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Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Attacking Iran an Unavoidable Prospect?

The idea that the US might attack Iran to destroy or severely damage its progress toward developing nuclear weapons has been a relatively common topic of discussion in the news for the last few months. You might be surprised, as I was, to learn that a majority of likely voters - 52 percent - would support a U.S. military strike to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon, and 53 percent believe it is likely that the U.S. will be involved in a military strike against Iran before the next presidential election, a new Zogby America telephone poll shows.

And at least one authority believes that war, or at least military action, might be the only way to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, something clear thinking individuals realize would be one of the most destabilizing events that could occur today.

Former US Ambassador to the United Nation John Bolton writes in a new book that "Iran will never voluntarily give up its nuclear program … and a policy based on the contrary assumption is not just delusional but dangerous. This is the road to the Nuclear Holocaust." In "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad," Bolton asserts that Europe's three-year try at using diplomacy to persuade Iran not to become a nuclear power were useless.

The prospect of Iranian President Ahmadenijad with nuclear weapons at his disposal is enough to cause true concern, but a more serious concern is that he would furnish nukes to al–Qaida, whose nuclear ambitions against the US have been known since the early 1990s, according to former FBI consultant Paul Williams in his recent book, The Day of Islam: The Annihilation of America and the Western World (Prometheus Books). Williams discusses the potential for nuclear terrorism on U.S. soil and the connections between al-Qaida, organized crime and illegal immigrants, and talks about the origins of al-Qaida's intentions to detonate a nuclear device that would kill hundreds of thousands of Americans. A newer and worse scenario calls for nuclear devices to be detonated simultaneously in seven US cities, New York, Washington, D.C., Las Vegas, Miami, Boston, Houston, and Los Angeles, and FBI Director Robert Mueller has confirmed Williams' main claim. Mueller said al-Qaida's paramount goal is clear.

To the extent that Iran might be the source for al-Qaida to obtain nukes, and that even if it kept them all to itself, Iran cannot be allowed to develop nuclear weapons, and it is comforting that the Zogby poll indicated that a majority of Americans recognize this.

Most of us don't want another war, and a lot of people didn't and don't want the one we are in now in Iraq. But it is simply unacceptable for nuclear weapons to be detonated in the US and that is something we must prevent at any cost. Better to act to pre-empt such a scenario than to have to respond to it, because the only sensible response to multiple nukes killing hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans is to level most or all of the Middle East where the threat was born and raised.

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