this is sarcasm, ok?
i don't think we should or could bomb iran without devastating repercussions, but i have some concerns about what we know we know about iran's nuclear programs, what we know we don't know, and even scarier, what we don't know we don't know -- the "unknown unknowns".
the NIE report came out recently and states that our intelligence services are not aware of any current operations that iran has undertaken to build nuclear weapons. bush says that's a good reason to keep holding our stupid and uninformed hostile position towards iran. hillary clinton says that's exactly why we need to be saber-rattling (calling their state military terrorists) and negotiating -- a stick-and-carrot approach. i don't trust bush or hillary, so here's my thinking on the subject.
one "solution" to our iran problem is to bomb them first, before they obtain nukes and bomb us. but who in america thinks that iran has ICBM's capable of reaching our shores? or bombers and fighter jets who could bring their nukes here? since iran has no capability of hitting us with a nuke, we really should turn down the rhetoric of fear and start being more reasonable in our negotiations.
if i were president, i'd threaten iran with a nuclear strike. sure, it's an aggressive stance, perhaps even more aggressive than bush and cheney and rice have been. so what -- a nuclear deterrence plan doesn't work unless your enemies are quite sure that you will not hesitate to hit them with your nukes. since i studied nuclear proliferation in college a little over 15 years ago, a lot has changed on the world stage. heck, bush even sought to ignore or overturn all the nuclear peace settlements previous presidents had sought to create and preserve with the soviets/russians. but since we haven't yet seen bush use a nuke (i'm not asking him to), we still need to do something to let the world know that our nukes were built to be used. that's the only way to deter sane people from striking us first. hey hillary, that's my stick.
then, we have to protect ourselves from the insane haters -- the muslim jihadists who WANT to bring an end to all life as we know it, since it's their personal religious mission to destroy anyone or anything that doesn't follow their zealous beliefs. since religious zealots are dangerous to all modern democracies, our foreign policy should be redesigned to support democracy worldwide, regardless over whether or not those democracies like us. as long as they're run as rational governments -- and surely the world must realize that bush is not rational -- we should have less to fear. heck, i support hezbolah in the gaza strip because dangit, they won their election. had we stopped supporting despots like sadam hussein and the shah years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now. so democracy and economic support should be our carrot.
an alternate strategy would be to bomb iran with nukes now. it doesn't matter where we hit. apologize for missing their nuclear programs, but as stephen colbert said, if they want an atom bomb we should give it to them. surely the world would be upset with us if this happened. but we would then have a living, modern example of what nuclear devastation is like -- perhaps it's different than chernobyl or nagasaki -- and just maybe more people would be horrified / mortified of what happens in the aftermath, thus inspiring a new generation of people who are not only afraid of the power of nuclear weapons, but working with all their might to get rid of them.
i suggest to anyone who is interested, check out A Canticle for Leibowitz, one of the best sci-fi books i've ever read. it's a protest against nuclear weapons, and a chronicle of what could happen should we be so gutless and cynical as to bomb iran first.
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oh yeah, i'm not sure how to tie this in but it also needs to be noted that the intelligence on iraq was correct -- they had no nuclear program -- yet bush interpreted our lack of knowledge about a program and saddam's hostile posturing to mean that we should invade. do we feel that the nie assessment is correct? what if our intelligence is wrong, and iran has a nuke program that is so far underground that our sources haven't uncovered it? again i'd like to postulate that iran has every reason in the world to develop nuclear weapons, and relatively few reasons not to do so. i'm not sure i trust our intelligence agencies to really know the truth on this, so again i must agree with bush, we should fear the fact that iran is using so many centrifuges to refine uranium. however i'm not sure this is the smoking gun / mushroom cloud that we should fear most. no, the greatest thing for us to fear (now that we've already pissed off the world with so many other crappy actions, like promoting torture and repealing the right of habeus corpus) is the reaction of the russians, chinese, french, british, muslim nations and oil-rich states should we bomb iran. after all, we could see $200/barrel oil or a very painful blockade of oil imports to the US should we attack iran, an oil-rich opec nation.
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