Quote Originally Posted by JMA View Post
Your point seems to be that if the nuclear facilities themselves are targeted there will be a catastrophic release radiological fall-out. This may well be so.

So removing the radiological discharge argument of yours what is your next point?
JMA, before moving on from the titled ('bomb Iran enrichment...') topic of this forum, which is clearly not off the table for neo-likudniks, let me be clear why blasting high level radiation across Persia would be bad, trending catastrophic.

Firstly, the quantity of gassified uranium is quite large, and the environmental half-life of the primary über-toxin (and resulting disease) is measured in hundreds of years.

Secondly, the precedent of striking at nuclear repositories is a really really bad thing to have coming back around. Not least since most of those kinds of targets are in the West. (We are talking about tooling up a uranium-plutonium energy economy, here in the land of free movement, no?)

Thirdly, even if the strike is endorsed by the Wahabi king/GCC, and carried out by the Knesset/IDF, the USA will be seen as enabler and guarantor of this Saudi-Israeli hit on Iran.

OK, so let's accept your unsupported conjecture that Iran's nuclear material and active enrichment will be avoided, and the only radiological component will be depleted uranium DU penetrators, such as we used against Iraqi armor. The third point stands, the US reasonably being accountable; we are both Israel and Arabia/GCC's primary security partner. What will we be accountable for?

A. Both regional parties agitating for military threats are proliferators themselves. Israel is way nuclear and moving to thermo/neutron weapons. The Saudi's sponsored Islamic Pakistan's bomb/proliferation, and dual use tech for said proliferation seems to flow thru the Gulf ports. Kinda lowers the bar for moral superiority over Revolutionary Iran. Quds support for terrorism? Similar problem re the Wahabi Royals.

B. If Israeli occupation is the Jihad argument, the Saudi kingdom and Egypt is the AQSL target. Another attack by crusaders on moslems may be acceptable to our buddies in those governments, but our joint existential struggle to debunk the suicide cult may well move backwards, once again. Moslems from Pakistan to Algeria will identify with the victims, not the advanced US weapons used against them.

C. If you think we (USA) can limit a Likud led IDF to a symbolic strike on an unpopular and relatively bloodless Iranian target, then you must have missed IDF misuse of cluster munitions on mixed populations, Lebanon 06, and Gaza 09. The likudist viewpoint benefits from US ever-war with moslems, and they may well drag us as far into the briar patch as they can get away with.

D. Nationalistic populations and leadership react unpredictably to military attack. I'll let someone claiming expertise or cultural insight guess how hitting them hard or just symbolically might motivate Persians. Hard or soft, by your 'no fallout' condition, we leave their enriched uranium and feedstock to their discretion; the feedstock and design pieces of an HEU program will be intact. If they don't fold, we'll have made the hard line case for nuclear deterrent.

Remember, as in Iraq, a long war is a bad war for us, because:

E. Even rumors of war in the Gulf will spike spot prices, with long-term oil contracts going up each month the crisis continues.

I don't know how your economy is doing, but my ex lost her house, and my two girls can't parley a teaching masters into a job to pay their loans. I'm not pitching conspiracy, but there are a lot of regional powers (Russia, China, Germany, France, India, Brazil) that might give our war party enough rope to finally hog tie us.

Containment worked reasonably well against the Soviets, the Maoists, Castro and Saddam. N. Korea is a problem, but mostly for their neighbors, who are each strong enough individually to deal with the Kim's bankrupt regime.

Put this in perspective. We need to defang the salafist suicide cult, bring our two long and expensive combat occupations to some kind of a conclusion, before being stampeded into a third war, and left holding the bag by shifty ME allies.

Hezbollah's missile threat aside, there is no emergency, no imminent threat that can lay claim to 'preemption' of looming attack. Certainly not for the USA. Hez is no existential threat to Israel, nor Persia to Arabia.

Economic sanctions take time, and give time for solutions and new leadership to emerge. Where are the calls for 'strategic patience' that accompanied the 'surge' counteroffensive, when we were losing another thousand KIA's?