Why did the Dictator hold his “nuclear summit” with heads of state flocking to Washington to pay homage to his great leadership? Since it was about nothing of importance, and nothing of importance came of it, it was probably only to have heads of state flocking to pay homage to his great leadership. Just something His Modesty desired.

With his usual clear sight, Mark Steyn writes:

In years to come – assuming, for the purposes of argument, there are any years to come – scholars will look back at President Barack Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit and marvel. For once, the cheap comparisons with 1930s appeasement barely suffice: To be sure, in 1933, the great powers were meeting in Geneva and holding utopian arms-control talks even as Hitler was taking office in Berlin. But it’s difficult to imagine Neville Chamberlain in 1938 hosting a conference on the dangers of rearmament, and inviting America, France, Brazil, Liberia and Thailand …but not even mentioning Germany.

Yet that’s what Obama just did: He held a nuclear gabfest in 2010, the biggest meeting of world leaders on American soil since the founding of the United Nations 65 years ago – and Iran wasn’t on the agenda.

Granted that almost all of Obama’s exciting innovative “change we can believe in” turns out to have been exhumed direct from the sclerotic Seventies to stagger around like a rotting zombie in polyester bell-bottoms from some straight-to-video sequel, there’s still something almost touchingly quaint in the notion of an international summit on nuclear “nonproliferation” in the 21st century. Five years ago, when there was still a chance the world might prevent a nuclear Iran rather than pretending to “contain” it, I remember the bewildered look from a “nonproliferation expert” on a panel I was on after I suggested non-proliferation was a laughably obsolescent frame for this discussion. You could just about enforce nonproliferation back in the Cold War when the only official nuclear powers were the Big Five at the U.N. Security Council and the entry level for the nuclear club was extremely expensive and technologically sophisticated. Now it’s not. If Pakistan and North Korea can be nuclear powers, who can’t? North Korea’s population is starving. Its GDP per capita is lower than Ghana, lower than Zimbabwe, lower than Mongolia. Which is to say its GDP is all but undetectable.

Yet it’s a nuclear power.

That’s what anachronistic nonproliferation mumbo-jumbo gets you. If you read in the paper that New Zealand had decided to go nuclear, would you lose a moment’s sleep over it? Personally, I’d be rather heartened. It would be a sign that a pampered and somnolent developed world had woken up and concluded that betting your future on the kindness of strangers is a helluva gamble. What Obama and his empty showboaters failed even to acknowledge in their “security” summit is the reality of the Post-Big Five nuclear age: We’re on the brink of a world in which the wealthiest nations, from Canada to Norway to Japan, can barely project meaningful force to their own borders while the nickel ‘n’ dime basket-cases go nuclear.

How long do you think that arrangement will last? Iran has already offered to share its nuclear technology with Sudan. Sudan? Ring a vague bell? Remember that “Save Darfur” interpretative-dance fundraiser you went to, where someone read out a press release from George Clooney, and you all had a simply marvelous time? Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed – with machetes. That’s pretty labor-intensive. In the Congo, five and a half million have been slaughtered – and, again, in impressively primitive ways.

But a nuclear Sudan would be a model of self-restraint?

By the way, that’s another example of the self-indulgent irrelevance of Obama. The mound of corpses being piled up around the world today is not from high-tech nuclear states but from low-tech psycho states. It’s not that Britain has nukes, and poor old Sudan has to make do with machetes. It’s that the machete crowd are willing to kill on an industrial scale, and the high-tech guys can’t figure out a way to stop them. Perhaps for his next pointless yakfest the president might consider a machete nonproliferation initiative. …

The Obama Happy Fairyland Security Summit was posited on the principle that there’s no difference between a Swiss nuke and a Syrian nuke. If you believe that, you’ll be thrilled by the big breakthrough agreement of the summit: Canada, Chile, Mexico and Ukraine have agreed to reduce their stocks of enriched uranium. Peace in our time! I have here a piece of paper from the prime minister of Canada!

This is the nuclear version of Janet Incompetano’s initial reaction to the Pantybomber – when she banned passengers from having paperback books on their laps for the last 45 minutes of the flight. In an age of freelance nukes, we shouldn’t be banning items but profiling threats. For 30 years, Iran has acted with extraterritorial impunity and without even the minimal courtesies of international relations – seizing embassies, taking out mob contracts on British novelists, seeding terrorist proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, blowing up community centers in Latin America. Washington’s pathetic fallback of “containment” is intended to prevent Tehran using a nuke, in the Middle East, Europe or anywhere else within range. There is no strategy for “containing” Iran’s leverage of its nuclear status to advance its interests more discreetly, and no strategy for “containing” the mullahs’ generosity to states and groups more inclined to use the technology. …

As we learned the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan, stupid, ill-trained illiterates with primitive explosives who don’t care who they kill can inflict quite a lot of damage on the technologically advanced highly trained warriors of civilized states. That’s the “asymmetric warfare” that matters. So virtuously proclaiming oneself opposed to nuclear modernization ensures a planet divided into civilized states with unusable weapons and barbarous regimes happy to kill with whatever’s to hand.

So another grand week’s work for a president pressing full steam ahead into the post-American global order. The good news is that at least you don’t have to worry about a nuclear blitzkrieg from Winnipeg. Sleep easy.

In a Townhall article which we quote from here, Roger Chapin sounds a warning about the weakening of America. He may be exaggerating when he speaks of a ‘nuclear doomsday’, but we do think that Obama is selling America down the river, wants world government and global redistribution of wealth, and that the transformation of America into a weak, decaying, impoverished, socialist country is a danger all too real.

Never before in our history has an American president, deliberately and by design, risked our very survival to a maniacal enemy power sworn to remove America from the world. Yet from all appearances, this is exactly what Obama is doing by failing to vigorously oppose Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. But in spite of the fact that over 60% of the public favors militarily destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities, there’s nary a word of protest from the Republicans in opposition. They’re so paranoid about being labeled warmongers, they have shamefully abdicated their own national security responsibilities, just as John McCain did during his presidential run.

Obama is weakening rather than strengthening our missile defenses. That’s how seriously this Administration takes the Iranian threat.

The reality is that the fanatical, messianically driven radical Iranian zealots will pay any price, including Iran’s virtual obliteration, in order to render the U.S. and its major allies non-players on the world scene. The mullahs expect to emerge from the ruins no longer hindered by the “Great Satan,” free to use their huge oil and gas reserves to fund the imposition of their tyranny throughout the Middle East and beyond.

Not only does Obama’s psyche make him incapable of understanding the radical’s mentality but he chooses to totally dismiss their own pronouncements spelling out their sinister intentions. Obama’s determination to make the United States subservient to an international body of nations is now driving him to systematically reduce our nation to a mere shadow of its former power and influence. …

The practical consequences of Obama’s extreme radical left agenda can only be to put our nation at the mercy of a new world order dominated by ruthless tyrants, thugs and spineless states who sell their souls for commercial gain. His first allegiance is to such an international order – not to the United States.

Obama is not only unfit to serve as commander-in-chief in a time of war, he is a menace to our national security. His obvious intent to allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, perhaps under the guise of what would undoubtedly be a totally meaningless agreement not to do so, presents a risk so grave to our survival that it can only be rationally viewed as tantamount to national suicide. Under no circumstances can the mullahs be trusted to honor any agreement, as they’ve proven time and again. …

By almost any standard, Obama is flagrantly guilty of dereliction of duty. It cannot be overemphasized how extraordinarily perilous a situation we are in, especially at a time when virtually the entire Republican Party is AWOL on bombing Iran and strengthening national security. There is no counterweight to Obama’s disastrous policies. Obama himself recently acknowledged that if terrorists get nuclear weapons “we have every reason to believe they will use them.” Despite this admission, he refuses to take the only action that will stop them from acquiring such weapons.

If we citizenry will not take the bull by the horns and demand a total reversal of our nation’s suicidal course, we could very soon experience the apocalyptic end of the America we love and all western civilization. Let us understand that the maniacal, radical Islamic enemies confronting us are irreversibly committed to making such a cataclysmic event happen – no matter how horrific the cost to them. To think that an olive branch of brotherly love could change their goals is sheer madness.

Take heed America, Obama’s policies may be paving the way for a nuclear doomsday.

Obama in China, at a ‘press conference’ where no one was allowed to ask questions, read a statement in which he said:

We [himself and President Hu] agreed that the Islamic Republic of Iran must provide assurances to the international community that its nuclear program is peaceful and transparent. Iran has an opportunity to present and demonstrate its peaceful intentions but if it fails to take this opportunity, there will be consequences.

Tremble! What might they be?

Again extending the time Iran has been given to change its policy while yet more diplomatic efforts are made to dissuade the mullahs from developing nuclear weapons.

Gosh! But if they still go on developing them?

Well then … there will be consequences.

As the powerless King Lear threatens:

I will do such things —

What they are yet I know not, but they shall be

The terrors of the earth!

At the Geneva talks, Iran has achieved a diplomatic victory, and at the same time full legitimacy for its program of nuclear enrichment. Furthermore, it could be helped, probably by Russia, to attain a higher grade of enrichment, raised from the present 5% to 19.75% – just .25% under weapons-grade. This tiny margin would allow Iran and its apologists – including the US administration – to maintain the fiction that Iran wants nuclear power for ‘civilian uses only’.  In fact, this help with the enrichment process would make it easy for Iran to produce a nuclear bomb in a few weeks.

And the Obama administration is happy with this outcome.

Ralph Peters writes in the New York Post on the confrontation with Iran:

For Moscow, this crisis isn’t about Tehran’s acquisition of nukes. It’s about Russia’s acquisition of a stranglehold on global energy markets. Putin’s playing with fire — but he’s sure we’ll be the ones burned. As for the Obama administration’s desperate (and stunningly naive) hope that economic sanctions can deter President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and his fellow thugs-for-Allah from pursuing nuclear weapons, forget it….

The current crisis is a win-win-win for Putin. But before laying out his plan, let’s run the numbers:

The Persian Gulf’s littoral states hold over 60 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves and 40 percent of the natural gas. Russia has “just” 10 percent of the oil reserves and 35 percent of the world’s natural gas.

Do the math: Iran and its neighbors, along with Russia, own two-thirds of the world’s oil reserves and 70 percent of the natural gas. …

This is one macro-region for energy, the zone of ultimate control. Putin gets it, even if we don’t. Here’s Czar Vladimir’s strategic trifecta:

For now, Russia profits wonderfully from its trade, both legal and illicit, with Iran, while the West talks itself to death. Life is good.

But life could get even better: If Iran’s nuclear quest isn’t blocked, a nuclear arsenal will give Iran de facto control of all Persian Gulf oil. Putin envisions a Moscow-Tehran axis, an energy cartel that dramatically increases the value of his oil and gas — the only economic props keeping the corpse of Russia upright.

If Israel’s driven to a forlorn-hope attack on Iran’s nuke program, Iran will respond by striking Gulf Arab oil fields and facilities, while closing the Strait of Hormuz. The US military will be in it, like it or not. Oil and gas prices will soar unimaginably — and the bear will have its paws on the golden tap.

So the worst outcome for Putin — more of the same — is still good. A bad outcome for everybody else is even better in Putin’s strategy to renew Russia’s superpower status.

Why on earth would this guy help us stop Iran? When he hates us, anyway? (It isn’t you, Barack. It’s just business.)

For all his viciousness, Putin’s a serious strategist. We don’t have any high-level strategists. Not one. On either side of the Potomac.

In his first decade on the throne, Czar Vladimir focused on addicting Europe to Russian gas, while moving successfully to exert control over as many pipelines as possible. That was the constructive decade.

The second decade in the reign of Vladimir I is the energy-cartel-building phase. This will be the confrontational phase. Energy’s the only real power Putin has, so he’s maximizing it.

It’s no accident that a strategic triangle has emerged between Moscow, Tehran and Caracas — home of the great Latin mischief-lover, Hugo Chavez, who thrives on his own nation’s petro-wealth.

For us, the Iran crisis is about peace. For Putin, it’s about power. Yet the self-deluding Obama administration really believes that Moscow’s going to support us. After our president gave away our only serious bargaining chip, the missile-defense system promised to our European allies.

Putin thinks in 10-year-plans. We can’t think past the next congressional roll-call vote.

The Obama administration’s primary legacy to the world is going to be a nuclear-armed Iran.

Because we keep a sharp eye on religious authorities of all stripes (okay, we spy on them), we got hold of an email (okay, it was leaked to us), from the EoZ to their man in Tehran, Sabourjian alias Ahmadinejad, of which we have decided to reveal this telling part:

You ********** ass! Why in the name of **** did you go and let the ******* cat out of the ******* bag prematurely? You were ordered to keep your Jewish identity secret until you’d ‘provoked’ the bombing of Iran by Israel. What a victory, what a crow we would have enjoyed! How completely we would have humiliated them! Now even the slow-witted mullahs will tumble to our scheme. Or maybe not. Try to stay in place, keep the hate-Jews-deny-Holocaust-annihilate-Israel talk going, and we may be lucky yet. But watch it. You’ve done your job well so far, the long slow climb to the top, the winning of the trust of the mullahs. We  were really proud of you. And now you go and blow the whole ********* thing with one stupid ******* gesture, holding up your ******* passport to the cameras of the world! What were you thinking? … Ah, well, carry on as long as you can, maybe raise the threat a few notches, bring forward the announcement that the nukes are ready …

While this episode immediately compels us to mark down the Cunning of the EoZ, which we had rated as A++, to B, and depending on developments maybe even lower, we wait to see if our mark for the mullahs’ Brains, currently D – , will need to be changed. If they let S aka A stay in place, down it goes. We’re watching.

Even al-Jazeera can be worth watching. It has published this map.

The range of Iran’s missiles

The Shahab-3 and Sejil missiles tested by Iran have a range of about 2,000km, according to Iranian military officials.

The long-range missiles would enable them to target Israel, US bases in Gulf countries – such as Bahrain and Qatar – as well as some parts of Europe.

Can this really be true?

According to DebkaFile:

The Pentagon has brought forward to December 2009 the target-date for producing the first 15-ton super bunker-buster bomb (GBU-57A/B) Massive Ordinance Penetrator, which can reach a depth of 60.09 meters underground before exploding. DEBKAfile’s military sources report that top defense agencies and air force units were also working against the clock to adapt the bay of a B2a Stealth bomber for carrying and delivering the bomb. The Pentagon has ordered the number of bombs rolling off the production line increased from four to ten – a rush job triggered in May by the discovery that Iran was hiding a second uranium enrichment plant under a mountain near Qom – a discovery which prompted this week’s international outcry. Congress has since quietly inserted the necessary funding in the 2009 budget.

All this urgency indicates that the Obama administration has been preparing military muscle to back up the international condemnation of Iran’s concealed nuclear bomb program, its sanctions threat and his willingness to join the negotiations with Iran opening on Oct. 1 in Geneva. Tehran may have to take into account a possible one-time surgical strike against its underground enrichment facility as a warning shot should its defiance continue. In particular, the world powers this week demanded that Iran open up all its nuclear facilities and programs to full and immediate international inspection. Failure to do so could bring forth further US military action.

According to our military sources, the earliest date for the accelerated Pentagon program to produce a super bunker buster bomb mounted on a stealth bomber is December 2009 or January 2010. This too is three years ahead of its original schedule. Pressed into service are two US Air Force research centers for work on adapting the radar-evading stealth bomber to the giant bomb: the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base and the Munitions Directorate and Air Armament Center, both headquartered at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

If it does turn out to be true, we will confess ourselves to be gobsmacked.

The Blog (of the Weekly Standard) brings us this piece of dumbfounding news:

In a little noticed interview with the Daily Beast (presumably little noticed because serious people don’t read the Daily Beast), Zbigniew Brzezinski suggests that Barack Obama do more than just refuse to support an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites — the American president must give the order to shoot down Israeli aircraft as they cross Iraqi airspace:

DB: How aggressive can Obama be in insisting to the Israelis that a military strike might be in America’s worst interest?

Brzezinski: We are not exactly impotent little babies. They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?

DB: What if they fly over anyway?

Brzezinski: Well, we have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren’t just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a Liberty in reverse.

The reference here is to the USS Liberty which was fired on by Israel during the Six Days’ War in June 1967. It was a friendly fire error. (See Michael Oren’s article on the incident here.) Brzezinski is implying that Israel attacked the ship deliberately, and that the US should avenge it. To him, Israel is America’s enemy and not Iran.

Contrary to Brezinski’s half-hearted disclaimer that no one wishes for such an outcome, there are plenty on the left who would delight in a pitched battle between the United States and Israel. Democrats in Congress routinely support resolutions affirming Israel’s right to take whatever steps it deems necessary to assure its own national defense. And Obama has at least paid lip service to the concept. But hostility to Israel among the rank and file is very real on the left — and among “realists.”

So conjure the image — the Obama administration sending U.S. aircraft up to protect Iran’s airspace and it’s nuclear installations from an attack by a democracy that is one of America’s closest allies. Unfortunately, this may not be so hard to imagine in Israel, where the number of people who believe Obama is pro-Israel is at just 4 percent — and falling. And given Obama’s (literally) submissive posture to the Saudis, his indulgence of the Iranians, and his simultaneously hard-line approach to Israel, it seems even some of Obama’s supporters can savor the possibility of a “reverse Liberty.”

Zbignew Brzezinski , who was National Security Adviser (1977-1981) to that 0ther anti-Semite Jimmy Carter, is now influential again as adviser to Obama.

Two articles in Investor’s Business Daily (find them here and here) describe the perils we are faced with from nuclear aggressors now that our defenses are being weakened.

First, this:

The Associated Press reports that ElBaradei’s self-styled nuclear “watchdog,” the IAEA, has concluded that Iran’s Islamofascist regime can now design and produce a nuclear bomb, according to an unpublished section of its analysis of Iran.

The IAEA also believes Tehran has “probably tested” a key component for an implosion-based nuclear warhead, and has been developing a missile chamber to carry such a warhead…

Why should all this be in a “secret” section of an IAEA report? U.S., British, French and German intelligence all report that Tehran has been at work on an atomic warhead. The only need for secrecy is to shield this defective, incompetent agency from embarrassment.

Earlier this month, diplomats gave ElBaradei a standing ovation at his going-away party…

It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that ElBaradei, who has held his “nuclear watchdog” position for well over a decade, is actually one of the most dangerous men in the world today.

He has gone out of his way to play down the genocidal threat that terror-sponsoring states in general, and Iran in particular, constitute. And he has emphatically insisted that the free world negotiate with the gang of fanatic mullahs and their henchmen who run that country. Remember: They’re the same ones who’ve vowed to wipe Israel off the map, and who also seek a world without the U.S.

Moreover, ElBaradei has almost certainly suppressed evidence discovered by his agency of Iran’s covert nuclear weapons development — in the name of peace, of course.

It’s like some twisted nightmare — an agency whose supposed purpose is to prevent the spread of the deadliest weapons instead hiding the fact that a terrorist regime is building them. And not only is its director not censured — he gets showered with awards and a grand send-off for presiding over such inexcusable acts.

The bad dream continued with the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland last week being marked by the U.S. scrapping plans for long-range missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic, two of our strongest allies in Europe. Instead, we’ll have sea-based sensors and interceptors that can stop only short-range missiles from Iran or Russia.

Unfortunately, it’s no nightmare. Our leaders being asleep to the growing threat of nuclear terror is very much a reality.

Or maybe they don’t want to defend America?

Next, this:

“Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism?” Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asked at a “World Without Zionism” conference in Tehran in 2005. “But you had best know that this slogan and this goal are attainable, and surely can be achieved.”

He added that Iran had a strategic “war preparation plan” for what it called “the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization.”

A simple Scud missile, with a nuclear warhead, could be fired from an inconspicuous freighter in international waters off our coast and detonated high above America.

This is where the Airborne Laser aircraft program, canceled by this administration, would come in handy.

Or it could be an upgraded Shahab launch, masked as a satellite attempt and flying over where the European defense sites would have been. It would wreak near total devastation on America’s technological, electrical and transportation infrastructure.

The threat is called electromagnetic pulse. Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., calls it the one way we could lose the war on terror. As he notes, a single nuclear warhead, detonated at the right altitude, would interact with the Earth’s atmosphere, producing an electromagnetic pulse radiating to the surface at the speed of light.

Nobody is harmed or killed immediately by the blast. But life in the U.S., the world’s only superpower and largest economy, comes to a screeching halt as a country dependent on 21st-century technology instantaneously regresses almost a century in time.

Millions could die as hospital systems shut down and as rail and air traffic controls collapse. Farmers would be unable to harvest crops, and distributors couldn’t get goods to market. Energy production would cease. Computers and PCs would become large paperweights. Telephones, even cell phones, wouldn’t work.

Retaliation would be futile and meaningless — if it were even possible — since communications with our deployed forces overseas, including ballistic missile submarines, might be cut off. A presidential authorization might be impossible to send, so fried might be our communications infrastructure.

To defend Europe — and American troops stationed there — against the possibility of a missile attack from Iran requires a European third site. We now maintain one ground-based missile site in Fort Greely, Alaska, and a second at Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California.

President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates cite intelligence indicating that Iran’s long-range missile development is going slower than previously thought. So ignore that Iranian Omid satellite. There’s time, they say, and for now our existing Aegis and other defenses should do fine.

But shouldn’t we have our long-range defenses ready before their offense is?

The fact is, we simply have too few Aegis-equipped and SM-3 armed vessels to provide defenses for Japan and Hawaii from the North Korean threat, both long- and short-range. Where are the Aegis ships to patrol the waters between Iran and Europe — or off our own coasts, for that matter? If the administration is planning a massive shipbuilding program, we missed the announcement…

President Reagan’s dream of a layered missile defense defending against, rather than merely avenging, a nuclear attack is being suffocated in the crib.

Now the only option may be for Israel to take out the nuclear facilities of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and save us from our folly.

Or we can wait for the day when nuclear-armed missiles are in the hands of a man who wants to wipe Israel off the map as he waits for the arrival of the 12th Imam and the apocalypse.