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Iranian Army is not the Israeli Army, but its stubborn effectiveness is in
no doubt. Rockets from Hezbollah and Hamas, and newly tested Iranian
long-range missiles, would hit Israel.

Chaos would threaten Persian Gulf states, oil markets and the grinding U.S.
campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. war front, in the first decade
of the 21st century, at a time of national economic disaster, would stretch
thousands of miles across the Muslim world, from western Iraq to eastern
Afghanistan.

It is doubtful that a bombing campaign would end Iran's nuclear ambitions,
so all the above might be the price paid for putting off an Iranian bomb -
or mastery of the production of fissile material - by a year or so. 

In short, the U.S. military option is not an option. It is unthinkable.

This is the poisoned chalice handed Obama by Bush, who responded to Iranian
help in Afghanistan in 2001 by consigning Iran to the axis of evil, rebuffed
credible approaches by the former moderate president, Mohammad Khatami, and
undermined European diplomacy.

No, the real "Red Line" will be set by Israel.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's leading candidate to become prime minister
after elections next week, has said "everything that is necessary" will be
done to stop Iran going nuclear. I believe him.

Never again is never again. There's no changing that Israeli lens, however
distorting it may be in a changed world. That could mean an Israeli attack
on Iran within a year. If the U.S. military option is unthinkable, equally
unthinkable is the United States abandoning Israel.

That is Obama's dilemma. Netanyahu is right about one thing. The Iranian
nuclear program, which Iran implausibly says is for civilian purposes, is
"the greatest challenge" now facing 21st-century leaders. If Obama fails,
his "new era of peace" will become the bitterest phrase of his inaugural.

I asked Mohsen Rezai, the former commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards
and secretary of one of its highest state organs, the Expediency Discernment
Council, how he sees the U.S. threat. "America will not do anything military
within the next 10 years," he said. "What the U.S. needs to do now is
regroup, repair, reconstruct."

And an Israeli attack? "Maybe, but it would be one of its stupidest
decisions."

There is little time to lose. Vice President Joseph Biden and senior Iranian
officials, including Ali Larijani, the speaker of Parliament, will mingle at
the Munich Security Conference this weekend. They should talk.

But only Obama can overcome the gridlock. He must break with the Bush years
in more than words. That requires a solemn declaration that the United
States recognizes and no longer seeks to destabilize the Islamic Republic -
an implicit renunciation of force.

A threat, in Iranian eyes, can only come from a domineering power, the very
U.S. attitude this country cannot abide. 

I think the tightened sanctions being contemplated by Obama are a bad idea.

The sanctions don't work; they enrich the regime cronies who circumvent
them. Plunging oil prices are a cheaper weapon. They will concentrate
Iranian minds as the economy nose-dives.

Decisiveness is foreign to the many-faceted Iranian system. Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, the supreme leader and ultimate arbiter, will not easily be swayed
from a course that would shred the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, of which
Iran is a signatory, among other disasters. But reason can still prevail.

It was Rezai, back in the late 1980s, who wrote Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,
telling him the course he had vowed never to alter - prosecuting the war
against Iraq until victory - had to be abandoned or disaster would follow.
Khomeini changed his mind. Peace came.

Khamenei's ultimate duty is to preserve the revolution by being true to
Khomeini's example. Obama might, obliquely, remind him of that.