Confront Iran!

Iran will reportedly take a big step towards 'large scale' uranium enrichment next month.

Iran ultimately plans to expand its enrichment program to 54,000 centrifuges, which spin uranium gas into enriched material to produce nuclear fuel. That would give it the capacity to produce dozens of nuclear warheads a year, if it chose to develop weapons.

Meanwhile, Mohamed ElBaradei, the worthless Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned that a pre-emptive strike would be 'catastrophic':

While ElBaradei did not name any country, his comments were clearly directed at Israel and the United States, which have both suggested a strike on Tehran’s nuclear facilities was not off the table unless the Islamic republic ended its nuclear defiance.

In a clear warning of such possible intentions, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Wednesday his country, believed now to be the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East, will respond to the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear ambitions “with all the means at our disposal.”

The Russians clearly are not going to help us with this. They recently sold advanced air defense systems to Iran to protect their nuclear facilities.

Thanks for the help, Russia!

But there are indications that the U.S. is becoming more willing to confront Iran directly. President Bush recently authorized the military to kill or capture Iranian operatives inside Iraq.

For more than a year, U.S. forces in Iraq have secretly detained dozens of suspected Iranian agents, holding them for three to four days at a time. The "catch and release" policy was designed to avoid escalating tensions with Iran and yet intimidate its emissaries. U.S. forces collected DNA samples from some of the Iranians without their knowledge, subjected others to retina scans, and fingerprinted and photographed all of them before letting them go.

Last summer, however, senior administration officials decided that a more confrontational approach was necessary, as Iran's regional influence grew and U.S. efforts to isolate Tehran appeared to be failing. The country's nuclear work was advancing, U.S. allies were resisting robust sanctions against the Tehran government, and Iran was aggravating sectarian violence in Iraq.

Those new ROE's were a long time coming. They've only been killing our people for what, some twenty-five years?

But, for three years, the Iranians have operated an embedding program there, offering operational training, intelligence and weaponry to several Shiite militias connected to the Iraqi government, to the insurgency and to the violence against Sunni factions. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the CIA, told the Senate recently that the amount of Iranian-supplied materiel used against U.S. troops in Iraq "has been quite striking."

"Iran seems to be conducting a foreign policy with a sense of dangerous triumphalism," Hayden said.

The new "kill or capture" program was authorized by President Bush in a meeting of his most senior advisers last fall, along with other measures meant to curtail Iranian influence from Kabul to Beirut and, ultimately, to shake Iran's commitment to its nuclear efforts. Tehran insists that its nuclear program is peaceful, but the United States and other nations say it is aimed at developing weapons.

We are also actively seeking more Persian Gulf allies. Another carrier group is headed to the region and several key diplomats have visited the area of late.

Iran and Syria are also being accused of supporting and promoting the recent violence and unrest in Lebanon.

The world is getting hotter and these continuing threats, heretofore unchecked, are becoming more difficult to manage. It's long past time that we took a more "hands on" approach to both Iran and Syria.