That was quite a warning the district attorney of New York County, Robert Morgenthau, delivered earlier this week at the Brookings Institution in Washington. A version of it appears this week on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. It is not often that the district attorney, who normally does his talking in a court room or in a press conference related to a specific case, goes public in a matter of international politics and strategy. But the DA is warning of the growing entente between President Ahmadinejad’s Iran and President Chavez’s Venezuela. They have, he reports, “created a cozy financial, political and military partnership rooted in a shared anti-American animus.” And he advises that now is the time to develop policies “to ensure this partnership produces no poisonous fruit.”

We mean only to underscore the importance of what Mr. Morgethau has said — he has given the clearest warning of this problem by a public official yet — by noting that these columns have been warning of this danger for years now. In “Mr. Monroe, Call Your Office”, an editorial issued on January 8, 2007, we warned that the Iranian president had been operating deep in our hemisphere, finding “its most reliable allies in Cuba and Venezuela, both of which voted against the United Nations resolution to refer Iran and its nuclear weapons program to the Security Council. Iran’s relationship with Cuba has been described by the Cuban press as “brotherly,” and the Venezuela-Iran connection has included trade deals, numerous photo ops, and the exchange of national decorations between the two presidents.” It noted that the head of Iran’s Export Development Center, Mehdi Ghazanfari, yesterday was quoted by the official Islamic Republic News Agency announcing a conference in Tehran next month on “Trade and Investment Opportunities in Latin American Countries.”

Another piece in the Sun, “What Will Others Do?”, issued a few weeks later on January 24, was written by the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, David Harris, a shrewd observer of the international scene. He warned that five countries — Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua — had become the focus of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s machinations in the hemisphere. In another piece, issued on July 18, 2007, Jamie Daremblum of the Hudson Institute, alerted readers of the Sun to the fact that on visits to Russia, Belarus, and Iran, Mr. Chavez had made a remarkable demarche, inviting the state oil companies of Russia and Iran to take over the business of American corporations in Venezuela. And on September 15, 2008, in one of his last columns for the Sun, Benny Avni, our bureau man at the United Nations, reported on how the Monroe Doctrine was being violated by Iranian scheming in Venezuela and other countries in the hemisphere.

These concerns are shared not only by the hawks who flutter around these columns. Mr. Morgenthau, in his remarks at Brookings, cited a report last year by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which noted that Venezuela has some 50,000 tons of un-mined uranium. “There is speculation in the Carnegie report that Venezuela could be mining uranium for Iran,” according to Mr. Morgenthau’s piece in the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Morgenthau reported that his own office “has been told that that over the past three years a number of Iranian-owned and controlled factories have sprung up in remote and undeveloped parts of Venezuela—ideal locations for the illicit production of weapons.” And he ventured the opinion that we should be concerned. All this adds up to an important matter for Mr. Obama, who famously chatted with Mr. Chavez and has been seeking to develop a more engaged approach with the Venezuelan strong man. We haven’t talked to the DA about it, but it strikes us as being worth the president’s while to bring in Mr. Morgenthau for lunch at the White House before he makes his next move.