The Iranian Strategy

With the start of the Democratic National Convention, I'd like to take the time to address the most urgent foreign policy question in the world today, Iran achieving nuclear weapons status. Sadly, I have seen little debate in either the DNC or RNC about this. Tehran has openly pledged to build nukes and the world issues a collective shrug in return. With Iraq being occupied by coalition troops until at least 2006 and Iranian agents infiltrating all the way to Baghdad, a nuclear Iran would change the entire geopolitical situation and be able to exort tremendous leverage over Iraqi Shi'ites and the current government in Baghdad. The blogosphere seems to be taking this issue very seriously, with commenters on both sides of the aisle taking an increasingly aggressive posture. And it's all the more dangerous because a good portion of the top al-Qaeda leadership is based in Iran (now, yes, Dan Darling have been saying this for about a year and half now and it now appears that he was right. And I should definitely mention his analysis of the Iran/9-11 connection.

But the problem is...

What can we do to stop the Iranian regime from finishing its nukes? Well, of course, as many people have pointed out, the Israeli's could do what they did to Iraq in 1981 and destroy the Buheur facility, but is that really a viable option? Even if they succeed in taking out the place, the mullahs sure do know about what the Israeli's did and you can bet they have their most important components of the nuclear program underground. And if an attack is carried out and the whole program isn't wiped out, Israel would be the first place Iran would attack (either directly or more likely using a Hezbollah offensive through Lebanon). We could also use sanctions, but that's a short term solution and as with Saddam they would probably serve to further entrench the regime in Tehran.

The Iranian Nuclear Stragey must be dealt with soon before it's too late.

To be continued...