Friday, March 24, 2006

When You Strike a Shah, Kill Him

Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. We are considering what to do about them, including air strikes.

But remember that Iran may be pursuing nukes but they already have chemical and biological weapons:

Iran's WMD programs are rightly viewed with concern given the theocratic regime's support for terrorists. Earlier this month, improved IEDs en route to insurgents in Iraq were captured at the Iranian border. Iran has also been a sponsor of terrorist groups, including Hezbollah, Hamas, PFLC-GC, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. This is a combination that is extremely dangerous, and this suspected combination was enough to topple Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003. Unlike Saddam Hussein's regime, Iran is open about its desire to acquire weapons of mass destruction – and its support for terrorism is also undisputed.

I think we could take out enough of Iran's nuke program to set them back years. But we'd have to strike a whole lot more targets to keep the mullahs from striking back with poor-man's nukes. If the only thing we can do is set back Tehran's WMD programs several years, I'll take that over letting Iran go nuclear. But just wounding them is never more than a second-best option.

In the end, the only safe option is to remember that it's the regime, stupid. A regime as nuts and hostile as Iran under the mullahs will find ways to kill us even if they only have hatred and box cutters.

Regime change. Soon. I don't know how much time we have, and nobody really does when it comes right down to it. Our record of predicting when countries will go nuclear isn't encouraging.