The US military *says* it can keep the Straits open even if the Iranians try to close it — just for an example we’ve deployed a lot better anti-missile defenses since 2002. We’ve got a whole lot of naval and Marine power floating around with nothing to do, not to mention the USAF also pretty much sitting around.

Remind me, who trains Hezbollah?

I don’t doubt that we have a lot of superiority over the Iranians- but a creative opposition could definitely be a problem for us in the Straits of Hormuz.

First off, it was everybody’s intelligence agencies being wrong, which suggests that maybe Americans weren’t uniquely stupid or evil in this case. And second, I mean the IAEA that had no idea that Libya even had a nuclear program on the one hand and the IAEA that issued a report saying the knew Iran was cheating but could do nothing about it on the other.

If Khamenei wanted us to know that Iran could be “worked with,” he would have said so.

(And those missiles were part of a secret deal where we gave them missiles and they gave us what exactly? “Working with” means quid pro quo — of course they’ll take a deal where we give them weapons and they pretend to try to get their stooges to do us a favor.)

As far as I know, the mullahs have never repudiated Khomeini’s policy: “We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”

Israel is faced with a mortal threat, coming from a state known to operate outside the norms of international relations. Mutually Assured Destruction only works with states that operate rationally, and neither we nor Israel have anything stronger than wishful thinking to tell us that Iran is rational.

(Plus there’s the problem that MAD may or may not have actually worked at all in that the Soviets didn’t necessarily buy into it — after the fall of the USSR, released documents on Soviet doctrine suggest that they never bought the concept at all. Those may have been for internal consumption, but we just can’t tell. Nukes may have been just big artillery to them. MAD was based on what we thought unacceptable losses were, and we just assumed that a country with 20 million war dead would think the same way.)

Realistically, short of a whole scale war with Iran, there’s simply no way to ensure they stop development of nukes absent diplomacy.

The Iranians treat diplomacy as exactly what it is: bullshit. They’ve been stringing along the EU for six or seven years now with promise after promise, while they’ve steadily been building their nuclear weapons capability. What is diplomacy good for again, when the target doesn’t care what you think?

And the author of the link you posted seems to think that any fighting between Iran and Iraq means the US Army is ipso facto immediately defeated. Does he really think Iran could cut our supply lines? The only reason the Iranian Navy (such as it is) isn’t on the bottom of their harbors is they haven’t pissed off the USN yet. I have a hard time taking his analysis seriously.

Iraq will stay quiet if it’s very blindingly obvious that Iraqi airspace was overflown to bomb their fellow Shi’ites.

Americans seem to think that Shi’ite solidarity is paramount (your link author above assumes that as well, I guess). Everything I’ve read from Iraqis and Americans who have spent time in Iraq is that Arab Iraqis hate Persians with a deep and abiding passion. Since Iraq’s government and the Iraqi people fear Persian hegemony, I expect they would publicly bitch and privately cheer if Israel struck. Hell, they might even look the other way while Israel used a deserted airfield in the desert somewhere.

Otherwise Iran gets a nuke. What do you think should be done about it?

That would be the IAEA that was right about Iraq not having restarted development on nukes/WMD, right, as opposed to our intelligence agencies being outrageously wrong?

But hey, if you can’t trust the Bush Administration (famous last words: Iraq will pay for its own liberation out of oil revenues), who CAN you trust?

Let’s remember, too, that while I’m sure Iran would love to have their own home-built nuclear-tipped IRBM to destroy Tel Aviv threaten and deter their enemies, a big clunky ISO container bomb would do the job quite nicely.

I don’t see why the Iranians would want to do this (yes, I know about the Iranian President being the Shiite equivalent of a Pentecostal Holy Roller who believes in the Rapture and End Times- it’s irrelevant because he doesn’t get to press the shiny red button). Their ayatollahs don’t want Teheran melted into glass, which is what’s going to happen if a nuke blows up anywhere in Israel. The Israelis have sub-launched ICBMs. Fat chance of blowing THOSE up before they get you, if you’re the Iranian Defense Ministry.

Mutually Assured Destruction isn’t pretty, but it does work with respect to states. This, of course, assumes they get a nuke. That may be unavoidable, absent a workable nuclear non-proliferation regime (which the Iranians, the North Koreans, the US under Bush, the Israelis, the Pakistanis and the Indians have all helped to undermine in recent history, through various actions).

However, I think the Iranians CAN be worked with. After all, we were sending them missiles through the Israelis just a few short years after that embassy invasion, right?

Realistically, short of a whole scale war with Iran, there’s simply no way to ensure they stop development of nukes absent diplomacy. The Israelis may be able to set things back a piece, but Osirak was followed by Gulf War I in all of 9 years. I am not particularly sanguine about the consequences for the US if we decide the sequel to pouring a trillion dollars of blood and treasure down a rathole in Iraq is another trillion or two in Iran… but I dare say that it’s darkly amusing to see supposed conservatives ignore their Burke while they emulate Woodrow Wilson. I say “supposed” because other conservatives I read actually seem to have this in correct perspective.

And I can tell you right now… I very much doubt Iraq will stay quiet if it’s very blindingly obvious that Iraqi airspace was overflown to bomb their fellow Shi’ites. It will make it very clear that the Iraqi government is a stooge of the US, and the Arab street HATES their governments being shown up as American puppets. So no, I very much doubt President-elect Obama wants to be handed an Iraq on full-scale TILT in the middle of the US’s biggest economic crisis in 70 years.