I think it would be incredibly stupid to invade Iran. They have one oil refinery, and their economy is in tatters. A simple blockade or the destruction of their oil refinery would be all it would take to create havoc inside their borders. There’s no need to go in with force. A local talk show host interviewed Secretary Rice the other day, and she was quite insistent that the US has plenty of options, other than force, remaining to deal with Iran. According to her, the administration still believe diplomacy can resolve the problems with Iran. Recently the Russians withdrew their support of Iran’s nuclear “reactor” program, and both Russia and China agreed to the unanimously passed sanctions on Iran. All of this leads me to believe that we are a long way from open war with Iran. (I say open because we’ve actually been at war with them since 1979, and more recently we’ve been fighting them in Iraq, although no one seems to want to admit it.)

Unfortunately, if we don’t do something pre-emptively about this problem, the “start” of the “conflict” is likely to be the abrupt extermination of (another!) six million Jews, whom we will not be able to bring back by any kind of retaliation after the fact.

The diplomatic route has been tried to the point of exhaustion, both by us and by the Europeans. No agreement is worth anything unless it can be verified by onsite inspections, which the Iranian regime refuses to allow. It is obvious that they are simply using diplomacy to string us along while their nuclear project moves forward. No negotiation can accomplish anything if the other side will never agree to the outcome which is essential to us (verifiable abandonment of their effort to build nuclear weapons).

This is a situation where there aren’t any good options. However, the airstrike option is increasingly looking like the least bad one.

I’ve never heard anyone advocate invading Iran, and I think that would be a disaster. The crucial goal is to destroy the nuclear-weapons program; it should be possible to do that via an airstrike, though it would need to be a very massive one. Secondary goals might include destroying the regime and the country’s military power. Those things, too, should be do-able from the air without an invasion. An invasion would only be necessary if we were trying to establish a new government as in Iraq; I see no reason why we should attempt such a thing. Iran, unlike Iraq, has potential sources of leadership outside the regime which could probably establish a new government without our help. And if Iran did lapse into anarchy or break up due to separatist tendencies in its ethnic regions, it’s not obvious that this would be against our interests.

A point to consider is that the US has the ability to destroy the Iranian nuclear program without using nuclear weapons of our own. If we don’t do it, the Israelis will have to do it themselves, and I think that they, having much more limited conventional capabilities, probably would need to use nuclear weapons to do the job.