Pundits on matters of intelligence and security keep writing about Iran's nuclear capabilities and the inevitability of an attack by either Israel or the United States to destroy that capability. The simple truth is that it's too late and will not occur.

In the late 1940s, Stalin developed nuclear capabilities for the Soviet Union, which started a Cold War that roiled for forty years. Proxy wars were fought in Korea, Vietnam and even in the Middle East. The situation will be no different with Iran, only more deadly for Israel, finding itself dead center.

Few people remember the US presidential campaign race in 1964 between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater. China started nuclear testing. Goldwater suggested the US bomb Chinese nuclear weapons factories in a preemptive strike and Johnson, who later became the Vietnam war president, ran a campaign that asked Americans if they wanted Goldwater as president, a man who would lead the US into nuclear war with China. Johnson won by a landslide. Vietnam followed, a proxy war with China and the Soviets that lasted ten years and cost over 50,000 American lives in a weekly trickle, with the communists winning by attrition. An analogy of this for the US and Israel, with Iran developing nuclear weapons, exists today.

After 9/11, the US needed to send troops into the Middle East. Al-Qaeda was just one part of the problem; a network of state-sponsored terrorism had grown almost exponentially in the Middle East since the 1979 hostage-taking at the US embassy in Tehran and when 241 Marines were murdered in Beirut in 1983, with both defeats accepted by the US. That sent a message to terrorist states that the US could be fought not by direct warfare, but with terrorist tactics. America became the ideal adversary: on one hand, the intellectuals in the US would never advocate full US military capability against those Middle East states due to moral concerns and political correctness; and at the same time, the US could be relied on to send money to the very states that quietly kept the war roiling through terrorist proxies against itself. The US at this point is still trying to play both sides of the coin, with disastrous results.

When US forces invaded Iraq, WMDs or not, the United States began to strike a blow at the state-sponsored terrorism network in the Muslim and Arab world. Saddam Hussein was clearly funding suicide bombers at 25-, then 30-thousand dollars a whack. But once the US invasion occurred, America once again blinked.

With the Iraq invasion going so well, so quickly, the real plan should have been to team up with democratic Israel's military, just as the US did with Britain's in the World Wars, and keep striking into Syria, throwing the Alawites from power, then going after the 12,000 Hizbullah missiles in southern Lebanon, which currently give Iran parity with Israel's nuclear capability. Today, Syria is providing the route for many of the Iraqi terrorists killing American and new Iraqi security forces in Iraq, and is home to Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Such a US-Israeli cooperative military invasion should have been carried out with the specific goal of destroying totally the infrastructure of Syria and south Lebanon, if necessary. The goal should have been to hamper any ability to wage war against the US or Israel in the region for decades to come. Once the Syrians and Hizbullah were neutralized, allied forces could have turned toward Iran with a deadline to admit weapons inspectors in - and stuck to it.

If the deadline was not met, allied forces should have attacked Iran's infrastructure as well, until the present government fell. Given the earlier lightening success in Iraq, the Iranian leadership would more likely have capitulated on nuclear disarmament for fear of completely losing power. The nuclear threat removed, the US and Israel both could then have just gotten the hell out. Those former terrorist-sponsoring states, their infrastructure ruined for the next thirty years, would then need US foreign aid, just as Germany needed it after their infrastructure was destroyed at the end of a much bigger war. But US foreign aid would then come only with a caveat of proof that no more state-sponsored terrorism was being conducted - the carrot and the stick.

Instead, we will now face those thirty years in a Cold War with Iran until the old guard dies off.

The US and Israel are both engaging in an intellectual's war, just as the Vietnam War was conducted, where massive retaliation to totally destroy an enemy's infrastructure will not be considered an option. Saudi Arabia is still financing Hamas without criticism from the US. Even now, the US is sending ten million dollars to the Hamas regime, while at the same time, the US is supposed to be fighting the same state-sponsored terrorism network that includes Hamas. With US troops bogged down in Iraq and US capabilities spread thin - and a continued US policy of treating Israel at arm's length while courting the biggest state terrorism financiers of all, the Saudis - the war can never be fully won.

The Iranians, faced with mutual annihilation from Israel and the US, will never seek to go to full war against Israel, but will rely on terrorist proxies to keep whittling at the Jewish State, in the hope it will eventually collapse from within, and to distract from economic and social exploitation of their own people at home. Full war would mean an Israeli nuclear retaliation that even the most virulent mullah won't want for himself despite all talk of martyrdom. CIA estimates are if Israel does go to full war with the Muslim states, it will win, but in a Pyrrhic victory costing 200,000 Israeli lives. That is why when 40 Kassam rockets are fired in one day from Gaza, the Israeli response is limited - smaller daily casualties are the lesser of two evils.

Israelis should prepare themselves for endless terrorist attacks on a greater scale than anything they can imagine, as Israel will become the centerpiece in a new Cold War between a nuclear-armed Iran and the West. And the West, to avoid all-out war at any cost, will ask Israel to absorb daily losses by serving as a buffer. Sadly, Israel will comply.