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In an address Monday night for Israel’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asserted that in the two recent rounds of conflict against the Islamic Republic — last June and this February-March — Israel and the United States had “crushed the evil regime in Iran to dust.”

“The regime of the ayatollahs sought to develop nuclear bombs and manufacture tens of thousands of lethal ballistic missiles intended to annihilate us,” he specified at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum, and then claimed: “They thought they could do this unhindered, but no more. Our nation has learned the lesson.”

“Year after year I stood here,” Netanyahu continued. “I pledged at the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony: ‘We will not allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons’. And as prime minister of Israel, I promised: ‘There will not be a second Holocaust.'”

“This year,” he declared triumphantly, “we turned that promise into reality.”

In a much-mocked address to the United Nations General Assembly in 2012, derided for the crude bomb diagram Netanyahu unveiled to try to illustrate the dangers of the Iranian regime’s nuclear weapons program, the prime minister correctly warned that the “red line” for halting the ayatollahs’ march to the bomb “must be drawn first and foremost in one vital part of their program: on Iran’s efforts to enrich uranium.”

“For a country like Iran,” he explained, “it takes many, many years to enrich uranium for a bomb. That requires thousands of centrifuges spinning in tandem in very big industrial plants. Those Iranian plants are visible and they’re still vulnerable.

“In contrast,” he went on, “Iran could produce the nuclear detonator – the fuse – in a lot less time, maybe under a year, maybe only a few months. The detonator can be made in a small workshop the size of a classroom. It may be very difficult to find and target that workshop,” he warned. “The same is true for the small facility in which they could assemble a warhead or a nuclear device that could be placed in a container ship. Chances are you won’t find that facility either.”

And therefore, Netanyahu hammered home his point, “the only way that you can credibly prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, is to prevent Iran from amassing enough enriched uranium for a bomb… The relevant question is not when Iran will get the bomb. The relevant question is at what stage can we no longer stop Iran from getting the bomb.”

But Iran, terribly, was not stopped.

Among its many flaws, the thoroughly inadequate 2016 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), overseen by US president Barack Obama, did not require the Iranian regime to dismantle its enrichment facilities and halt all uranium enrichment. Indeed, it allowed the regime to continue research and development of still faster centrifuges.

And after US President Donald Trump, in his first term of office, withdrew from the deal in 2018, the regime booted the UN’s nuclear watchdog inspectors, hugely expanded and accelerated its enrichment facilities and processes — while striving to render them immune from attack — and gradually amassed some 450 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium, enough for 11 nuclear bombs.

By Netanyahu’s correct 2012 account,........

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