US official to confirm that a plan for striking Iran

"Never interfere with an enemy while he's in the process of suicide." This is a quote widely attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, and it is also the advice Israeli analyst Guy Bechor gives to Israeli leaders. It appears to be more or less the approach of the United States and its allies with respect to Iran at the moment. Whether they have read the situation right, and for how long it will work, is another matter. In the past few days, the rhetoric has heated up a bit. On Sunday, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen became the most recent and perhaps highest-ranking US official to confirm that a plan for striking Iran exists. He stressed that in his opinion, a strike was "a bad idea", but added that the risk of Iran going nuclear was "unacceptable", and refused to comment which would be worse. Predictably, Iran went ballistic. "If the Americans make the slightest mistake, the security of the region will be endangered. Security in the Persian Gulf should be for all or none," threatened the deputy head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Yadollah Javani. "Tehran will burn down Tel Aviv" in response to any attack, said Mohammed Khazaee, Iran's ambassador to the United Nations. A similarly worrying message echoed in an earlier statement by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad: "The specter of real peace in the region is disappearing and the possibility of war is increasing. "Meanwhile, a Hamas military commander was killed on Friday night in a retaliatory strike for a missile that fell on the Israeli city of Ashkelon, and the Islamic Jihad militia threatened to resume suicide terror attacks on Israel from the West Bank. (Hamas is seen by many as an Iranian proxy, and Debka reported on Sunday that Iran recently sent "$250 million to Hamas for the creation of a new Palestinian Popular Army in the Gaza Strip".Despite all this, we have yet to see a full-scale appeal by the Barack Obama administration to the international community to support a strike - something that, judging by Obama's behavior so far, we have every right to expect before such an action. Some analysts, moreover, remain skeptical as to whether a strike will happen at all. Steve Clemons for the Huffington Post writes:

Despite the confidence, even eagerness, of the US Air Force to bomb Iran's nuclear program capacity, the other military services are not so sanguine and fear that the logistics demands for such a military action and its followup would undermine other major operations. In other words, adding another major obligation to America's military roster could literally break the back of the US military, erode morale, and result in eventual, massive shifts in American domestic support for the US military machine which had become increasingly costly and less able to generate the security deliverables expected.

At the very least, it would make sense for Obama to give sanctions a little more time before he approves any military action. The US president put so much effort into having the UN Security Council pass them that, if he is seen to undermine them, this could weaken his international standing considerably.