WHAT WAS LEFT OUT – AT 10:26 P.M. ET:  President Obama delivered his much-anticipated and overhyped speech on the Middle East today.  We will examine some of the contents tomorrow, but Investors Business Daily got it right when it noted what the president left out.

The president's policy speech lauded changes in the Mideast during the so-called Arab Spring. Curiously missing was anything about ominous nuclear developments in the Muslim world.

We're happy to see President Obama embrace President Bush's idea that the Mideast status quo is not satisfactory. Changes are due.

But during his lengthy address, billed as a comprehensive new policy toward the Muslim world, Obama barely mentioned the biggest threat of all: the growing nuclear threat of Pakistan and Iran, which may soon metastasize to other countries in the region.

Even as Obama spoke, the nuclear genie was leaving the bottle. Iran's state radio on Wednesday announced that its Bushehr nuclear plant, built illicitly with Russian help, is now "operational." This is a first for Iran — and a watershed in its bid to gain nuclear weapons.

Though its oil reserves are the third largest on Earth, Iran insists it needs Bushehr to generate energy. Maybe so. But color us skeptical. It won't be long before Iran ascends the nuclear learning curve and builds a weapon.

Equally alarming, Pakistan has built a massive new weapons-grade nuclear reactor — its fourth — at Khushab. The British Daily Mail calls it "the fastest-growing nuclear program in the world."

COMMENT:  Political change in the Mideast will come and go, but nuclear weapons, once developed, are forever.  And the Mideast, tragically, is drifting further toward extremism, despite the hope of the "Arab spring."  This is not Europe.  There is no democratic tradition. 

Pakistan isn't in the Mideast, but it shares the brotherly characteristics of nuttiness and instability, and has a large nuclear weapons program.

As Americans, we must become more aware of the dangers the "Islamic bomb" poses to us, directly.  It doesn't take an intercontinental missile to deliver the bomb.  A nuclear weapon, stored in the hold of a rickety 60-year-old freighter, and sailed into an American harbor with a suicide crew on board, can take care of the ugly business.

And yet, the president said little about it.  Maybe he thought it would "offend" the sensitive Muslims, apparently one of the worst crimes in the world.

May 19, 2011