WHAT SHOULD BE DONE ABOUT IRAN?

excerpts from "Getting Serious About Iran: A Military Option" by Arthur Herman
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/getting-serious-about-iran--a-military-option-10135?page=2

[excerpt]
. . . the most immediate menace Iran poses is not nuclear but conventional in nature. How might it be dealt with militarily, and is it conceivable that both perils could be dealt with at once?

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[excerpt]
. . . the military option. That there is plentiful warrant for the exercise of this option—in Iran’s serial defiance of UN resolutions, in its declared genocidal intentions toward Israel, another member of the United Nations, and in the fact of its harboring, supporting, and training of international terrorists—could not be clearer. Unfortunately, though, current debate has become stuck on the issue of possible air strikes against Iran’s nuclear program, and whether such strikes can or cannot halt that program’s further development. Optimists argue they can; pessimists, including those highlighted in Time’s cover story, throw up a myriad of objections.

The most common such objection is that the ayatollahs, having learned the lesson of 25 years ago when Israel took out Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor at Osirak, have dispersed the most vital elements of their uranium-enrichment project among perhaps 30 hardened and well-protected sites. According to Time’s military sources, air sorties would thus have to reach roughly 1,500 “aim points,” contending with sophisticated air-defense systems along the way. As against this, others, including the strategic analyst Edward Luttwak in Commentary (“Three Reasons Not to Bomb Iran—Yet,” May 2006), argue convincingly that it is hardly necessary to hit all or even the majority of Iran’s sites in order to set back its nuclear program by several years. . . .
© 2008 Commentary Inc.

"one possible scenario for military action" from the Arthur Herman article at Commentary can be found at http://islamicdangerfu.blogspot.com/2008/07/one-possible-scenario-for-military.html

For the entire Commentary article by Arthur Herman see https://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/getting-serious-about-iran--a-military-option-10135?page=2