So are the Nuanced Americans debating how we destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities or overthrow the Iranian mullah regime? To ask the question is to answer it.
No, we shall see this argument trotted out now that the threat is imminent:
The IAEA report rekindled the debate about whether we can deter a nuclear-armed Iran. Hawks worry that we cannot. Iran’s theocratic government is led by irrational and risk-acceptant religious extremists, they say, who are incapable of caution and insensitive to threats. But advocates of deterrence point out that we learned to live with equally risk-acceptant nuclear powers during the Cold War. If we could deter Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, why can’t we deter Ayatollah Khamanei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
Well, we didn't deter Stalin and Mao from unleashing North Korea on South Korea and waging war against us, now did we?
Anyway. The author dissects the very word "deter" to ask what do we want to deter them from doing? Yes, time to complicate it up. This portion is great:
”Despite its messianic pretensions,” Ray Takeyh and James Lindsay note, “Iran has observed clear limits when supporting militias and terrorist organizations in the Middle East. Iran has not provided Hezbollah with chemical or biological weapons or Iraqi militias with the means to shoot down U.S. aircraft.” But some analysts fear that Iran will be emboldened to take such risks if it believes that possessing nuclear weapons removes the danger of retaliation.
Yes, what will Iran be emboldened to try (assuming that they don't want to demonstrate why they think Israel is a one-bomb country)? When they already sent chemical weapons shells to Khaddafi, what indeed might they do? I took a stab at measuring deterrence with regard to Iran, and I'm not terribly comforted that we could deter loons on a mission from God.
There's not a whole lot of nuance involved here. All this talk of "sending messages" to Iran is just nonsense masquerading as deep thought.
We must not allow a mullah-ruled Iran get nuclear weapons. Anything else is just a smoke screen to put off any action to achieve that objective.
Have a nice day.
