Commando

-The USA will only form a ceasefire plan and temporarily stop this crisis before Israel annihilates all 70 million Iranians.

-Israel pre emptive strike, although some problems it would be mostly a success.
- Iran plans a full scale retaliation. It is shocked to realise Syria only diplomatically supports Iran and is reluctant to send any forces what so ever to help Iran.
-Iran retaliates individually through the use of missiles. Over 50 missiles are shot at Israel overnight. Iran fears fighter jet attacks will stall Israel into a long war so none are used.
-With thousands of Israeli fatalities Israel launches 10 nuclear weapons spread out across Iran, tactical nukes predominantly.

The next is up to whatever happens.

The point i am trying to make here is that if Iran retaliates like it has promised then Israel will not try to occupy Iran or just bomb from the air. They will use nukes. And with Israel we can not be assured they will all be tactical!!!

Srirangan

Won't be so bad. We deal with Pakistan already. :-/

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Commando

huh? who's gonna deal with Pakistan???

Srirangan

We. Since 1998.

Bulgaroctonus

January 22, 2006
The World
Why Not a Strike on Iran?
By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON

DIPLOMATS around the world keep repeating the mantra: There is no military option when it comes to slowing, much less stopping, Iran's presumed ambitions to get the Bomb. The Europeans say so. The Chinese, who need Iran's oil, and the Russians, who make billions supplying Iran's civilian nuclear business, say so emphatically.

Even the hawks in the Bush administration make no threats. When Vice President Dick Cheney was asked Thursday, in a television interview, if the United States might ever resort to force to stop Iran, he handled the question as if it, too, were radioactive.

"No president should ever take the military option off the table," he said, carefully avoiding the kind of language he once used to warn Saddam Hussein. "Let's leave it there."

Mr. Cheney, it seemed, was trying to sow just enough ambiguity to make Iran think twice. Which raises two questions. If diplomacy fails, does America have a military option? And what if it doesn't?

"It's a kind of nonsense statement to say there is no military solution to this," said W. Patrick Lang, the former head of Middle East intelligence at the Defense Intelligence Agency. "It may not be a desirable solution, but there is a military solution."

Mr. Lang was piercing to the heart of a conundrum the Bush administration recognizes: Iran could become a case study for pre-emptive military action against a gathering threat, under a policy Mr. Bush promulgated in 2002. But even if taking out Iran's facilities delay the day the country goes nuclear, it would alienate allies and probably make firm enemies out of many Iranians who have come to dislike their theocratic government. And Iran simply has too many ways of striking back, in the oil markets, in the Persian Gulf, through Hezbollah.

"Could we do it?" one administration official who was deeply involved in planning the Iraq invasion said recently. "Sure. Could we manage the aftermath? I doubt it."

Similar fears, he said, gave President Bill Clinton pause about launching a strike on North Korea in 1994. Later that year he reached an accord for a freeze on the North's nuclear production facilities. But in 2003 everything unfroze, and now the North, by C.I.A. estimates, has enough fuel for at least half a dozen bombs.

The Iranians took careful notes then, and here in Washington today the Korean experience underlies diplomacy-versus-force arguments that rarely take place on the record.

The problem is not that Washington lacks targets. Many of Iran's nuclear facilities, or at least those that American intelligence agencies know about, are in plain view or in underground sites whose construction was recorded by spy satellites. The problem is the global consequences of an attack to cripple them.

"The irony is that this is the opposite of Iraq," said John J. Hamre, a deputy defense secretary from 1997 to 1999. "We know a lot about what they have because the international inspectors have been there." Those inspection reports have helped Pentagon planners who, in imagining every contingency, have already mapped out Iran's most vulnerable facilities.

"Elimination of the nuclear program is not possible, but with the right strikes you could decisively set them back," said Ashton B. Carter, an expert at Harvard on proliferation problems.

In Iran's case, any attack would almost certainly start at Natanz, where Iran clipped off the International Atomic Energy Agency's seals a week ago and said it was preparing to reassemble a connected series of 164 centrifuges for purifying uranium.

Just beyond the research laboratories is a huge underground chamber, designed to hold as many as 50,000 centrifuges, yet unbuilt. Iran hid its existence for years.

Also on the target list, officials said, would be factories that manufacture the centrifuge components, and a plant at Isfahan where raw uranium is converted into a form that can be fed into the centrifuges.

Then there are research centers and military installations where the United States suspects - but cannot prove - that clandestine nuclear-related activity may be taking place. Given the track record in Iraq, however, there is always the risk that those facilities will turn out to be a watch factory, or, worse, a schoolhouse. (The Iranians hid one facility behind a false wall in a Tehran factory, but the I.A.E.A. found it.)

"You are talking about something in the neighborhood of a thousand strike sorties," said Mr. Lang. "And it would take all kinds of stuff - air, cruise missiles, multiple restrikes - to make sure you've got it all." Other former officials say fewer bombing runs would be needed.

The Israelis, who see Iran's nuclear program as a threat to their existence and have been far more outspoken about a military option, give a similar assessment. But they also say they lack the air power, or the reach, to do the job.

In any event, it is one thing to talk about such strikes in purely military terms, and another to consider the political cost.

"What you do with a bombing campaign is bring a whole country rallying around its radical leaders," said Mr. Hamre. "And that's the opposite of what we are trying to achieve in Iran," which is to convince a well-traveled, well-educated, and in some cases pro-American population to usher in a very different kind of leadership.

But if Iran knows the United States and its allies ultimately have no stomach to put military muscle behind their demands, what is its incentive to give up its weapons program? Efforts by the Europeans and Russia to come up with formulas that would provide Iran with nuclear material that cannot be used for weapons have been rejected, at least so far. And no one wants to threaten truly tough sanctions, for fear that by hurting ordinary Iranians they will only drive moderates into the camp of their leaders. Those leaders have been threatening retaliation, even to measures as weak as a letter of warning from the United Nations Security Council.

They have threatened to cut off oil exports and send the markets into a panic, though most experts said an embargo is not something Iran could execute for very long without damaging its own economy. Iran could also step up interference in Iraq and dispatch Hezbollah on terror missions. In addition, the Iranians often boast that their missiles can reach Israel.

Some of those threats may be inflated. And for now, at least, Iran's centrifuge program appears to have hit some technical hitches. I.A.E.A. inspectors are still in Iran, and the Iranians have not yet dared throw them out, as the North Koreans did three years ago. A senior European diplomat involved in the talks with Iran dismissed most of the country's threats last week as "bluster meant to buy them some time, and keep us paralyzed."

But, he added, "it may work."

Several American officials, when promised anonymity, said they thought that in 5 or 10 years, Iran will most likely have a weapon.

"They have read us pretty well," Mr. Hamre said. "They have skated right at the edge of controlled pugnaciousness."

The debate among the West, Russia and China is whether, together, they are willing to skate to the same edge in hopes that, in a repeat of the cold war, the other side blinks first.

BenRoethig

Are you insane. We did that once and have regreted it every second since. We and the Russians knew exactlt what they do and came close to using them several times. The Iranians see them as a supreme gift from God. I lived through the closing days of the cold war were almost every U.S. unit was carrying tactical or strategic nukes. The threat went away and they got locked in a bunker instead of a Mk41 VLS tube aboard a tico. I don't want to go back there, but if Iran gets nukes, it's exactly were we'll be.

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Sameer

If North Korea has a handful of n bombs, what stops them from selling just one of two to Iran, I really dont get this, the knowledge to make a bomb is there from the Pakistanis/Koreans and Chinese. Iran does not lack the money, yet after more than a quarter century of Islamic rule, they still cant come up with a single nuke tipped missle.

Allah does not appear to be on their side.

phew

Commando

regretted? yes a lot of civillians died that and USA regretted it. It ended the war a lot quicker than it would have and with a lot less fatalaties then would have without full US invasion of Japan which would have taken another 4 months.

I don't know why everyone here is speaking as if the US is going to take the first miliatary action over Iran. It will obviously be Israel a few weeks after sanctions are imposed. Don't worry about the US using nukes, the worry is Israel. If Israel gets hit with a retaliation missile strike from Iran after the pre emptive strike then i find it difficult to believe Israel won't use nukes. They can't let their small country get to badly battered.

Sameer

People seem to forget that with one phone call those wacky Ayatollahs can stir quite the shish kabab in Iraq considering the huge Shia population and the close links many a cleric have towards the regime.

That wont be good for Bush and hence such fantasy scenarios wont happen.

Israel cannot put enough fighters over there to have a good chance at destroying the capab of Iran.
Nukes wont be used even by Israel, people who think like that have no real concept of real world politics.
sorry to say.

Sameer

Had Bush listened to me, he would have given weapons to Saddam and made him attack Iran but made sure the weapons were not decisive. ie back to the 1980s. That way both Iran and Iraq would be busy killing each other and the rest of us would move on.

ok i fantasize too...

Commando

Are you still going on about George Bush Senior in the 1980's. Get over that.

Okay Sameer so let me get this straight. Israel does not have enough fighter jets to produce a successful pre emptive strike. Israel won't use nukes.

Then how will Israel respond individually to the threat of Iran as they have so often promised to do so. Israel must have said over 30 times now, if the world can't stop Iran obtaining nukes, Israel will take it into their own hands.

You contradict yourself Sameer. If Israel does not have enough fighter jets to perform the operation then what will they do. Obviously the last option is tactical nukes.

No grip on world politics. Hyperthetical question. If your looking at a hostile country over Iraq that has 70 million people and the president continually questioning the holocaust and why Israel isn't in Europe and that Israel should be annihilated. Why wouldn't you use nukes to destroy that threat if you so say the air force isn't capable which is totally wrong by itself.

Hence Israel's airforce is capable and if Iran retaliates after the pre empive strike then they will likely use nukes. No Sameer you have no grip on world politics!!!!

BenRoethig

But we still wish we could disinvent the damn things.

Officer of Engineers

I have seen no indication that Israel has tac nukes. Most certainly none of the regular ground forces are issued with them.

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Commando

The fact in the whole crisis that realy concerns me is that Iran's nuclear programme has been hid from the world for 25 years. Is it possible they already have the bomb?

Ballguy

Yes!! Lets attack, of course, because we found oh so many weapons of mass destruction in Iraq....

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