I've been reading that despite the word that it is still unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear bomb and despite officially taking the position that every option is on the table to prevent Iran from getting the bomb, we must nonetheless move past preventing Iran from getting the bomb:
The way Obama sees it, a “diplomatic resolution of this situation is, frankly, greater than what we could achieve with the other options that are available to us.” That’s because, according to the president, you can’t get rid of the knowledge that it takes to make a bomb. “The technology of the nuclear cycle, you can get off the Internet,” said Obama. The technology, he elaborated, “is available to any good physics student at pretty much any university around the world. And [the Iranians] have already gone through the cycle to the point where the knowledge, we’re not going to be able to eliminate. But what we can do is eliminate the incentive for them to want to do this.”
In other words, because there’s no way to bomb the knowledge out of existence, the only real option is to convince the Iranians that it’s not in their best interest to make use of the knowledge they already have.
Yeah. And if somehow, against the odds, we fail with another heartfelt outreach to persuade Iran they don't really want the bomb, we'll have to contain nutball mullahs with nukes in their arsenal because we simply can't bomb and cruise missile away the knowledge.
Funny enough, I've made the same point about the knowledge base of nuclear technology expanding beyond the ability to bomb it away. Of course, I made that very same point to argue for strikes much earlier in the whole process of going nuclear than when striking is "the last resort":
If we don't act soon, a murderous regime will soon have the tools to carry out their threats against the West and Israel.
And while many here continue to insist that military action must be the last resort, the more the knowledge of nuclear weaponry becomes deeply embedded within Iran. More people acquire the knowledge of how to proceed and unless we kill them all, destroying buildings is the least effective way to slow them down. Iran can rebuild structures if they have the scientists and technicians who take decades to train ready to pick up the pieces. Indeed, Iran could rebuild in other countries and subcontract various stages of the work in locations that may be immune to future attacks.
And it is worse. With delay, Iran gets the chance to disperse their nuclear program--partly abroad, too--making it harder just to knock out the hardware that the people with knowledge can use to rebuild the 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?
And so the last resort becomes the lost resort. And accepting Iran as a nuclear state becomes one more option we won't take off the table.
Heck, the White House has been primed for this option for a long time.
You'd almost think this was the plan all along. But I'm cynical that way:
Call me cynical, but I think the people unwilling to act now because they don't think Iran is close to producing nuclear weapons will not be willing to act should the consensus develop that Iran is close to getting nuclear weapons.
The basic hope of these people (including the Europeans) is to forestall action until Iran is openly a nuclear power and then say, "Oh well, too late to do anything now. We'll have to live with Iran's nuclear weapons."
So it was written, so shall it be done.
Have a super sparkly day.
