ISRAEL CAN HIT THE MULLAHS

From Carlos Echevarria at the Astute Bloggers:

The Weekly Standard comments on a Time Magazine report regarding the complicated & successful aerial strike carried out by the IAF against a combination of Sudanese and Iranian Islamo-Fascist terrorists who were attempting to smuggle arms to Gaza:

Time magazine reports that Israel's January attack on an Iranian arms shipment through the Sudanese desert consisted of a strike package of "dozens of aircraft." The successful raid, which was a fusion of UAVs for recce work, F-15i fighters for air superiority, F-16's for ground attack, and tanker aircraft to extend fighter range, was thrown together with less than a week's planning. The Israeli Air Force, legendary for their boldness, even went so far as to fly their KC-130H tankers on a refueling track above the Red Sea, wedged between Egyptian and Saudi airspace -- no small feat, considering the Egyptians fly very similar variants of the Israeli F-16 and the Saudis fly AWACs guided F-15s.

Interestingly enough, the distance in nautical mileage between Israel and Khartoum is roughly the same as Israel and Tehran, demonstrating that the IAF has a combat-tested lethality at ranges of 2,000nm or more.Now that doesn't quite solve the question of a safe ingress/egress route into and out of Iranian airspace, nor does it address the issue of the sophisticated Iranian integrated air defense network. But it does prove that the Israelis have the legs (and the chutzpa) to transverse thousands of miles over hostile territory to break stuff that makes them nervous. This attack was for a weapons convoy porting small arms and short-range rockets. One can only speculate what type of strike package the IAF is dreaming up for a full blown nuclear weapons program.