge the government of leaders who had Islamic leanings with periodic putsches, but its desire to join  the EU and American pressure for democratization have led the army to accede to the current Islamist government. Pushed away by the EU and vying with Iran for influence in Islamic world, Turkey predictably has become more religious.

Once the government succeeds in weakening the Turkish army, the state may well erupt into violence among the numerous religious and ethnic groups. The divide between Turkey’s atheist and religious population is in itself deep enough to cause civil war. It remains to be seen whether Erdogan will succeed in installing his own commanders in the army. So far, all military graduates are staunchly secular.

Only the White House bars Israel from striking, though the joint operation plans with US Navy have already been refined.

Jews are much less zealous in protecting their own homeland. We’ve yet to hear any reports of IDF Border Police shooting infiltrators.

If true, the attack would mark another touch of genius, following the one we saw in the Gaza war. Commando raids so deep into enemy territory, with such wide goals, have never been tried before, and it would astonishing if Israel could accomplish them.

Such an attack would further confirm the changing rules of warfare: just as conventional warfare has become unacceptably destructive, states follow the terrorists’ lead and turn to low-profile operations: assassinations, the CIA drone wars, and now Iran.

By now, an Israeli strike on Iran seems unavoidable. The government has accepted the possibility of Iran procuring nuclear weapons from North Korea, but assumes that ayatollahs with a couple of A-bombs won’t risk a confrontation with Israel, which has some 200 of them.

The Lebanese do not possess SAM batteries, which would be dangerous to Israeli F-16, though low-altitude flights make the planes vulnerable to primitive missiles.

In its report on Goldstone’s allegations, IDF avoided taking a simple and unassailable position: yes, we did kill hundreds of Arab civilians in Gaza, just as American troops have killed non-combatants in Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and many other places. They are collateral damage. We cannot and will not bend over backwards verifying our targets before every shot. If they do not like that, we can help them all cross into Jordan so that they make it a Palestinian state.

The key to understanding Egypt’s missile program is the date of its acceleration: 2007. At that time, aging Hosni Mubarak was mostly concerned with receiving American approval for a non-democratic handover of power to his son Gamal, and would not have risked an arms race with Israel. The Egyptian missile program is an answer to Iranian nuclear and missile development, which had accelerated shortly before then.

Egypt also runs a military nuclear program, which Israel has to tolerate because of the peace treaty with Egypt.

Meanwhile, the US has introduced a new set of sanctions against particular Iranian companies. The sanctions can easily be circumvented by using straw firms.

The assumption is wrong. The Taliban won’t take their defeat at Marjah as a problem. Unlike elected presidents, they think long-term, and they know that the Americans will withdraw, Marjah or no Marjah.

The real question is, what does it take for American soldiers to risk their lives for no cause?

The United States continues to send major aid to the Lebanese army.

Faced with the Iranian threat, Saudi Arabia had to improve its relations with Syria, and reduced its involvement in Lebanon. As part of the deal, Hariri paid homage to Assad, who ordered Hezbollah to murder his father. Since then, Hariri has continually given in to Hezbollah.

The reckless Vienna draft allowed Iran to have its cake and eat it, too: it mastered what is essentially weapons-grade uranium enrichment and demands fuel supply offered by the West in October last year.

Iranian research uranium produces plutonium.

Western analysts consider Shia to be an aggressive crowd, but Sunnis so far have the upper hand in terrorism.

So far, Shiite groups have refrained from retaliating for various terrorist acts against them. The Sadr militia and other Iranian-backed groups have shown restraint in order to avoid prompting Americans to delay the withdrawal. But after August, they will act.

When everyone else lauded the US Army’s surge tactics, we said that the results would be short-lived.

Attacks on Shiites intensified somewhat after the Iraqi Shiite-led government banned 511 Sunni candidates from the elections over their connections with Saddam. Under American pressure, Iraqi judges overturned the ban, which leaves us wondering, are those people in the State Department really crazy? In the name of liberal democracy—which does not exist in this part of the world—they ensured a deadlocked parliament in Iraq. A proper solution would be to give Shia parts of Iraq back to Iran, allow independence for Kurdistan, and let Iraq persist as a Sunni state.

Germany is strengthening its economic ties with Iran while accusing China of blocking the very sanctions which would block German-Iranian cooperation.

US General James Jones said that he is surprised by Iran’s “puzzling defiance” of the West. Far from puzzling, the Iranians are quite rational. They want the bomb and are sure that the West won’t stop them, just as it did not stop India, Pakistan, or North Korea.

Looking at Europe’s condemnation of the Iranian nuclear program, Netanyahu must be busy preparing for a strike on Iran, and does not want to alienate Syria any further. But no doubt, at some point we will have a government which values a piece of paper with Syria’s signature more than it values land, and that government will return the Golan Heights.

Indeed, tens of thousands of Gazan extremists won’t cooperate with Fatah, which only fakes resistance; instead they follow radical Salafist groups which belong to the Al Qaeda franchise.

Egypt shoots the illegals on its own territory, where they have committed no crime, but the Israeli government refuses to give IDF the commonsense order to shoot infiltrators in the Negev after they have already committed the major crime of crossing the border illegally.

Regrettably, there is no other way to stop the hordes.

In the meantime, the Knesset Internal Affairs Committee has derailed a bill which would allow Israeli soldiers to keep African illegals out of our country. In the Committee’s view, the bill did not provide sufficiently for asylum seekers. Never mind that no legitimate asylum seeker can enter Israel due to her geography: by the time the Africans reach Egypt, they have already reached asylum, and they only infiltrate Israel for economic reasons.

Jordan has revoked citizenship from reportedly hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

Israel is afraid to revoke the citizenship of her Palestinians. If we were to do so, they would stay here with personal, but no political rights.

C’mon, no way. Obama cannot even decide on bombing the North Korean and Iranian nuclear facilities, which pose a clear and present danger of nuclear terrorism, and we are to believe that he would wipe out Tehran or Pyongyang and the millions of people allegedly held hostage by their regimes? There would be a minute of silence in the UN, followed by a month of sanctions, and that’s it.

On the other hand, Israel would be perfectly safe to attack Iran’s underground laboratories with tactical nuclear weapons.

Obama stands by his promise to withdraw US troops by August, and leave Israel to deal with the terrorist nest created in place of Saddam’s stable regime.

After 1973, Israel acceded to the demand Egypt had been making since 1971—to return Sinai and live in peace.

Regrettably, Barak is right on this. Syria will attack with a thousand mid-range missiles, and Israel will defeat it, but the shock will force Israelis to negotiate away the Golan Heights.

No way can Karzai make such a bold offer without American approval. Any agreement with the Taliban will bring them into the government, and soon after the American withdrawal they will castrate Karzai, just as the mojahedeen did to the Soviet puppet Najibullah.

The deal might take time to finalize and it is unlikely that Russia would deliver S-300 to Libya, which can transfer them to another country.

But if S-300 is so good and relatively inexpensive, why does Israel rely on Patriot, Arrow-2, and X-band instead of procuring the superior Russian systems?