Richard Fernandez writing for Pajamas Media latches onto a significant report about the thinking of President-elect Obama and his team of advisers concerning Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

President-elect Barack Obama will offer Israel a strategic pact designed to fend off any nuclear attack on the Jewish state by Iran, an Israeli newspaper reported on Thursday.

Haaretz, quoting an unnamed source, said the Obama administration would pledge under the proposed “nuclear umbrella” to respond to any Iranian strike on Israel with a “devastating U.S. nuclear response.”

Granting Israel a nuclear guarantee would essentially suggest the U.S. is willing to come to terms with a nuclear Iran, the paper reported.

According to the paper’s source, Obama’s nuclear guarantee would be backed by a new and improved Israeli anti-ballistic missile system. The Bush administration took the first step by deploying an early-warning radar system, which enhances the ability to detect Iranian ballistic missiles.

No immediate comment from Israeli officials or the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv was offered.

Iran denies its nuclear program has military designs. But tough anti-Israel rhetoric from Tehran has spread fears that the Israelis, who are believed to have the Middle East’s only atomic arsenal, could attack their arch-foe pre-emptively.

The source, according to Haaretz, noted that the discussion of the possibility of a nuclear Iran undermines efforts to prevent Tehran from acquiring such arms.

A senior Bush administration source reportedly said the nuclear umbrella was ridiculous and lacked credibility.

“Who will convince the citizen in Kansas that the U.S. needs to get mixed up in a nuclear war because Haifa was bombed? And what is the point of an American response, after Israel’s cities are destroyed in an Iranian nuclear strike?,” he said.

Richard then goes on to consider a possible U.S. response to an Iranian strike, and then concludes:

A combination of tacitly accepting an nuclear-armed Iran and reposing deterrence in Washington could make the Ayatollahs more willing to run the risk. What are the odds that the West can bring itself to enter into a nuclear exchange with Iran if it could not muster the will to prevent Teheran’s acquisition of those weapons in the first place?

Michael Ledeen also weighs in with his always educational and interesting prose.  I agree with both Richard and Michael, but would add a significant forecast to the discussion.  It won’t happen this way.

Iran will not entrust the deployment of a nuclear warhead to an air delivery system (since achieving enrichment doesn’t mean achieving miniturization of nuclear weapons to decrease overall mass) – nor will it be that overt.  Instead, acceptance of a nuclear Iran will mean the turnover of a nuclear weapon to Hezbollah or some allied group, and detonation somewhere around Tel Aviv (with its metropolitan population of more than three million people).

Since IAEA inspectors have been effectively booted from Iran for months, it won’t be possible early on to ascertain, even with gamma spectrographic analysis, the fission product and actinide composition and thus the initial mixture of high enriched Uranium.  Another way of saying it is that we have no “signature” for Iranian weapons.

By the time it has been determined through intelligence that the weapon came from Iran, the spin machine will have been active for weeks convincing the world community that the weapon fell into the hands of rogue elements, and that any attack on Iran would mean the deaths of innocent civilians.  World pressure will build for Israel to refuse to retaliate.  Even if Israel retaliates, the military forces and authorities will have relocated to unknown locations.

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis will be dead and much of the surrounding land will be uninhabitable for years.  The toll on the medical care system will be so enormous that it won’t be able to keep up, and the seat of power – the government – will effectively cease to exist.  At this time Hezbollah will attack from the North and Hamas and allied groups will attack from Gaza.

Given this scenario, i.e., the delivery of a weapon by means other than air delivery, the notion of a “nuclear umbrella” is ridiculous and irrelevant.  Team Obama is naive to the point of childish if this is their level of analysis of the situation.

Further, acquiescence to a nuclear Iran will mean a certain nuclear arms race in the Middle East.  Just recently Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak explained how most if not all Middle Easterners see Iran.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak spoke out against Iran during a meeting with members of the Egyptian ruling party, according to a report in the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida on Thursday, cited by Israel Radio.

Mubarak accused the Islamic Republic of trying to subsume its Muslim neighbors, telling the forum that “the Persians are trying to devour the Arab states.”

Mubarak’s comments came after the Egyptian leader recalled the country’s diplomatic envoy from the Iranian capital earlier this week following an increase in tension between the two countries.

Recent strain between Cairo and Teheran has grown as several demonstrations in Iran called for the hanging of the Egyptian leader. The Iranian FARS news service reported that participants in recent student demonstrations outside the Egyptian diplomatic mission in Teheran also chanted “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” and burned an Israeli flag.

On Wednesday the Egyptian ministry was quoted as criticizing some Iranian newspapers that have repeatedly insulted Egyptian policies and leadership recently. Teheran media, for example, broadcast incitement against Cairo’s policy allegedly preventing aid from reaching Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Democratic revolution and regime change remain the best options, but the State Department effectively killed the last such remaining program and no politician has shown any interest in the easy solution.  They are all seeking the hard ones.

For team-Obama, it’s three strikes and an out the first time at bat.