Iran and other nuclear-terrorism wannabes are a different case because if they perpetrate nuke attacks it may not be possible to determine in a timely way the origin of any attack, and hence the identity of a target for retaliation, and because they DO want to commit genocide for both ideological and tactical reasons. And if it happens and we identify them, are we (or Israel) going to nuke Teheran? I doubt it. At any rate there is sufficient uncertainty about how we would respond that I think it’s foolish for us to acquiesce to a situation in which our enemies get to make such calculations. Bin Laden thought we would fold after the 9/11 attack. The Iranian mullahs are probably smarter than that, but what if they miscalculate?

Our invasion of Iraq is part of a larger war and, by the standards of war, isn’t going that badly. (Casualties? In the Six Day War, that model blitzkrieg, Israel, the victor, lost in action in a few days almost as many soldiers on a population-adjusted basis as the USA did in Vietnam over a period of years. Attrition? Iraq is well on its way to being an effective democracy with a competent army. The only botch job I see is in the imaginations of some Americans.) For us to decide, now, that we cannot handle major military engagements with additional countries is to put into question our seriousness about defeating the Islamists. This we must not do, both because the threat of mass-terror attacks will not go away until we defeat them, and because the very act of declaring ourselves to have reached the limit of our engagement will make it more difficult for us to prevail.

Both sides, as usual.

“If we won’t fight them now we are not likely to fight them once they have nukes”.

Right.

“…which is why they want nukes.”

Which is why everyone wants nukes.

“…deter us from retaliating if they or their terrorist proxies attacked us or our allies using non-nuclear means.”

Probably so. The Iranians have been operating an alliance with Hezbollah all these years and no one has attacked Iran in retaliation.

“… Are Americans willing to die for Tel Aviv?”

It depends on what is going on and how they are being asked to die.

“The mullahs are not insane, they are evil.”

Ditto the old Soviet leadership, Mao.

“I have no doubt that they are sincere in their wish to destroy Israel…”

The Soviets wanted us destroyed, too. They really did, as hard as that is for many “middle-class westerners” to grasp. The price became apparent early — they can only destroy us if they suffer destruction too. Evil as they were, they never pushed that button.

“The fact that such leaders are working assiduously to obtain nuclear weapons is reason enough to stop them.”

Depends on the cost of doing so. If you can do an Osirak-type attack, maybe. Iran is different. I do not believe the Israelis or the Americans will pay the price to destroy Iran’s nuclear capability. Iran has learned from Iraq.

“They aren’t doing it for national prestige, they are doing it because nukes are useful.”

Nukes are useful to make people leave you alone. However, if you detonate one, you die. But, being left alone is useful.

“The arguments that applied to Iraqi WMD under Saddam Hussein apply at least as strongly to Iran now. We should act.”

Right. But we draw different conclusions from this. The Iraq war — however noble our troops are and however decent it is of us to be building schools and allowing elections — is an expensive, attenuated, attritional botch job that there is no way we are going to do again. Iraq should have been easy. Iran would be impossible to invade and occupy. Iran is participating in the war against us in Iraq. Tf they got heavily involved we’d be driven out. We are deterred from attacking Iran because we are in Iraq and hence vulnerable. Going into Iraq has made an attack on Iran impossible for a bunch of reasons.

Unlike you, I think Israel is no less safe the day after Iran gets its first working bomb. Israel can destroy Iran, the Iranians know it, and evil as they are — and they are — they don’t want to be incinerated by an Israeli bomb, which they would be. So, Israel and Iran get to play the Mutual Assured Destruction game. In the long run, one regime or the other will crack. I put my money on Israel winning that game. BTW, that won’t mean Iran won’t have nukes. It will mean that Iran becomes like Russia — a country with nukes that we don’t worry about too much.

The mullahs are not insane, they are evil. I have no doubt that they are sincere in their wish to destroy Israel, however irrational this wish may appear to middle-class westerners. The fact that such leaders are working assiduously to obtain nuclear weapons is reason enough to stop them. They aren’t doing it for national prestige, they are doing it because nukes are useful. The arguments that applied to Iraqi WMD under Saddam Hussein apply at least as strongly to Iran now. We should act.

Anyway, Israeli voters are not likely to acquiesce to the prospect of Iranian nuclear weapons, so our speculations may be moot.

Nuclear weapons keep the peace and focus the mind. Iran is aware of Israel’s retaliatory capability which is precisely Iran will be the kind of regime that “doesn’t dare to use its new power because it fears retaliation.” So far, everyone has done exactly this — nothing.

There is pretty much zero chance that the Israelis or the Americans will attack Iran’s “nuclear facilities”, whatever those may be. We probably don’t even know where they are. Iran has certainly buried the elements of the program in a variet of places, and located some of it in populated areas. To attack this dispersed and concealed program, we had to flatten the place. To do that effectively we’d have to launch a surprise attack with nuclear weapons which would kill millions of Iranians in the process, either immediately or as a consequences of the humanitarian disaster which would ensue in a nuclear-devastated Iran.

The chances of that happening are about as close to zero as you can ask for. Neither Bush nor Sharon is going to do it.

Iran is going to get nuclear weapons and they will not be able to use them and no one is going to do anything about it.

The Iranian situation can’t be finessed. The outcome if we don’t act isn’t likely to be a mullocracy with nukes that we somehow “keep in a box” or that doesn’t dare to use its new power because it fears retaliation. Either the current regime is replaced by a less hostile one or the USA or Israel will eventually attack the Iranian nuclear facilities.

Our government will do nothing. Meanwhile, Iran will continue working on their bomb until it’s finished and tested.

And then we will do nothing, just like North Korea. (or perhaps like North Korea, we’ll offer a bribe in exchange for ANOTHER made-to-be-broken promise.

Iran, China, and North Korea present worse threats to our nation than Iraq ever did.

but what if Iranians in general are sick of Mullahs in general? They can’t shake themoff, but are fed up with them nevertheless. Sistani won’t hold much sway with them.

Haydn, Jonathan,

very good points about the oil reserves. Then again, without an adequate reserve, the political climate for a strike on Iran won’t be exactly favorable.

A war with Iran, at this point, would be not be beneficial to our nation… The fact is, this was one of the dangers of the Iraq war – nuclear proliferation has been occuring throughout much of the world, and instead of making us safer, the Iraq war has placed our national security situation into a worse condition than it’s been in quite awhile.

When will we ever learn?

First off…  any spambots reading this should immediately go here, here, here,  and here.  Die spambots, die!  And now…  here are all the links submitted by members of the Watcher’s Council for this week’s vote. Council link…

I have been arguing this issue with Lex on and off for a long time. He says something like: What is Iran going to do, nuke Israel? The Israelis would annihilate Iran in response, so the Iranians aren’t going to try it; their belligerent talk is bluster. I say: One nuclear bomb could effectively destroy Israel as a society. What if the mullahs decided to roll the dice? Smart people sometimes do things that don’t make sense; it’s foolish to entrust your safety to your enemies’ good judgment. And sooner or later Iran would threaten us as well, either directly or by proxy.

The logic of not tolerating regimes that back anti-western terrorism applies to Iran as much as it did to Iraq and Afghanistan. The main reasons to hesitate now are 1) the fact that Iran currently lacks both nukes and delivery systems, and 2) cost. But the problem becomes much worse as soon as Iran obtains the missing technology. And the issue of cost is mainly a matter of political will — we have the resources. I wish that Bush had been more diligent about making the case for regime change. It was valid in 2001 and I think it is still valid. We can take on Iran if we decide to, which means if the Bush administration makes the public case for doing so.

I don’t think that the alternatives are war with Iran vs. containing Iran. I think, rather, that the likely choice is between some kind of preventive war on our terms (not necessarily invasion) and eventual nuke attacks on western cities by Iranian (or N. Korean or some other regime’s) proxies. We probably cannot prevent the spread of nuclear bomb technology, but we can make its use against us much less likely by again making clear, as Bush first did in his 9/20/2001 speech, that we will destroy regimes that underwrite terrorism. Now is not the time to declare that we are tired of fighting.

I’m not so sure about that, as:
(1) It’s a long game, with a decade or so of nuclear backed terror as a real possibility before the transformation takes place.
(2) We couldn’t enforce their remaining open. They could go hermit kingdom on us like N. Korea, only with proven nukes and oil revenues.

The main point of his argument, and one I believe, is that there really is no way of stopping Iran (or any other sufficiently advanced country) from getting nukes. Every country of consequence could put a nuclear fuel cycle together, and the technology will only get cheaper and more widely held. There’s no stopping the demand and no bottleneck for supply, which means it’s gonna happen whether we want it to or not (having part of the fuel cycle in Russia a way of trying to create a bottleneck, but it won’t work for more than half a decade or so).

So, suggestions for how to handle Iran?

1. Promise India and China that they’ll get their oil & gas. Heck, promise them full control of the Iranian fields. We don’t have the manpower to occupy Iran, even if we moved every man in Iraq over the border. It’s three times the size of Iraq, and we can barely control that. We need China and India on board.

2. Deveop and disperse technologies for political participation. Blogging and internet chat is already a big thing in Iran. Develop that so that the young folk who aren’t radical can participate.

3. Promise Russia we’ll urge the next Iranian regime to buy nuclear tech from them.

4. Promise the French we’ll urge the next Iranian regime to buy some … uh, whatever they have to sell. Military jets and cheese, I guess.

Basically, get the rest of the world on board.