For Israel, Iran is threat that won't go away

Israel celebrates its 60th anniversary Thursday. What we should remember is May 8 commemorates the founding of the modern Jewish state. For millennia, Jews have lived, reared families, tended flocks and brought in crops, and celebrated good days and suffered bad times in the Holy Land. The Romans may have destroyed the previous Jewish state, scattering Jews into centuries of the Diaspora, but they did not wipe out Jewish life there.

That goal remains the twisted fantasy of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the terrorist organizations his country arms and funds, the Islamist radicals at war with the modern world, the reactionary Arab regimes trying to divert their populations from the rotten fruit of their miserable governments and the mindless elements of the Arab street who unquestioningly soak up the most lurid, irrational horrors of anti-Semitic propaganda. For them there is no distinction between Israel and Jew; wiping Israel off the map, Ahmadinejad's professed goal, would be a second Holocaust.

President Bush visits Israel next week to mark Israel's anniversary. He also has stops scheduled in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continue to express hope for their goal of achieving some sort of negotiated peace this year. History, the hostility of Israel's neighbors, the unending terror campaign against Israelis and Iran's push for regional hegemony do not inspire much optimism.

Recent history has shown the futility of Israel's earnest concessions for peace. Its military withdrawal from Lebanon yielded only war from Hezbollah. Its uprooting of Jewish communities and abandoning the Gaza Strip produced only daily rocket attacks and the establishment of the terrorist state Hamastan. Hamas says the recent Egyptian-sponsored cease-fire is but a "tactic" in its unending war against Israel. It will use the time to rearm and plan new atrocities.

The CIA's recent disclosure that the Syrian facility Israel bombed last year was a nuclear reactor with no other purpose than to produce atom bombs amply demonstrated how dangerous and sinister Israel's neighborhood remains.

The nuclear threat from Syria may be gone, but not the one from Iran. The latest attempt by six world powers to offer incentives to Tehran to abandon its nuclear enrichment program was immediately rebuffed Monday by Tehran. A nuclearized Iran would pose the combustible mix of the most devastating weapons with extremist religious ambitions. Ahmadinejad envisions Muslim domination of the world coming with the "imminent return" of the Shiite messiah, the 12th Imam.

Now the London Times reports that an Israeli intelligence "breakthrough" indicates Iran's nuclear capability may be far more advanced than judged by last year's U.S. intelligence estimate, which asserted Iran had halted its weapons program. The White House says military action remains on the table, but the American political environment, infused with weariness with the Iraq war, does not seem open to that. Iran's program is thought to be so dispersed and protected that it's not vulnerable to a quick strike like the one Israel delivered against Syria in September and on Iraq's atom bomb facility in the 1980s.

Barring the unforeseen, the world seems to be on a collision course with the reality of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Perhaps that thinking was behind Hillary Clinton's comment last week that the United States would be able "to totally obliterate" Iran should it attack Israel with nuclear weapons. Iran complained to the U.N. about that, and Barack Obama likened her comment to Bush "bluster." Yet it sounds like she was only articulating a new version of the massive retaliation policy that successfully prevented nuclear attack during the Cold War. The key question: Would that work with a radical Islamist regime inflamed with apocalyptic visions?