What Do You Think Will Happen if Romney Wins? If Obama Wins?

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I was joking about the nukes, though I still think military intervention is necessary.

Wholeheartedly agree! Military intervention is entirely necessary in Iran. Wouldn't be difficult at all to attempt to hold down a country four times the size and with three times the populace as Iraq while continuing to occupy Afghanistan. I'm sure that the Iranian mullahs and the majority of Iranians who follow their teachings will welcome us as liberators of their people and will not react at all badly to foreign troops occupying their soil, establishing military bases on their land, and patrolling their streets in our military vehicles. I'm sure they'll greatly appreciate American troops being there to keep them safe and promote democracy (with full attention towards protecting our 'strategic interests' out near Abadan). Bet they'll love American troops killing and terrorizing their neighbors, setting up checkpoints on their soil, ransacking entire neighborhoods, all that stuff. That won't cause any hatred or resentment towards us, of course not. They'll love the nation that overthrew democracy in Iran coming back in with a stated aim of restoring it. Yep, yep, no American soldiers will die overseas, there won't be any casualties, no issues there. We'll be welcomed with open arms into Iran, which has absolutely no rugged terrain capable of hiding a guerrilla force of significant size.

I assume you'll be first into the recruitment offices to sign up to fight, right?

So you'd prefer it if we allowed Iran to gain nuclear weapons.

Would you like some more straw for that man you are building?

Oh yes.

I'm not sure you understand the meaning of that last sentence...

No, he got it, he just thinks that calling Iran trying to obtain nuclear weapons a strawman is ridiculous.  And it is.  Iran has a nuclear weapons program.  What truly is a strawman is holding that the only military option for dealing with Iran is to invade and occupy it.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Drawing a connection from an opposition to military intervention in Iran to a desire for Iran to actually have nuclear weapons is the strawman I was referring to, of course.  I thought that was obvious.

Actually, maybe some of you need to learn what a strawman is.

Iran wants and is taking steps to have nuclear weapons.  You'd need to be Russian or Chinese to miss something that obvious.

Not that Joyce's belief that an invasion of Iran would be the only possible military option to stop the Iranians is particularly rational either.  Especially since about the only way it would be politically possible for us to invade Iran would be after Iran had made a hostile use of a nuclear weapon.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Iran is using the nukes as leverage; much as the Soviet Union built nukes but had no plans to use them unless war broke out. They're smart enough to know that they'll be destroyed if they actually use a nuke on the US or Israel.

MAD only works as a deterrence if both sides agree that destruction is a bad idea.  A secular viewpoint would of course generally lead to agreeing to that.  But Iran is not a secular country and its leadership in particular rejects secularism.  While I'm not one of those alarmists who thinks Iran intends to use the bomb as soon as it gets it, neither am I polyyanna who thinks they'll only use it as a bluff.

The most likely situation in which an Iranian nuke gets used is if Iran ends up in a situation similar to Syria today.  I can easily see Khamenei or his successor authorizing the use of Iranian nukes in such a situation so as to find out if nuking Teł Aviv would be considered equivalent to the sun rising in the West that is one of the signs of the end times in Islamic eschatology.

The only way to prevent that from happening is to keep Iran from having nukes.