Nuking Iran

Iran is such a depressing topic for me I haven't blogged about it much. Iran is mere months away from developing a bomb, their hardline lunatic leadership is quite forthright about their desire to wipe Israel off the map, and they would have few qualms about delivering a bomb to Al Qaeda.

I'd like to do the military-bluster thing and start advocating airstrikes on all their nuclear facilities, command and control sites, even their oil wells. But I don't think that will actually solve things. Their uranium enrichment program is hidden, probably underground, and almost certainly well-dispersed. We could not end their atomic ambitions through mere airstrikes.

For those of you counting on Israel to end this problem for us-- forget it. The comparison to Iraq's reactor is inapposite. That was a big identifiable target. The Iranian sites are largely unknown, even by the vaunted Israeli intelligence organizations.

We're not going to invade. We don't have the troops and the nation doesn't have the stomach.

Which means that Iran will have a bomb soon.

WunderKraut has come to similar conclusions.

And, like me, he thinks that the ultimate solution may be the unthinkable one-- a full-scale genocidal nuclear attack on Iran. Unthinkable, that is, until these bastards actually use the bomb.

It is time for Bush to spell out clearly what our nuclear policy is in regard to nuclear-armed rogue states. And this is not the time for diplomatic nicety. Bush must announce, clearly and solemnly, that any nuclear-armed nation invites a nuclear attack, and that a nuclear attack by such a nation will be met with the complete destruction of that nation by nuclear fire.

The fundamentalist religious crazies thuggishly ruling Iran may have little fear of that. They will consider giving up their own lives to strike a mighty nuclear blow for Allah a small sacrifice for greater Islamist glory.

We have to put the fear of God Himself into those who value life more than seventy-two viriginal whores in the afterlife. The Iranian citizens, the generals, the scientists building the doomsday devices.

We have to be clear on our response to such an attack, and we have to be resolved about carrying it out with clinical, murderous deadliness.

And we need to inform the world, and Iran of course, of all of this in advance. We need to be quite clear on our policy, so that the world will know that Iran was forewarned.

Limited retaliatory strikes are counterproductive against a nuclear-armed lunatic theofascist state. Such limited strikes will only give the mullahs the pretext for further nuclear attacks. These not on Tel Aviv (probably the first city to go), but New York, the bomb smuggled in in parts by Iranian intelligence officers and Al Qaeda confederates.

There is simply no other way to restrain them. Even such a horrifying promise of nuclear holocaust might not be enough. But we no longer have any other options.

Tens of millions of perfectly-innocent Iranians will be killed. But we are confronted with the choice of their innocents being killed, or ours.

I've always imagined the problem to be like two clocks. One, the clock ticking down when a radical Islamist state would get the bomb. The other, the clock ticking down to when stability and sanity finally came to such a state.

The latter clock was recently set back an hour and a half and stands at 9:30, or earlier. The first clock is now one minute to midnight. Our hopes have always been that the one clock would strike midnight before the other, but our hopes are now revealed as naive.

I really don't think America can simply execute a nuclear first-strike on Iran, and no matter how satisfying it might be to bluster along those lines, it's just not going to happen. We can, however, promise a final strike, a strike that will render the entire ancient land of Persia a radioactive desert of gleaming irradiated glass.

It is monstrous to contemplate. But we are dealing, after all, with monsters, monsters soon to be armed with the most deadly technology the world has ever known.

posted by Ace at 12:57 PM

| Access Comments