Iran Nuke Watch Continues

Iran continues its march towards its holy grail and all France can do is say Stop Nukes, Then Meet. Now why would Iran be so confident that the UN will not impose sanctions on it? Does Iran have key diplomats in their back pocket?

Or is it all one big charade? Charles Krauthammer has some particularly insightful comments about Europe's worry and role:

The problem that mortifies the Europeans is what Iran might do after such an attack -- not just cut off its oil exports but shut down the Strait of Hormuz by firing missiles at tankers or scuttling its vessels to make the strait impassable. It would require an international armada led by the United States to break such a blockade.

Such consequences -- serious economic disruption and possible naval action -- are something a cocooned, aging, post-historic Europe cannot even contemplate. Which is why the Europeans have had their heads in the sand for two years. And why they will spend the little time remaining -- before a group of apocalyptic madmen go nuclear -- putting their heads back in the sand. And congratulating themselves on allied solidarity as they do so in unison.

Atlas Shrugs has more. So does Memeorandum. Dr. Sanity calls it infinite complacency. I'd call it willful complacency. Even negligent complacency if you want to be charitable.

These days, it seems to me, it hardly takes a seer or a rocket scientist--or a psychiatrist--to foretell the misery and death that await the world in the next decade if decisive and proactive steps are not taken right now.

We will never know the moment it became too late to do something until after it has passed. Infinite complacency will gradually become grand disillusionment and eventually hopeless regret.

The scary part is that we already may have passed the critical moment when we could have halted short of the precipice but haven't realized it yet.

UPDATE:
Michael Ledeen sends out warning signals. He, of the Faster Please crowd, notes that we've had 5 years to craft a policy and yet we have an empty sheet of paper to work from.

You want to bomb the nuclear facilities? Do you really believe that our intelligence community is capable of identifying them? The same crowd that did all that yeoman work on Saddam's Iraq? The CIA that once received accurate information on Iranian schemes in Afghanistan, only to walk away from the sources that provided it? The CIA that, three times in the past 15 years or so, seems to have had its entire "network" inside Iran rolled up by the mullahs? And even if you believe that we have good information about the nuclear sites, are you prepared to deal with the political consequences, in Iran and throughout the region? Do we even know, with any degree of reliability, what those are? Look at the problems we now face in Pakistan, after a handful of innocents were killed in an assault against a presumed terrorist gathering. Then imagine, if you can, the problems following hundreds, or thousands of innocents killed in raids inside Iran. Are you prepared for that?