An Idiot’s Guide to Victory Over Iran.........
“There’s Only One Way to Stop Iran....…. Since peaceful carrots and sticks cannot work, and an invasion would be foolhardy, the United States faces a stark choice: military air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities or acquiescence to Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. The risks of acquiescence are obvious. Iran supplies Islamist terrorist groups in violation of international embargoes. Even President Ahmadinejad’s domestic opponents support this weapons traffic. If Iran acquired a nuclear arsenal, the risks would simply be too great that it could become a neighborhood bully or provide terrorists with the ultimate weapon, an atomic bomb. As for knocking out its nuclear plants, admittedly, aerial bombing might not work. Some Iranian facilities are buried too deeply to destroy from the air. There may also be sites that American intelligence is unaware of. And military action could backfire in various ways, including by undermining Iran’s political opposition, accelerating the bomb program or provoking retaliation against American forces and allies in the region. But history suggests that military strikes could work. Israel’s 1981 attack on the nearly finished Osirak reactor prevented Iraq’s rapid acquisition of a plutonium-based nuclear weapon and compelled it to pursue a more gradual, uranium-based bomb program. A decade later, the Persian Gulf war uncovered and enabled the destruction of that uranium initiative, which finally deterred Saddam Hussein from further pursuit of nuclear weapons (a fact that eluded American intelligence until after the 2003 invasion). Analogously, Iran’s atomic sites might need to be bombed more than once to persuade Tehran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons. As for the risk of military strikes undermining Iran’s opposition, history suggests that the effect would be temporary. For example, NATO’s 1999 air campaign against Yugoslavia briefly bolstered support for President Slobodan Milosevic, but a democratic opposition ousted him the next year………..If nothing else, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that the United States military can oust regimes in weeks if it wants to………..”
Is this Kuperman out of his F---ing mind with that last sentence? He wants a repeat of Iraq and Afghanistan (not Afghanistan of November 2001 but current day Afghanistan) but on a much larger scale.
(Mr. Kuperman apparently has a history of minimizing various forms of genocide: he vigorously though intervention would not have helped save some of the million or so who were massacred in Rwanda. He also thought the Serbian fascists (Karadzic, et al) were not as bad as they were depicted, after the Bosnia massacres. When it comes to the Middle East, though, he perks up and sees danger all around him).
Cheers and Happy Holidays
mhg
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