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In the abstract, assuming competency in our government, solid international institutions and political consensus, adequate planning for the aftermath, etc., is some kind of military strike on Iran preferable to letting them get nuclear weapons? Maybe; it depends. The Iranian government is generally scary and their current president is a loose cannon.
Given the current administration's known decision processes, skill at judging evidence, and demonstrated level of competence at planning, combined with the weakened state of the US military as a result of their previous adventures, is having them lead a war with Iran now preferable to letting Iran get nuclear weapons? No, it isn't. I doubt that we'd be doing anything other than marginally stalling the horizontal proliferation of nukes at an immense cost. If invading Iraq hasn't already destroyed our ability to project both military and political power to good ends, a war with Iran on top of that probably would. The idea that bombing Iran would lead to friendly regime change can at this point be safely discounted as Bizarro World logic.
Is actually using nuclear weapons on Iran preferable to telling Iran get nuclear weapons? No. The main point of not letting Iran get nuclear weapons is the danger that they just might use them on somebody.
"Better us than them" sounds superficially like a good argument: they might detonate a nuke in a city or give one to al Qaeda or something, whereas we'd surely limit them wisely to busting the impenetrable bunkers that are supposedly out there, do our best to limit civilian casualties, etc., etc. You can probably fill in the rest because you're probably heard it all before.
Even given that (and I have doubts about it too), war is the continuation of politics by other means. The United States has used a nuclear weapon in anger twice, at the very end of the biggest and most horrible war in history when nobody else had any, and people are still arguing about the wisdom and morality of that 60 years later. Now, there are many other countries with nuclear weapons, some of which are actively involved in various conflicts, and the main thing keeping any of these conflicts from going nuclear is the feeling that there are things that are Not Done and might invite retaliation. For the biggest power in the world to just go and use them with the assumption that nobody is ever going to take this as a precedent, or a spur for retaliation... this is a very very bad idea.
Argue all you want that nuclear bunker-busters are not physically that different from really, really big chemical bombs; the administration that's allegedly mulling this over is the same one that counts degraded mustard-gas shells and vials that might once have contained anthrax as Weapons of Mass Destruction, lumped together with ticking nukes in Times Square. I don't think it's much of a stretch to see that actually nuking somebody would be a bit alarming to the world.
If Sy Hersh's article can be believed (this is all from anonymous sources, but he's had a disturbing tendency to be right in recent years), the Joint Chiefs of Staff agree with me on this but Rumsfeld's people don't. At this point, who do you believe, the Joint Chiefs or Rumsfeld?
The US had never officially had a no-first-use policy for nuclear weapons, but I think it should, de facto if not de jure. The arguments are as good as they were during the Cold War if not quite as immediately urgent.
Given the current administration's known decision processes, skill at judging evidence, and demonstrated level of competence at planning, combined with the weakened state of the US military as a result of their previous adventures, is having them lead a war with Iran now preferable to letting Iran get nuclear weapons? No, it isn't. I doubt that we'd be doing anything other than marginally stalling the horizontal proliferation of nukes at an immense cost. If invading Iraq hasn't already destroyed our ability to project both military and political power to good ends, a war with Iran on top of that probably would. The idea that bombing Iran would lead to friendly regime change can at this point be safely discounted as Bizarro World logic.
Is actually using nuclear weapons on Iran preferable to telling Iran get nuclear weapons? No. The main point of not letting Iran get nuclear weapons is the danger that they just might use them on somebody.
"Better us than them" sounds superficially like a good argument: they might detonate a nuke in a city or give one to al Qaeda or something, whereas we'd surely limit them wisely to busting the impenetrable bunkers that are supposedly out there, do our best to limit civilian casualties, etc., etc. You can probably fill in the rest because you're probably heard it all before.
Even given that (and I have doubts about it too), war is the continuation of politics by other means. The United States has used a nuclear weapon in anger twice, at the very end of the biggest and most horrible war in history when nobody else had any, and people are still arguing about the wisdom and morality of that 60 years later. Now, there are many other countries with nuclear weapons, some of which are actively involved in various conflicts, and the main thing keeping any of these conflicts from going nuclear is the feeling that there are things that are Not Done and might invite retaliation. For the biggest power in the world to just go and use them with the assumption that nobody is ever going to take this as a precedent, or a spur for retaliation... this is a very very bad idea.
Argue all you want that nuclear bunker-busters are not physically that different from really, really big chemical bombs; the administration that's allegedly mulling this over is the same one that counts degraded mustard-gas shells and vials that might once have contained anthrax as Weapons of Mass Destruction, lumped together with ticking nukes in Times Square. I don't think it's much of a stretch to see that actually nuking somebody would be a bit alarming to the world.
If Sy Hersh's article can be believed (this is all from anonymous sources, but he's had a disturbing tendency to be right in recent years), the Joint Chiefs of Staff agree with me on this but Rumsfeld's people don't. At this point, who do you believe, the Joint Chiefs or Rumsfeld?
The US had never officially had a no-first-use policy for nuclear weapons, but I think it should, de facto if not de jure. The arguments are as good as they were during the Cold War if not quite as immediately urgent.