Describing the barbarity of a Civil War prison, Benson Lossing wrote in 1868, "Seventeen feet from the inner stockade was the 'dead-line,' over which no man could pass and live." Lossing could well be describing the inevitable bloody endgame of the Israeli-Iran conflict during the final twenty-four months of the Obama administration. Both sides are acutely aware of this "dead-line," with Iran more so than Israel. Iran's "dead-line" awareness reaches back 31 years to the release of 52 American hostages held for 444 days, just twenty minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president (and after Jimmy Carter previously...