“What Would Begin Do?” Seth Lipsky asks, in a column on “seeing the Iranian nuclear threat through the lens of Osirak.” It begins:

The latest disclosure in respect of Iran’s work on an atomic bomb — the International Atomic Energy Agency says the mullahs have the technical data needed to make a weapon — has me thinking about what happened in 1981, when Israel sent a flight of American-built warplanes to destroy a reactor that Iraq was building as part of a suspected program to manufacture a weapon. The thing that stands out from that episode is that it came out of the blue, not just literally but also politically. [Read more.]