Is it? Bush issued this same ultimatum maybe 500 times and yet here we are, still wringing our hands over whether Russia and China will agree to one more turn of the economic ratchet. Ask yourself: If you’re Khamenei, knowing per the North Korean example that the west will go on negotiating with you forever even after you’ve got the bomb, why not plow ahead and build one? Then you can come back to the table, nuclear leverage in hand, and bargain for some sort of treaty in return for sanctions being lifted. The One and the media may believe that the time for talk is over, but the grand lesson of the Iranian nuke kabuki over the past seven years is that it’s never really over. Especially since bombing isn’t much of an option

. . . because Iran’s been caught cheating three times, maybe they’ll finally give up on the nuclear dream. Er, isn’t it more likely they’ll conclude that since there’s no real penalty for cheating, they might as well keep on chasing it? Stalling for seven years bought them enough time to see a president who might

attack replaced by one who certainly won’t; if the strategy ain’t broke, why fix it? Tapper’s logic makes sense if and only if you think that the Qom site is Iran’s only secret bomb-grade enrichment facility, which would mean that they now have no way of building a bomb on the sly (for the moment). But there’s no reason to believe that’s true: For one thing, as I’ve noted ad nauseam, U.S. intelligence suspects them of having up to 15 secret sites, and for another thing, the existence of the Qom site almost certainly implies the existence of at least one more as-yet-unrevealed facility to convert the uranium that Iran planned to enrich at Qom. Quoth the AP

Bear in mind, too, that the Iranians have always been keenly aware of Saddam’s mistake in centralizing his nuclear program in one location at Osirak, which made it easy pickings for Israel’s air force. That’s why they’ve put their nuclear eggs in a bunch of different baskets spread out across the country — and if they were smart enough to do that, they’re almost surely smart enough to have built redundant facilities in case an IAF airstrike succeeded in taking out Natanz or Qom or some other secret enrichment site. In the very dry words of the Washington Times, “Some nuclear experts noted that the discovery of a clandestine site suggests that Iran could have many more.” No foolin’.