Ominous Events - The Plan for Iran is Coming Together.

Seems like forever that US administrations, Israeli administrations and other governments on the UN Security Council and not, have been talking sanctions and attacks on Iranian nuclear installations as ways to, in order of preference, encourage Iran to stop development of the nuclear weapons or to deliver a series of knockout punches to Iran's nuclear infrastructure, thereby stopping Iran's such development unilaterally.

Over more recent months the policy of ever-enhanced sanctions - i.e. slow strangulation of the Iranian middle-class - has been worked, and sometimes with surprising agreement from the permanent UN Security Council members including those traditionally more likely to support Iran , i.e. Russia & China. But as the effective life of sanctions draws nearer to its end and the attack option beckons, kind of like a late-night end-of-the-line twice-as-ugly any-port-in-a-storm option, China grows less omni-partisan. Maybe it's their growing global military influence, or their desire to use Iran as a proxy to keep USA off-balance, or maybe it's the US' economic & financial cojones firmly in its fist - whatever combination it may be, China feels empowered to flip the bird at the USA and UN on the question of Iranian sanctions. Fine - China has earned the right to rebuff the US once in a while - like when Obama had to kowtow upon his visit to China back in the fall. And now - in need of demonstrating to the home front that he's not the soft-headed pushover some have labelled him, and to give the Chinese a little pushback - Obama has approved sale of some $4.6B of weapons to Taiwan. Defensive weapons, that is. Taiwan wants more, and offensive too, but Obama has said "not yet". Pretty plain to see - Obama is effectvely saying to China "You don't see any particular need to control Iranian nuclear capability? Great - that means Taiwan can be better-armed too!" We'll see if i) Taiwan gets the submarines and fighter jets it asked for - or not and, ii) whether China comes around to support final sanctions on Iran - or not.

Separate, but in my mind clearly related to the Iranian intransigence:

- US military delivers Patriot defensive anti-missile systems to several countries either bordering on, adjacent to, or reachable by the missiles of Iran.

- US military runs test of ship-launched defensive anti-missile systems in the Pacific, ostensibly to show North Korea who's the boss, but obviously Iran is watching & listening too

- US is at or very near completion of its super-sized bunker-busting bomb, designed to detonate far below the surface of, for example, a hollowed-out mountain where Iran thinks (hopes) its nuclear installations are safe

- resident of rural south-eastern Newfoundland report several large flying objects (missiles) passing through their skies, visible for some minutes until they vanished across the horizon. That would be the test of large (bunker-buster-sized) cruise missiles (flying relatively slowly @ 400+ mph - that's why they were visible for so long) with large exhaust flames (very heavy cargo means big rocket motors) in a undersea-launch test near a rocky rural coastline (as if from the Persian Gulf).

Obama needs to demonstrate a number of things at home and abroad and, unhappily enough, an Iranian attack would achieve a number of his objectives. So long as he can defend Iran's neighbours and Israel from retaliatory strikes, he may be much more likely to go at it than ever before.

I wonder if anyne has given thought to striking only the entrances to Iran's nuclear installations with theater-sized neutron bombs - i.e., small nuclear explosions that don't kill many people but render the sites permanently 'hot' i.e. highly radioactive virtually forever, and therefore almost impossible to continue working. Not a nice option but maybe better than wholesale mass conventional destruction.

Blame it all on Scott Brown.