The Democrats’ latest slogan of “phased redeployment” is an ill-disguised marketing campaign for retreat in the face of terrorism. But, assuming for a moment that this approach is adopted, what are the consequences?

1. Israel will have to fly over at least two foreign countries to get to Iran. They won’t ask for or get permission, so they can really only attack one time, in one large strike package. In other words, they won’t be able to conduct an extended campaign. Given the number of aircraft Israel has, this will severely limit the number of targets they’ll be able to hit and they’ll have no restrike capability should they miss.

2. Range. Israeli aircraft don’t have the range to get to the critical sites and return without refuelling and they don’t have a good refuelling capability. Furthermore, they’ll have to refuel both on the way to Iran and back over someone elses airspace. Again, not going to happen.

So, at most the Israeli’s could conduct a single, relatively small strike on a few facilities. The effect would not be too significant in terms of damage to the Iranian nuclear program. At best it might buy a year or two.

Of course, the Israeli’s could opt for ballistic missiles, but those have disadvantages as well (namely small warhead size and accuracy, unless the payload is nuclear) and Israel does not have a large supply of them.

So overall, Israel’s capability to conduct a conventional strike on Iran is pretty limited.

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Sue,

Qutb is much more closely related to Sunni radicalism than Shia. Are you suggesting that all the Iranian power players are “crazy” followers of his brand of radicalism? Remember that Islam is not unitary, just look at Iraq and Lebanon for proof.

Talking may be all we’ll be able to do. Not that anything will come of it except maybe to lead us on. Talking to the drug cartels or the crips and bloods would help too, no?

Agreed that the “We Must Bomb Iran Now” crowd is getting way to much serious attention.

There is plenty of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence that they are, in fact, working hard to build the bomb. But the fact remains that there is no documentary or photographic “smoking gun” that would confirm our suspicions one way or another.

One of the VERY VERY few times I’ve heard any blogger or media report state that simple fact, as is this:

To proceed on the assumption that they aren’t building a bomb would be stupid. To bomb them without some idea of what facilities to hit would be equally dumb.

Bravo!

One scenario I’ve put forth here and in other places is that Iran is not seeking nuclear weapons themselves, but the capability to produce them in a relatively short period of time. This strategy has several advantages for the Iranians. First, they don’t need to worry about hiding a cladestine program, whose discovery would be the “smoking gun” initiating an attack. Second, they can get to 95% of a weapon by using technology that’s perfectly legal under the NPT (as a reminder Iran’s current development and deployment of enrichment technology is perfectly legal under the NPT). Third, once the nuclear fuel cycle is mastered, they could weaponize quickly by reconfiguring their cascades or building new ones.

There is a lot of hyperbole on Iran running around the blogosphere and media. People need to seriously and critically consider the evidence and the costs of military action. Those who advocate attacking Iran almost universally overstate the evidence against Iran and understate the costs of military action. They also view the Iranian leadership as “Krazy” with a capital “K.”

And while negotiations would almost certainly be a waste of time, protocol, tradition, and common sense demands that we talk directly to the Iranians at some point.

That really depends on the context of negotiations. So far, Bush and company have primarily used poorly veiled threats in an effort to coerce Iran, and it’s failed miserably (predictably, I might add). It’s hard to change to negotiations at this particular point in time as Iran now views itself in a position of relative strength and therefore will likely be a much tougher negotiator, espcially given our hypocrisy in negotiating a nuclear deal with India.