‘The Cuban Missile Crisis in Slow Motion’ Tom Smith

A telling characterization of the Iran dilemma.

Zbigniew Brzezinski says attacking Iran would be a disastrous mistake, akin to Britain’s gross misjudgment in entering WWI.  I’m not so sure.  I’m not sure Russia and China would come to the defense of Iran, if the US showed it was determined enough.  But of course, whether we really have the will to stand down Iran is another question. 

It is a very difficult problem:  we can take our chances with a nuclear armed Iran, and hope its politics mellow, or we can preemptively attack them, and expect that decision to shape world politics possibly for decades.  I lean toward sending Iran some very clear message that we will indeed break up their underground devil’s kitchen, and then, if they don’t cave, caving in their bunkers for them.  It is probably impractical to do so with nuclear weapons.  It seems likely the fallout, physical and political, would be too radioactive.  But our Air Force can accomplish remarkable things without using nukes.  We hear a lot about the other services, but the U. S. Air Force, for sheer high tech, precise devastation, has to be the world leader. It may even make sense to play up the possibility of using nukes so not using them looks restrained.  Also, it need not be an all-out, one shot, super high intensity war.  Why not just drop a few dozen large, deep digging bombs on them every month for the next ten years?  In the meantime, we can get DARPA to come up with smarter and deeper digging bombs.  You would think it would be hard to build nuclear bombs under those conditions. 

Of course, these does mean the Iranians would bend their efforts all the more towards building or buying a nuclear bomb and shipping it to Manhattan in a crate or something similar.  So enforcing a “no-build zone” under the sands of Iran would have to be combined with pressure for regime change.  Unfortunately, it is hard to see how this can work in the long run, given our own soft politics.  This would be a kind of new Cold War, and I doubt we have the stomach the Greatest Generation did for that kind of long term commitment, God bless them.  It would be so much easier to work out by an accommodation of some sort, if the Iranian regime were not such a bunch of crazed, bloodthirty Nazis.  Somewhere I read that at some recent missile studded parade, those darn Iranians had chalked “Wipe Israel Off the Map” on the sides of their rocket tubes.  Hard to be much clearer than that.  ‘We want to be a big important country with nukes’ is one thing — that just makes you like India.  It’s difficult to get too worked up about a country that thinks it’s wrong to eat cows.  ‘We want to be a big important country with nukes and use them to kill all the Jews’ makes you a Hitler with crackpot Islamism instead of the Legend of Thule as your guiding star.  Talk about tiresome.  What is it about crackpot leaders, world domination, nightmare weapons, and the Jews?  If they could find some other outlet, it would be so much better for all of us.