"...I did not support going into Iraq..."
We are in agreement.
We are not in agreement.
"...What do you think a war with Iran would look like?..."
If Iran launched nukes, their Adversaries (NATO and Israel, at a minimum) would probably drop an equal number on top of Iran, cooking-down a few cities and reducing the number of towns in which large-scale urban guerrilla warfare operations would be required, but, that still leaves a lot of the country un-touched, and that aspect of such a war would resemble the latest Iraq War in many respects, most likely.
"...They are an advanced industrialized nation with formidable weapons and thirty years of certainty that our nation and Israel occasionally wants to kill a significant portion of their population bombing their infrastructure flat..."
That's right... take
their side in the argument... the phrase: '
Giving aid and comfort to the enemy' comes to mind.
I do not recall the President of the United States nor the President nor Prime Minister of Israel exciting their people by publicly declaring that Iran was the 'Great Satan' nor by invading the Iranian Embassy and taking 50 embassy staff as hostages nor by declaring that Iran should be wiped off the map.
Epic Fail.
"...Even a a limited air war would be hideously expensive in lives and money with no good coming out of it..."
You fail to take into account that you are dealing with a government whose uppermost layer consists of medieval, fundamentalist, dogmatic, martyrdom-encouraging religious clerics, presiding over a branch of a belief-system whose very founders and earliest heroes embraced religious warfare and who promised great rewards in the afterlife for suffering a heroic warrior's death in this life.
One need look no further than the Martyrdom Complex suffered by the Iranian population during the course of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, in which the Iranian Ayatollahs sent scores of thousands of their boys 'over the top' in World War I doughboy style to certain death in the face of machine-gun fire and armor and artillery and airstrike counterfire.
The subject of Iranian-style Martyrdom, and how that plays-out in their modern-day society and culture - can be studied using a number of sources, but the obligatory Wiki article on the subject gets one off to a good start, using understandable and digestible verbiage, without investing a ton of time on it...
Martyrdom in Iran - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
...and it begs the question:
"Do we, as the Big Guns who can (unfairly, perhaps, but effectively, nevertheless) refuse Nuclear Arms to a prospective member of the Nuclear Club, really want to admit a Fundamentalist Theocratic Autocracy to the Nuclear Club?"
Really?
Have we lost our friggin' minds?
This is just
BEGGING for trouble in the future, for ourselves in a few years, or our kids or grandkids. Why not just demonstrate some backbone now, and say 'No', and avoid even the
POTENTIAL for Iranian nuclear mischief in future, in any of a thousand-and-one scenarios that we cannot envision at present? Why do that to ourselves?
In the interests of fairness?
SCREW fair.
When Fairness and (future) Mortal Safety are at-odds, Mortal Safety needs to win-out, every time.
Fair has nothing to do with it.
"...Good god, what a bunch of idiots some people are thinking that anyone would benefit from such an adventure other than the slimy war profiteers at the pentagon."
Or, alternatively, what idiots some people are, for taking sides with The Adversary, and for metaphorically hiding behind a couple of thousand miles of ocean-water separating them from their future antagonists, and failing to realize that we are in the opening decade(s) of a resurrected struggle between The West (secularized Christendom) and a re-awakening, radical, militant, and re-militarizing Islam, of which this Iranian Shiite nucleus may end-up becoming one of the leading players over time.
