Let me present an alternate viewpoint. Would Iran actually use an atomic bomb on Israel if they had one? If they did, it would be suicide – the U.S. would be entirely justified (and capable) of using nuclear weapons to wipe Iran off the map. Despite the tradition of suicide bombers among militant Islamic fundamentalists, it’s hard for me to imagine the entire country committing suicide.

Sadly, a lesson of the ill-fated and ill-concieved invasion of Iraq was that if you are on America’s short list of enemies, you should get yourself a nuclear bomb quick. If you have one, we’re not going to risk invading your country. It worked for North Korea, and it may work for Iran.

Let’s take a longer view. Nuclear weapons are unimaginably terrifying, but unfortunately they may not be the last word in weapons. Bioterrorism, particularly engineered organisms, may prove to be cheaper, more effective and easier to make than nuclear wepons. There may be other nano-weapons in our future. The future is going to be a dangerous place, even more dangerous than it is now. In the future, we may not be able to simply bomb a country’s weapon-making facilities out of existence.

Perhaps we need another solution instead of trying to grind our enemies into dust, which isn’t working very well in my opinion. Step one would be to ween ourselves off a shrinking resource that’s mostly located in the Middle East.

Not to mention, the Europeans will finally get some help from us and the talks will succeed.

In fact, Iran will become a protestant country then too.

Enlightening in the sense, that regardless of how many people want a solution, the only people with the information critical to real solutions is the President. Empowered to do just such things.

To Megan, I always believe there is a way. If there is a will.

All problems have solutions, but not every solution solves the problem you want.

History will tell whether our trust in Condi Rice and George W. Bush were justified.

You can ignore, sanction, or attack. Ignoring never works, sanctions/discussions only work if the govt in question gives a flip for it’s people (and is why this is used in cases like the US and Sweden – neither of us want our own populace killed so talks will eventually work and is why it fails in places like Iran where his people death is irrelevant – It’s like threatening to never feed me broccoli again unless I do something – so? I hate brocolli), and attack will always work in the short term (long term depends on how after the attack is handled and how the people feel).

The same thing is true if you have two (or more) entities commited to genocide of each other. You can ignore, pick a side, or conquer and rule both sides. Ignoring supports who ever ends up strongest. Picking a side means you are killing many on the other (even if you chosoe to protect one side and sanction the other – your just doing it indirectly, though to many they can easily not notice that), and becoming thier dictators just delays the inevitable and will have both sides hate you and kill you until you do one of the other options.

To pretend there are any other options and persue them only kills more and causes more suffering until it degenerates into one of those causes.

This also generally extends out into conflicts in general, you just need to use more general terms than “sanction” (talk it out) or “attack” (use force – physical or verbal). You can also tack on “surrender” which usually isn’t much of an option so I didn’t really discuss it.

Only this time it’s worse because this madman has (or will have) nukes.

But truly what can be done? I see no way to stop his manic drive and I don’t see (from all that I’ve read) that he plans to get these nukes and just hold on to them.

There’s this sinking pit in my stomach.