I have a hard time understanding how Iran is any kind of threat to the world.
This is due to your lack of knowledge of the current middle eastern situation.
Even with a nuclear bomb, if they are somehow successful at building one to completion, they can only blow something up once. After that, they get annihilated.
I have gone thru this so many times....sigh...
First off, since the iranian fascists refuse IAEA inspections of their facilities as required by the NPT(see my sig question to the moron KK), there is no way a nuke detonation in the middle east can be traced back to iran.
Second, the other major concern is not that iran will fire an ICBM with a nuclear payload, it is that they could hand a nuke to one of their numerous terrorist proxies working to de-stabilize the middle east, and then claim "it wasn't ours" - and again, without inspections there is no way to trace it back to them. They could claim Hamas bought it on the black market....
Further, the protection of a nuclear umbrella would give hamas and hezbollah enormous cover and clout to strengthen the size and ferocity of their attacks against both israel - and the West in general. They would no longer have to fear a strong military response with iran's nuclear-powered backing,
Lastly, the ability of iran to be able to launch ICBMs into europe carrying nuclear payloads is a terrible thought - just ask japan what it is like to live next to an insane asylum run by a nuclear-armed maniac.
The debate is really just a question of what's more acceptable...pre-emptively attacking them with the possibility that they had NOTHING, thereby wasting thousands of lives and probably hundreds of billions of dollars if not more...or falling back, and they potentially DO have something and they blow something up somewhere, only to be subsequently annihilated.
They are ALREADY running thousands of centrifuges; it is no longer a question of if, but when - they will have enough enriched uranium - and plutonium from their Arak heavy water plant - to construct both bombs as well as nuclear-tipped warheads.
What the advocates of a pre-emptive attack are going to have to forgive me for, is my hesitancy to get behind such a thing in the face of the massive failure the pre-Iraq war intelligence, and assumptions, turned out to be.
Having worked in a clandestine capacity for so long, perhaps I am more forgiving of intelligence estimates, as almost every major Western and arabic intelligence agency believed iraq had WMD. This was not purely a CIA error.
Further, if you look at most of the major errors the CIA has made with respect to these scenarios over the past 10-15 years, it has been to mis-judge the other way, as in the cases of both india and pakistan, who the Agency thought would take FAR longer to develop nuke weapons.
Funny how I do not hear the pacifists mentioning
those mistakes.
I'm just not sure I can stomach another one of those kinds of mistakes. Refusing inspections does not make you guilty. It didn't make Saddam guilty, and it doesn't make Ahmadinejad guilty.
LOL, Saddam was guilty of much worse - he DID use WMD on the kurds, remember? And I have news for you, the CIA makes a shitload of mistakes, and correct calls as well - they just don't make the headline of the NY Times.
I don't agree with the UN's existence PERIOD, let alone our membership. So if UN inspectors said they demanded to come into my country and inspect me, I'd tell them to suck a fat dick.
Except iran signed the NPT accord, which legally binds them to inspections...
