I hope Iranians prevail in their own country. In the meantime, I would hope that Iranians leave us alone. If Iranians want to live in the 15th century, commanded and over-ruled by mullahs, leave them to it.

Iran would never, ever fire a warhead at us. The response would be overwhelming. We would indeed turn all of Iran into a sheet of glass. Further, if Iran has the cojones to fire a nuclear weapon at Israel, I would suggest they make it a really big one, because Israel has the hydrogen bomb and they will use them to obliterate Iran.

My worry is that those crazy mullahs will let some of the fissionable material loose and crazy Islamic fundamentalists, e.g.,, OBL, will fashion together some sort of dirty bomb and let it loose on us. I don't think these nationaless crazies can actually produce a fissionable weapon; they are really dumb asses almost incapable of creative thought and discipline.

Bottom Line .. unless we are prepared to strike Iran with very, very heavy bombs in about 12 different locations; we can't get at their nuclear facilities. Israel can't do it, unless they resort to theater nuclear weapons. We need to darn near close our borders, check all cargo that gets in to the US and be prepared to answer Iran with overwhelming destruction if they dare to let even 1 gram of enriched U232 out of their country. We have the technology to determine where enriched uranium and plutonium was processed. We can easily eliminate all other nuclear countries and by deduction determine if any stray fissionable atoms belong to Iran. If something gets out ... we nuke 'em.

 

I think the mullahs days as rulers in Iran are numbered. They aren't very popular among the citizenry and therefore they walk on thin ice. The younger generation in Iran is surprising modern, informed, and in many respects unafraid to be heard. It's difficult to suppress an empowered citizenry. We'll see.

I wouldn't worry too much about a "dirty" bomb. It would have more of an economic impact by scaring people into thinking they would be irradiated. It wouldn't cause the death and destruction that a fissionable weapon would.

As far as attacking Iran, they wouldn't last two minutes under a sustained nuclear retaliation attack from the USA. I doubt seriously whether we would resort to using nuclear weapons, though. A few well placed MOAB bunker buster-type bombs would more than likely do the trick. And, every plane that tried to take off or every rocket they tried to launch would be blown from the sky in mere seconds. They're already in our sights. Shock and awe.

 

By and large we are in coincident agreement. I was part of the enterprise that brought you shock and awe ... and it works against the unprepared or the inept. Saddam was nothing but bluff as far as we are concerned. Iranians are not much better along in terms of military capacity.

It won't matter whether Iranians shake off their mullah rulers, they remain Moslems and they will always hate Americans and Jews. No change from theocracy to democracy can ever change the inherent and individual genetic hatred of the Moslems towards non-believers. In my old world, we had to read the Koran (or like the TV idiots now call it, Quran) to gain an understanding of the 180 degrees of difference between the Islamic world and our Western beliefs, values and morays. It is every Moslem's duty to spread the word of Islam, to praise Allah and his Prophet Mohammed, to keep to the proscriptions of the Koran to perform a hadj to the holylands of Mecca and Medina and to either convert or kill nonbelievers. While the more moderate (a nonsequiter) Moslem recognizes these proscriptions, he puts them on the back burner as philosophy rather than operational tactics. The fundamentalists, much like our own evangelical fanatics, believe that the Koran is "God's Word," much as the bible is "God's Word" to Jerry Falwell and his fellow travelers.

Yes, I liked the one MOAB we fired off, interesting how 22,ooo pounds of TNT can detonate so quickly. Its lots of fun, much like the SLUFAE's of my youth. You should see them go off in real life with some proximity, you can feel them in your chest first. However, neither MOABs, nor SLUFAEs nor Daisy Cutters nor Bunker Busters can get at the twelve or so facilities that comprise the nuclear facilities of the Iranians. We can't resort to nuclear devices, TNFs would be required, because we would dig an even greater global hole than that built by Bush already.

Disengagement and disgust ... those are key.

 

The mullahs are ruining Iran and everybody but the mullahs realize it. No other Middle Eastern country wants to be ruled by mullahs. They can run the mosques, but not the countries.

We can't just ignore them. Moderates have run the countries in the past and they can again. The pendulum will swing the other way soon.