By Michael D. Evans
Published: June 29, 2007

The White House is perched on the fence that divides the State Department’s containment doctrine over Iran from administration hawks who advocate a preemptive strike to prevent Iran’s Islamist terrorist regime from developing nuclear weapons.

In one ear, President George W. Bush listens to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice telling him that a kinder, gentler Iran lies beneath the genocidal bluster of its President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In his other ear, Bush hears Vice President Dick Cheney whisper that, no matter what they say at the UN, the feckless nations of this world truly expect its one superpower to remove the Iranian nuclear threat.

The Pentagon is actually playing both sides in this debate. At the same time its officials provide Rice with supposedly good arguments why diplomacy is preferable to military action, its strategic planners are doing everything necessary to prepare for an eventual strike against Iran’s growing nuclear infrastructure. On the one hand, the Defense Department must provide support for Rice’s new diplomatic effort; on the other, it must be ready to prove to Iran that the military option not only exists, but is good to go.

The most senior Bush administration official who clearly wants to resolve the conflict with Iran by a massive bombing campaign is Vice President Cheney. Numerous sources have reported that a senior Cheney national security aide has been spreading the word recently to Washington think tanks that Cheney opposes Rice’s diplomatic efforts and feels the president is ignoring the military option at his peril.

For the moment, US and UN-led diplomacy seems to be winning the debate – but it is the same kind of delusional vision of conflict resolution that Neville Chamberlain displayed in 1938. In the year since Secretary Rice persuaded the US to join with Europe, Russia, and China to demand Iran halt its uranium enrichment campaign, the Islamist terrorist regime has installed more than 1,000 additional centrifuges to produce weapons-grade uranium. The International Atomic Energy Agency predicts that Iran could have some 8,000 centrifuges on-line by the end of the year.

The public Iranian nuclear debate is characterized by uncertainty as to how long it will actually take Iran to produce enough fissionable material to make one or more nuclear weapons. Estimates commonly range from several months to several years. But some things about Iran are not in doubt: one is that this Islamofascist regime already has ballistic missiles that can reach most of Europe; another is that this sponsor of international terrorism does not even need a missile to detonate suitcase-sized nuclear devices anywhere in the world.

Pursuing diplomacy and hoping for the best just does not work with fascist dictators; this is why those at the State Department who argue that a military strike would be disastrous are ignoring the lessons of the most truly disastrous war in history. It is time for the president to get off the fence and set a red line beyond which Iran would face a massive preemptive strike.

It is imperative to halt Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear capability, period. Those who feel the Iraq war has hampered the Bush administration's ability to deal with more than one crisis at a time are underestimating America – as do our so-called allies in Europe. The Europeans just didn’t get it twice before in the last century, and are no closer to reality at present.

As John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations said recently: "Regime change or the use of force is the only available option to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapons capability, if they want it."

The same thing could have been said about stopping Hitler in 1938 – before it was too late.

Mike Evans is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Final Move Beyond Iraq published by Frontline.