Certainly, both American and Israel (and I'm going to assume Britain, too) have had time to build the capabilities to attack Iran. But Iran has had a decade to develop their nuclear industry, which means the breadth and depth of knowledge and facilities require more attacks to set the Iranians back and make it easier for Iran to recover from an attack with the surviving assets and knowledge base.
I've also worried that as we've put the pressure on Iran, that Iran has dispersed key nuclear work outside of Iran to survive either an Israeli or an American-British attack (could this be why President Obama has rediscovered out British special relationship?). Remember that when President Clinton ordered the destruction of that pharmaceutical plant in Sudan back in 1998, we believed it was linked to Iraq's Saddam Hussein (and al Qaeda) and was a WMD facility.
North Korea is an obvious ally. So is Syria, where Israeli aircraft destroyed a Syrian nuclear facility several years ago where a number of North Korean technicians were killed in the attack. But both North Korea and Syria are problems in the long run given our focus on them and their own internal problems, so Iran courts Venezuela as an ally where they could hide nuclear work. Indeed, the entire Latin America region could be a reserve nuclear asset to rebuild whatever is destroyed inside Iran because Iran is cultivating ties there:
[US Southern Command commander Air Force General Douglas] Fraser says there is concern Tehran sees the region as a way to circumvent international sanctions over its nuclear program.
So we will pay the price of delaying a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. Once they were fewer, more poorly defended, and more likely to be inside Iran. With a more resilient program, Iran also has fewer reasons to negotiate the halt of their programs even under threat of attack. So a last resort may be lost to us as an effective response to seriously slow the Iranians down. We make a terrible mistake in acting as if the Iranians are stupid and can't take their own actions to frustrate our efforts to attack them as a last resort. Do we really think they are just sitting their waiting for us at our leisure to decide to destroy a program that is clearly very important to them?
Regime change is the only way to protect the planet from nuts with nukes. No nuts and the nukes really are less of a problem. Remember, nuts without nukes are a major problem as it is.
But we may have to strike even though we can't destroy everything (because not everything is in Iran, even if we destroy every target in Iran), just to buy time. But make no mistake, once we join the war that Iran has been waging war on us for three decades we need to finish it with regime change during the time we buy when Iran won't have nukes (well, unless Iran buys some warheads from North Korea or Pakistan).
