Deflected?

David Sanger @ New York Times is hawking a new book out Tuesday called "The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power” and repackaged some old news to debut his new duds.

"President Bush deflected a secret request by Israel last year for specialized bunker-busting bombs it wanted for an attack on Iran’s
main nuclear complex and told the Israelis that he had authorized new covert action intended to sabotage Iran’s suspected effort to develop nuclear weapons, according to senior American and foreign officials."

The NYT piece is a good read - making the case that using asymmetrical warfare against a rising regional hegemon like Persia's Mullahs is clever.

After all, how can Supreme Leader of Iran try to become the Supreme Leader of Mohammedists worldwide when wicked agents of Great Satan and Great Britain are running around his own turf, sweetly queering the mix with sabotage against the regime most sensitive and precious assets?

While deflecting Little Satan from procuring those magical bunker busting devices and with holding air transit ops over Iraq is significant - it also conjures up several opportunities.

Little Satan is rumored to have buddied up with Georgia - right before Russia's panzer blitz last summer. Such a move to put airstrips in Georgia would give the IAF (which has mommie jets capable of refueling long range missions) no reason to violate anyone's airspace.

Save Iran's.

As noted in "Strike Package", Little Satan doesn't really have to have Great Satan's goodies or permission to render a rowdy panty raid on sensitive portions of Iranian prestige, capital and brainpower to render enrichment interruptus a reality.

Prob the best look at Target Sets (regime killing talk for vaporizing precious assets) and what it would take to knock them out - all the way out - is the SSP Working Paper by done by aviation sci spy guys Whitney Raas and Austin Long.

This exhaustive (yet fun and light to read dossier - perfect for the beach - and available in pdf) details naughty details.

"To have a reasonable chance of success, both in the mission and in
the ultimate goal of rendering Iran’s nuclear program impotent, the target set must be narrowed to concentrate on the critical nodes in Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

The most difficult part of nuclear weapons development is obtaining the nuclear material itself; thus, if the means of fissile material production can be destroyed, the set back for Iran will be maximized.

The total number of weapons needed to have reasonable confidence
in destroying all three target sets is thus 24 5000-lb weapons and 24 2000-lb weapons."

84 tons! Such precision, intelligent weaponry - and Little Satan - even avoiding Iraqi airspace - has the means to put steel on target.

If HAMAS is going down - and it sure looks like it - then Iran's threat to turn the Gulf States into a collection of smoking rocket and missile craters, shutting down the Gulf if attacked and surging into Iraq may actually be self defeating.

Acting out militarily on a regional scale could not be sustained for long - besides Iran couldn't even take out Iraq in the horrible Iran Iraq war - even after laying seige to Basra for 6 years.

Strategic assets like Hiz'B'Allah wouldn't last long in a real war and striking at Iraq invites a counter strike from Great Satan that could end up killing off the entire regime in Tehran.

Since face saving is soooo important in a part of the world that never really caught on to the Western Way of War, events could conspire against Iran to accept 44's most likely offer of high level talks.