The day that is coming, if we do nothing

Ben writes:

You wrote: “Unlike many, I do not dismiss the Iranian nuclear threat.”

I don’t either, and soon neither will anybody else. The darkest day of history will be the day Iran announces it has become a nuclear power. Everything will change after that.

- end of initial entry -

Randall Parker writes:

If you were King for a year what would you do about Iran? S.T. (Sam) Karnick writes:

I think our venture into Iraq has powerfully achieved an exhaustion of American will that makes a push into Iran a difficult sell for the public, but as you and Arthur Herman and many others argue, it is indeed imperative.

LA replies:

Yes. I wonder if all the Bush supporters who have kept telling us for the last three years that we were in a “war” in Iraq—a war that in reality was not a war because we never had a strategy to defeat our enemy, only a vain hope that democratization would make the enemy go away—have realized that by endlessly shouting, “We’re in a war, a war, a war, it’s the turning point of history, the hinge of fate, we must not doubt, we must not question,” when we in fact were not in a war, but only a doomed holding action, they have discredited genuine calls to war when war is imperatively needed.

The neocons are the boy who cried wolf.

Mr. Karnick replies:

You’re right. From a normal citizen’s perspective, Iraq looked, walked, and quacked like a war, but as you say, the lack of a definite purpose, or endgame as the analysts like to call it, may well have set the public mind against all such possible actions in the Mideast for the time being—until the next attack on U.S. soil. And by then the cost of response will be much, much more severe. A terrible situation.

I’d rather the Iranians didn’t get the bomb. I’m wondering whether the Saudis will give the Pakistanis really large dollars (billions? tens of billions?) to buy nukes should the Iranians get nukes. I do not know.

LA replies:

We cannot sit and do nothing while Iran becomes a nuclear power. We must at a minimum attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. To prevent them from cutting off world oil by cutting off the Straits of Hormuz while this is happening, we must, as Arthur Herman writes in November Commentary, seize the Straits ourselves. We could also seize their oil wells in the Gulf, where much of their oil is. We thus assure that countries we like can use the Straits, while Iran can’t, thus crippling Iran economically and putting the squeeze on the regime.

Remember, Sailer always talks of how Iran has zilch in conventional military forces and equipment. Though naval actions in the Gulf (which Herman says would be similar to what we actually did in the late 1980s to prevent Iran from blocking the Straits), and air action against their nuclear facilities, we conventionally exert our will over them to deny them the one thing they must not have which is nuclear weapons. We also cause them maximum damage, giving others the lesson that we will not tolerate any jihadist, nuclear-war-threatening regime to get the A bomb.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 15, 2006 11:56 PM | Send