Again, please explain to me how you equivocate non-involvement to appeasement. Are you a real lawyer ? It bewilders belief.
I like Israel, but that doesn't mean i want to spend another $2 trillion and 4,500 American lives to wage a war of aggression as a pre-emptive strike to "protect" Israel.
The only one of us who is equivocating is you. You are trying to distinguish between not getting involved and appeasing, but in some cases--and this is one of them--the two amount to the same thing. The best-known example of appeasement is probably the agreement by Britain and France in 1938 to sacrifice Czechoslovakia to Hitler in the vain hope of buying peace. Someone who wanted to excuse that policy, which was followed in less than a year by the outbreak of full-scale war it was supposed to avert, could just as accurately call it "non-involvement" as "appeasement."
The same is true with the Islamist regime in Tehran. But instead of being inspired by dreams of racial supremacy as the Nazis were, the Khomeinists' goal is religious supremacy. Their regime is no less murderous, anti-Semitic, or anti-American than it was 36 years ago when Khomeini, himself a murdering, Jew-hating jihadist, established it. It has the blood of thousands of American civilians and servicemen on its hands--a fact its defenders conveniently ignore.
Just the anti-tank mines Iran supplied to terrorists in Iraq and trained them to use killed at least 500 American servicemen and seriously injured hundreds more. In 2007, Iranian operatives planned an attack in Karbala in which Iraqis under their control, wearing U.S. uniforms and speaking English, burst into a meeting and seized four U.S. soldiers. Later that day, they murdered these men while they were still handcuffed together. Those were war crimes. So were the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and the bombings of two Jewish centers there two years later, both directed by Iran, which killed a total of 114 people. So was the bombing at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 U.S. airmen. A long series of terrorist attacks in other places by Hizballah and other Iranian-controlled terrorist groups has killed many hundreds more American civilians.
These are the jihadist bastards you would allow to get nuclear weapons, a few of which they might well make available to fanatic Hizballah suicide squads. Maybe you are taken in by the fact some of them wear western suits, speak good English, and know how to smile and be gracious at diplomatic cocktail parties. I am not.
Your gross exaggeration of the costs of a pre-emptive strike to disarm Iran, which apparently applies numbers taken from a decade-long ground war in Iraq, cannot be taken seriously. It is false and silly, cooked up as a flimsy excuse for doing nothing. There are only five facilities that would need to be destroyed to put paid to Iran's nuclear weapons program--the uranium enrichment centrifuge galleries at Natanz and Fordow; the reactor station at Bushehr; the heavy water/future plutonium production facility at Arak; and the uranium conversion plant at Isfahan. They are all quite vulnerable to heavy guided bombs, and it would not take very many.
Reliable, objective studies like Anthony Cordesman's estimate, for example, that as few as four 2,000-lb. bombs placed on vital parts of the Arak facility would ruin it beyond repair. Two tactical aircraft could do that job in a single strike. And we know that the earth and concrete covering the two large galleries at Natanz would easily be penetrated by the 30,000 lb. bomb. One of two on top of each structure--two to four B-2's, in a single strike one night--would make junk of the thousands of centrifuges at the site. Tests of this very powerful bomb have shown a few of them would reliably destroy even the deeply buried gallery at Fordow.
What the proponents of "non-involvement" ignore is that Israel, justifiably having no faith at all in the anti-Semitic Barack Obama, may yet become convinced that a nuclear-armed Iran is a threat to its existence too serious to tolerate. Israel, though, does not have either the 30,000 lb. bomb or any aircraft that could carry it, and yet an attack that left Fordow intact would probably not be very effective. The only weapon Israel has that could make sure of that vital facility is a nuclear bomb delivered by ballistic missile. However unthinkable it may seem to us to use a weapon like that to disarm Iran, I am sure it would not be unthinkable to Israelis if they believed their nation's existence depended on it. Because a nuclear weapon used that way would have to be set off at ground level, the enormous volume of irradiated soil sent into the air would be sure to kill a great many people living downwind, as it came back down as "fallout."
