Israeli October Surprise?

According to Israel’s Channel 10 (as summarized by The Times of Israel), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is determined to attack Iran before the US elections.” There is ample support among neoconservatives in the United States to back such an attack with U.S. military power, but a reality check is in order.

Pat Buchanan, in response to an article by Weekly Standard contributor and Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow, Reuel Marc Gerecht, calling Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei The Most Dangerous Man in the World, asks, “But what exactly are we to fear? And what is the imperative for war now on Iran, for which this piece beats the drum?”

Buchanan compares the unproven threat from Iran to the long list of much worse adversaries the U.S. has previously faced.

“Khamenei has declared that nuclear weapons are immoral and Iran will never acquire them. Is Islamic Iran’s supreme religious leader lying through his teeth? Where is the proof? Where is the hard evidence?

Sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies stated unanimously in 2007 and reaffirmed in 2011 their conviction that Iran does not have an active nuclear weapons program. In the Standard piece, John Sawyer, head of the British Intelligence Service MI-6, ‘flatly stated in July that we have two years left before the Iranians can build a weapon.’

And if we should fear this most dangerous man in the world, why do not the Iraqis, Turks, Azerbaijanis and Pakistanis, his neighbors, seem to fear him? The Paks, with scores of nukes, seem less nervous about Iran than democratic India, with whom they have fought several wars.

Before now it has been Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who was the incarnation of Hitler. But Ahmadinejad’s eight years in office are up next summer, and he is reportedly going back to teaching.

For all his bellicosity, how many wars did Ahmadinejad fight?

When was the last time Iran started any war?

On Al-Quds Day, Wednesday, an annual event since the 1979 revolution, Khamenei reportedly said he was confidant ‘the fake Zionist (regime) will disappear from the landscape of geography.’

Yes, and Nikita Khrushchev said, ‘We will bury you,’ and, ‘Your grandchildren will live under communism.’ And we buried him, and his grandchildren saw the end to communism.”