Not for the first time, John Bolton has spoken the plain truth about the parlous danger to the free world and its ever more supine failure to confront it. He has told the Jerusalem Post that time is running out over Iran and yet the US administration remains in deep denial, so much so that it is actively helping the enemy:

Sanctions and diplomacy have failed and it may be too late for internal opposition to oust the Islamist regime, leaving only military intervention to stop Iran’s drive to nuclear weapons, the US’s former ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday. Worse still, according to Ambassador Bolton, the Bush administration does not recognize the urgency of the hour and that the options are now limited to only the possibility of regime change from within or a last-resort military intervention, and it is still clinging to the dangerous and misguided belief that sanctions can be effective. As a consequence, Bolton said he was “very worried” about the well-being of Israel. If he were in Israel’s predicament, he said, ‘I’d be pushing the US very hard. I am pushing the US [administration] very hard, from the outside, in Washington…

‘The current approach of the Europeans and the Americans is not just doomed to failure, but dangerous,’ he said. ‘Dealing with [the Iranians] just gives them what they want, which is more time… We have fiddled away four years, in which Europe tried to persuade Iran to give up voluntarily,’ he complained. ‘Iran in those four years mastered uranium conversion from solid to gas and now enrichment to weapons grade… We lost four years to feckless European diplomacy and our options are very limited.’

Indeed. The realist lunatics have taken over the Washington asylum, siren voices are pushing for further appeasement of and ‘engagement’ with Iran and other Islamists, and President Bush appears to be paralysed. History will judge him not so much for the mistakes made in Iraq but for the much more fundamental failing—that he would not exercise the leadership required to back those in his administration who had courage and vision against those who preached defeatism and surrender. It’s always about character in the end — and in the end the consequences will now be so much more appalling.

Update: The Jerusalem Post reports Israeli officials taking issue with Bolton’s analysis as ‘too categorical’:

‘We believe that the integration of concrete financial measures and UN sanctions can bring the Iranians to a tactical decision not to move forward with their nuclear program,’ one government official involved in the issue said. ‘This, of course, will require continued determination and an uncompromising approach on part of the international community,’ he said. ‘Bolton’s comments reflect his belief that the international community is incapable of this. We are cautiously optimistic.’