If they build it, they'll come after us.

That's the only scenario the world can count on, given the vision and the track record of the Iranian mullahs, as they approach their nuclear option.

"Iran has joined the nuclear countries of the world," proclaimed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday — hardly a good news day for peace on Earth, this Passover and Easter week.

We can ask Four Questions, as at Seder and the Last Supper:

Prayer?

Diplomacy?

Sanctions?

Bombing?

My Old Testament answer is, if the Pharaoh won't play, whack him out.

Diplomacy keeps trying, always fails, and sanctions never get it done. If sanctions didn't work in Iraq, when the European Union had strength, why have faith they will now that the EU is practically worthless?

So it comes down to this: If there is no military option, the Iranians have a clear way to the nuclear option.

And yet there are powerful voices in America who argue that a military option is outrageous, must be taken off the table. They say it can't work, the Iranians have their bombing places so far-flung that we can't knock them out.

Israeli intelligence sources tell me differently.

"We know, and of course the U.S. knows, where the nuclear capability lives in Iran. That is not a problem. America can take it out without our help. This is important to understand. Because even though Israel is the nearest target of Iran, it's a worldwide target they have in their cross hairs."

Why?

"Two reasons: America and the world can't allow the mullahs to control the Saudi oil supply. And they can't permit Iran to have the power to deliver nuclear bombs to other terrorist regimes, who can hit New York and Washington."

Will it require us to use nuclear weapons, as Seymour Hersh suggested this week in The New Yorker?

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"Baloney," said my Israeli sources in unison.

"Conventional weapons are more than enough, absolutely."

To bomb out the bomb, that is the question.


Sidney Zion is a columnist for the New York Daily News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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