Let's Eliminate the Iranian threat

The big news for today was that the latest National Intelligence Estimate concludes that the Iranians decided to stop working on nuclear weapons in 2003.

Bush's National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley believes that the Iranians stopped because American sanctions and other pressure worked. That seems unlikely. If American sanctions worked so well, the Iranians would have stopped working on enriching uranium.

But they clearly haven't even though the Iranians won't have enough enriched uranium for a bomb until at least 2010-2015.

It's more likely that the Iranians gave up the idea of nukes after American overthrow of Iranian enemies like the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Why go to all that bother after the Americans had eliminated their two biggest enemies?

Which leads me to the following conclusion.

If Bush wanted to eliminate the Iranian "threat" altogether, he could invade Israel and overthrow the Olmert government. Even better, that might bring out the apocalypse that the right is looking for.

But would the Israelis welcome us as "liberators?"

Of course, the Iranians might have stopped working on nuclear weapons because they could see how badly the occupation of Iraq was going.