Time short to stop Iran nukes

As Donald Trump said when he met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office on Monday, “doing a deal” with Iran on its nuclear ambitions would be “preferable to doing the obvious” – a reference to the US President’s repeated threats to “bomb the hell out of it”.

But in talks in Oman on Saturday, Mr Trump must ensure Washington is not suckered into another flawed deal, as Barack Obama was in 2015, which failed to impede Tehran’s ominous march towards nuclear weapons.

Despite Mr Trump dumping the deal in 2018, Iran remains a dire threat. It claims its nuclear work is for peaceful purposes only. But its supply of highly enriched fissile material, needed to build nuclear weapons, has grown substantially. It would take no more than a week or two to have enough weapons-grade material for a nuclear weapon.

That is the ominous, urgent challenge facing the Trump administration if it is to ensure, as the US President insists, that Iran will never be allowed to get nuclear weapons. The theocracy’s malevolent actions behind Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels’ efforts to destroy Israel and kill all Jews also must be stopped.

The extent of Tehran’s complicity in Hamas’s October 7, 2023 slaughter of 1200 Jews and grabbing 250 hostages in Israel, triggering the war in Gaza, was exposed by Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz on Monday.

Tehran has always denied any prior knowledge of the attack. Perish the thought that the ayatollahs could be behind such an atrocity. But documents found by Israeli soldiers in Hamas’s Gaza tunnels reportedly provide compelling evidence that before October 7 Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, now dead, wrote to the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps asking for $US500m ($826.3m) “to destroy the state of Israel”. The IRGC stumped up and the onslaught, the first stage of an Iran-sponsored terrorist war aimed at annihilating Israel, proceeded.

Despite acute embarrassments such as Israel assassinating Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July 2024 in a hotel heavily guarded by the IRGC, and the ease with which the Jewish state has neutered attempted attacks by Iran on targets in Israel, Iran poses a fundamental threat to what slim hopes there are for peace in the region. That threat would be compounded enormously were Iran allowed to reach the point where it could quickly build nuclear weapons.

Unlike Mr Obama, who was painfully weak-kneed towards Tehran, Mr Trump has threatened to “bomb the hell” out of Iran. “We are going to see if we can avoid it, but it’s getting to be very dangerous territory,” he warned. So much is at stake – he must be resolute.