Iran: To bomb or not to bomb - That is the... Umm, Never Mind

OK, this is twice in one week.  I wrote this today and was just planning on finishing editing it and sending it in, when I read that President Trump has just bombed three sites in Iran!  I've been locked out by X and haven't actually been paying attention to the news because I'm trying to survive 95 degree temps with no AC.  Now this!  As Gilda Radner's Emily Litella used to say... Never mind...

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There’s a lot going on with Iran right now.  For about a week Israel has been busy bombing their nuclear and military facilities, exterminating their leaders and trying to engage President Trump in the enterprise.

Thus far the president has declined to do so although he has sent American military assets to the region.

Israel claims to have eliminated most of the Iranian nuclear capabilities – unless you believe the mullahs who claim that they’ve moved their nuclear materials to someplace safe – except for the Fordow complex, which is buried in a mountain just north of the city of Qom. As intended, it appears to be sufficiently deep in the mountain so as to make it immune to any weapons Israel has.  The only weapon capable of destroying it is the American GBU-57, a bunker busing bomb so large that it can only be delivered by the B2 Bomber, something else Israel doesn’t have. 

And MAGA is split on what to do.  On the one side are calls for the President to bomb the Iranians, and even to put American boots on the ground, while on the other there are people saying this is not America’s war and the President should keep us out of it.

The interventionists suggest that taking out the mullahs will be the catalyst that finally transforms the Middle East into something other than a vortex of terror.  The relative isolationists suggest that getting involved in any way will lead to boots on the ground and another American quagmire, a-la Iraq.

Of course the not so funny thing about this is that we’ve been hearing for almost 30 years that Iran was on the verge of a nuclear weapon. Netanyahu first told us that way back in 1990s and has continued to do so for the last three decades, and on a few occasions over that time Israel has attacked Iran’s facilities, each time dealing them a setback.

Many people point out that what we’re hearing right now echoes much of what we heard before the Iraq War, and that’s true.  Hussein told us – much as the mullahs have – that he had WMDs and was prepared to use them against the United States. He’d actually used some (chemical weapons) two decades before during the Iran Iraq war – as did the Iranians – so it wasn’t or isn’t inconceivable.  And he sponsored terrorism, just as the mullahs do. So, still reeling from 9/11, America understood all too well what damage could be done by terrorists, invaded Iraq in early 2003, and would be there for eight long years.  It turned out that, apparently, he didn’t have the weapons.  But they dye was cast. 

So now it’s been two decades since 9/11, with much of that time with the US involved in two caustic wars and a better understanding of the terrorist threat that the west faces.  Are we therefore better able to make an objective assessment? 

Good question. 

Of course part of the reason we’re in this circumstance is because Barack Obama gave the Iranian regime a $1.7 billion in cash and access to more after having turned his back on the Iranian people when they tried to overthrow the mullahs in 2009.    

They say that a stopped watch is right twice a day.  What if this time Netanyahu et al are correct? What if the mullahs really are on the verge of successfully building a nuclear weapon?  Is that somehow acceptable because Iran is 7,000 miles away?  If we were 100% certain that Iran had nuclear weapons would we take them out?  If the answer is yes, we have to figure out where we draw the line… How about 98%?  95%? 80%?  But of course absent having a squad of Navy Seals go in and do a Zoom meeting with scientists back at Las Alamos, we probably can’t know for 100% certain. 

Then others would ask, why are Israel, Pakistan, India, North Korea, China and others allowed to have nuclear weapons and Iran isn’t. 

Well, the answer for most of them is that there is little to suggest they are a threat to their neighbors or the world.  For the rest, we have to recognize that we don’t have a great deal of choice.  As an example, although North Korea has been belligerent, the fact is they are a de facto client state of China, and as such there are avenues of diminishing the threat of war or terrorism from North Korea that are not available with Iran.  And Pakistan’s government, while closely aligned with terrorists, does not seem inclined to put nuclear weapons in their hands.

Iran is a different animal.  They have been actively funding terrorism around the world going back to the late 20^th century. That terrorism has not only hit Israel, but stretched around the world including Europe, the United States, Argentina and more.  At the same time, they have vowed to wipe Israel off the map and bring death to the Great Satan, AKA, America. 

If this was an encounter on the street where someone standing next to you threatened to kill you after having just killed other people on that same street, are you required to wait until he actually puts the gun  to your head before you try to disarm him?  If you didn’t seize the opportunity to disarm him while you had the chance, what’s the likelihood that he would simply walk away and leave you in peace?  And if he did, and he retained his weapon, how long would that peace last?

Of course, if the United States did obliterate the Iranian nuclear program and kill the mullahs, what would Iran look like?  Would it transition relatively peacefully as Egypt did or would it be Iraq or Libya 2.0 with all of the attendant chaos and death?

We don’t know.  So, what do we do?  This question is made particularly challenging because Trump has just disagreed with his DNI and the intelligence that Iran is not, in fact, close to producing a nuclear weapon. 

Do we wait for 100% certainty then make a move or do we simply accept the reality that Iran will eventually get nuclear weapons?

There are those who say that this is not our fight because it’s really Israel that’s the problem. Are we supposed to believe that if Iran were to launch a nuclear missile into Israel and somehow obliterate it that somehow the world would be safer?  If history tells us anything, it’s that tyrants often use external enemies to distract citizens from domestic problems. It’s much easier to unify a nation when there’s a foreign threat against which to rally the populace. As such, once Israel was gone, exactly where would the mullahs turn?  On their fellow Islamic nations with whom they might have to fight an actual ground war which would be both expensive and difficult to win, or the west, where they could fight a fiery rhetorical war and follow it up with relatively inexpensive terrorist attacks, nuclear or otherwise? Some will say this is the “Do you want to fight them over there or wait until they’re here?” trope.  Maybe it is.  But like a broken clock, sometimes messages are right even when they’ve been overused. 

At the end of the day I agree with Victor Davis Hanson when he says that if the mullahs remain in power with their nuclear operations intact, it would be a disaster.  They will not only eventually succeed in getting a nuclear weapon, but they’ll use it.  Whether it’s New York or Tel Aviv, we know there are people with a sufficiently fatalistic mindset that they would willingly sacrifice everything if they can’t have what they want.  Think of a spouse unhappy with their divorce who kills his ex and then himself. Or Jonestown.  Now imagine the mullahs are that spouse or Jim Jones and they have nuclear weapons and their anger at Israel and the Great Satan, the United States?

I’d rather not…