Outlook

Conor Cruise O’Brien once defined an intellectual as “someone who can admit when someone else has scored a point in a debate.” If one can never admit or even consider what those on the other side of any particular political or ideological divide are saying one is nothing more than a political hack and no one should pay any attention to anything he says. 

In these pages and elsewhere I have been very critical of President Obama’s approach to the Palestinian-Israel conflict. In addition I have been critical of the amount of time President Obama kept his hand futilely extended to Iran as its nuclear program hummed along.

Yet it is now clear that President Obama was not quite the patsy with respect to Iran’s nuclear program that his public stance would have suggested. A front-page piece in the January 16 New York Times details at length the degree of cooperation between the United States and Israel in the production of the Stuxnet virus that has done such damage to Iran’s nuclear program. Though that cooperation began during the Bush administration it reached its crescendo under President Obama. The Stuxnet virus was at least as effective as an Israeli military strike would likely have been and without the collateral damage that such a strike would have entailed including terrorist retaliation around the world and political isolation for Israel.

The damage rendered by Stuxnet to Iran’s Natanz enrichment facility has not permanently derailed Iran’s nuclear program. Nor has the need to retain a military option against Iran’s nuclear program become moot. But at the very least it has provided a year or two more to ratchet up sanctions versus Iran in the hopes of bringing down Ahmadinejad and the mullahs before a military confrontation becomes inevitable.