You can read all about it – supposedly. The most common point of view is that the Iran Deal which Trump has negotiated is the worst thing ever. Some say no, it’s not; it’s okay although not fabulous. Trump himself hypes it to the skies, of course.

Take your pick, because at the moment we simply don’t know.

As I wrote over the weekend, I have a bad feeling about this deal. But I freely admit I simply don’t have enough reliable information to know if that feeling of foreboding is based on anything other than the present uncertainty and my own tendency to pessimism.

So I’ve decided to re-post something I wrote in June of 2008 – back when Bush was still president – and recently rediscovered. The rest of this post consists of that essay, which you can also find here. It was called: “The problem of pre-emptive strikes against evil empires: how to deal with Iran?” Note the question mark.

Here’s the post:

Michael Ledeen writes in the WSJ about the problem the Allies had in recognizing, taking seriously, and then mobilizing against the danger represented by the Nazis prior to WWII.

He likens this inaction to the current muddled response of the West to Iran, and locates the problem in our presumption that people and regimes are generally the same (like us, that is), are basically good rather than evil, that anti-Semitism still thrives, and that there is a tendency towards inertia and inaction in democracies.

Although I certainly think Ledeen’s points are well taken, I think he’s leaving out some important factors that also militate against the West doing anything against Iran until some unequivocal and terrible step is taken by that country. The problem is that we don’t see many good options against Iran.

The first choice, the encouragement of the peaceful overthrow of the government by its citizens, might seem to be by far the best. Perhaps there are already clandestine ways in which we are helping the people of Iran to defy and to overturn their government, but in a climate of tyranny and repression such as has existed in Iran since 1979, such a movement is highly unlikely to succeed—it’s far more likely to lead to martyrdom on the part of the revolutionaries. This was true of the Soviet system, it was most definitely true in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (this was part of the tragedy of our post-Gulf War encouragement of rebellion against him), and it is true of many repressive dictatorships all over the world. The example of our own American Revolution is hardly the proper comparison to their regimes and cultural environments.

The approach also has the drawback of being slow. Perhaps it would work if given enough time, but if the intent of Iran is to get nuclear weapons and to use them against Israel and/or Iran’s other rivals and/or Western nations, then time may indeed be of the essence.

Note I write “may be” rather than “is.” This is because of the extreme difficulty of estimating how long it will take for Iran to develop effective nuclear weaponry. Estimates vary widely, and in the past they have been unreliable.

And that’s not the only problem with prognosticating. Not only is the time frame unknown, but the plans of the mullahs in terms of the specific actions they might take are opaque. As with Hitler, who telegraphed his aggressive intents against both the Jews and the Western world, the Iranian leaders have made their desires crystal clear. But, with both Hitler and the mullahs, that’s a far cry from knowing exactly what they are willing to do and how and where they will actually try to do it.

That makes it extremely tempting to dismiss their talk as bluster, even with the prior example of Hitler before us, who was dismissed in much the same way but who actually meant exactly what he said. But the mullahs are not Hitler, and so there is no simple equation here. And so it remains commonplace to dismiss the leaders of Iran as all talk and no action, and/or as powerless to deliver on their threats, and/or as amenable to rational persuasion. These assumptions are what candidate Obama is banking on, and although there’s no reason to believe he is correct, it is tempting and soothing (although perhaps dangerous) to think so.

That brings us to still another and more active way of opposing the mullahs: some sort of pre-emptive strike on their developing nuclear facilities. This leads us to the murky world of intelligence, bunker busters, and civilian collateral casualties. And it also brings us to the next and even more terrible option: some sort of military attempt to overthrow the government, as in Iraq.

It is when we consider these last two options that the Iraq War—and the reaction to that war of our own people, press, and Congress, as well as the response of Europe and the world—looms very large. One of my concerns during the buildup to the war in Iraq was that, if our prior intelligence turned out to be flawed or if casualties in the war were extremely high (especially of civilians, but also of our own forces) that these events would make it nearly impossible to launch a pre-emptive strike against any nation in the future even if that country’s hostility were clear and even if it had also developed nuclear weapons in defiance of an injunction against it.

Events in Iraq have indeed played out that way, at least in Western perceptions. Intelligence was flawed in the sense that there were no actual nuclear weapons found (and probably none developed); and although the intent and the means were there for Sadaam to have reconstituted his nuclear program as soon as sanctions were lifted (the Duelfer report has made that clear), this finding and its significance was lost in the outrage against the failure to find the WMDs which would have clearly justified the war ex-post-facto.

Likewise, there was anger at the extent of civilian casualties in the war, even though those casualties were mainly perpetrated by the terrorists and the insurgency—in other words, the enemy. The US was seen as motivating these people, and somehow the casualties were added on to those we actually (although unintentionally) caused and were made our responsibility. And although our own military casualties were—and remain—extraordinarily low for a war, the fact that the bulk of them occurred after major operations were over, and the length of time of the occupation in which they have accrued and its seemingly indeterminate nature, have given the public far less tolerance than it might otherwise have had for the magnitude of the sacrifice made by our military.

Despite the success of the surge, there is still heated argument about whether the war should have happened in the first place and whether it was worth the cost, both personal and monetary. Whichever side one agrees with on this question, the existence and force of the argument itself, and the fact that the majority of people continue to feel it was not worth it (see this poll taken in May of 2008 in which 62% of the people felt it was wrong for us to have gone into Iraq), probably will serve to make it far more difficult in the future to launch any such pre-emptive strike.

In summary, Iran is a case in which we see the problem but do not see a good solution. This confusion paralyzes our responses, despite the desire to do something before it’s too late. This leads to the understandable frustration of those such as Ledeen who have been saying “faster, please!” for quite some time now about Iran, and about the need to act to stop the regime.

It appears to be part of human nature—or at least the nature of the Western world at this point in time—to hesitate to act against a threat unless it is truly imminent, due to the difficulty of prediction and the risks inherent in a pre-emptive strike. This reluctance is what Bush was trying to overcome in his 2003 State of the Union message, which has been widely misquoted as saying the threat in Iraq was imminent but in which he actually said:

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike?

This is a good statement of the dilemma. Tyrants announce only their general intentions, not the specifics of an attack. Just as the police are not allowed to convict someone for mere threats and must wait for anger to ripen into an aggressive act, so is it generally true that non-aggressive nations wait for an attack or an invasion before defending themselves.

Even back in the days before nuclear weapons, this defensive posture often made the ensuing fight difficult and risky enough. But there was a limit to how much damage an offensive attack on the part of an aggressor against a nation with an effective and prepared military could do, though it could be bad (Pearl Harbor, for example). But now, with nuclear weapons available not only to major powers but also to more minor ones—and even to non-national players such as terrorists—the potential damage of such an attack is far greater, and in the case of an attack on Israel it could effectively wipe out that country.

An attack on Israel might also inflict terrible damage on Iran itself because of Israel’s nuclear retaliation. If the mullahs and their mouthpiece Ahmadinejad were sensible and rational actors, they would take this into their calculations and it would act as a deterrent. But there is no evidence that this is the case, and there’s plenty of rhetorical evidence that it is not.

One other possibility is that Israel will finesse the whole thing by acting against Iran pre-emptively to attack its nuclear facilities. This was done back in 1981 against Iraq’s Osirik, an act which earned Israel universal condemnation at the time but which has since been grudgingly praised. Unfortunately, even if the mullahs are crazy they are certainly not dumb, and they learned from that incident to decentralize and hide their nuclear program, thus making any future such attack on facilities far more difficult, far more controversial, and far more deadly to civilians.

Is it any wonder that we fail to act? Our rhetoric sounds tough—even Hillary said during her campaign that if Iran attacked Israel, the US would retaliate and could “obliterate” Iran. That sort of language ought to give the mullahs pause—unless they consider, from the evidence of our debate during the post-Iraq war years, that the US is a paper tiger and such words are just bluster.