No one even pretends anymore that the Israel lobby isn't behind the effort to drag us into another Middle Eastern war. You don't have to be me, or Mearsheimer and Walt, to make this case: you have only to listen to the public pronouncements of Israel's leaders, who are openly demanding that either we strike, or else they will – perhaps, as has been suggested by Benny Morris, with nuclear weapons.
In the U.S., AIPAC, the scandal-rocked central command of Israel's amen corner, has come out of the shadows, where they remained during the run-up to the Iraq war, and taken the lead in calling for harsh sanctions and a military blockade of Iranian ports. Now we have this bipartisan ad hoc committee taking out full page newspaper ads and speaking in the implied names of both major party presidential candidates.
I had to laugh when I read, in the Journal op ed piece, that "Tehran's development of a nuclear bomb could serve as the ‘starter's gun' in a new and potentially deadly arms race in the most volatile region of the world. Many believe that Iran's neighbors would feel forced to pursue the bomb if it goes nuclear." Methinks the starter gun went off long off – sometime in the early 1960s, Israel having earlier procured the technology to make the Bomb from the French.