A few nights ago I was watching Fox News. They had the French author Bernard Henri-Levy discussing the situation in Iran. One phrase he used caught my attention, “we’re in 1938,” he said. I fear that he’s correct. Unless we (by which I mean we of the West, as we are all in this together) take immediate and appropriate action, we shall soon find ourselves plunged into a war of intensity unimaginable in the modern age.

We make a great mistake if we do not take the words of our enemies at face value. Iran’s leaders are not post-modern scholars, nor are they Machiavellian schemers. They mean what they say. When a man declares that he intends to kill you, it’s best to take them at their word and to respond accordingly. When Iran’s leaders declare their intention to launch a Second Holocaust and to launch attacks against the West, we’d better respond appropriately.

But, what is an appropriate response? There are many serious objections to the prospect of a military assault against Iran that are certainly worthy of consideration and response.

First, there is the observation that Iran’s nuclear program is widely dispersed and would be both difficult and costly in lives to attack.

Second, there is the real possibility of an asymmetrical Iranian response in the form of terrorist attacks on targets in the West and in efforts to disrupt shipping throughout the Persian Gulf.

Third, there is the certainty that Iran would respond to any attack upon it by attempting to provoke a mass uprising by Shiites in Iraq and, quite possibly, might launch a direct assault against US forces in Iraq.
Fourth, Iran might respond to an attack by the United States by launching an attack – either with long-range missiles or through proxies – against Israel.

So how, over such objections, can I still support an attack against Iran? Well, it’s easier than it might appear at first blush. There is a simple and elegant solution which, I think, could solve multiple strategic problems in a single rush.

First of all, let me state, that I don’t think that Iran and Iraq can be considered in isolation. Fundamentally they are part of a single battlefield. Iran is no more neutral territory in the Iraq conflict than Laos or Cambodia were in Vietnam. Thus, while it is true that Iran can take advantage of a US offensive against it to launch attacks in Iraq, the inverse is also true: the United States can use the time afforded by a distracted world and domestic media to radically tilt the balance in Iraq.

Consider, for a moment, the most likely outcome of an effort by Iran to launch a massive offensive in Iraq. If Iran were to launch an all-out Shiite uprising against American and Iraqi government forces, we would likely see a modern-day reenactment of the Tet Offensive – a battle which would result in the annihilation of the attacking forces but which, thanks to a hostile global and traitorous domestic media would be presented to the public as a massive defeat for Allied arms. Iran can likely launch such an attack at any moment. Wouldn’t it be far better if it were launched while the media was distracted by images of Mushroom Clouds over the western deserts of Iran? This is especially true when one considers the fact that the combination of a distracted media and a chaotic military situation is likely to allow Allied forces to take more… liberties… with regard to their human rights policies than might otherwise be allowable.

The problem of Iran’s hardened nuclear facilities is easily solved if we choose to use nuclear weapons. Simply put, we can drop nuclear bombs on anything that even looks like a nuclear facility and, afterwards, no one will really be able to conclusively establish what was there to begin with. This will be extremely useful in the off-chance that, like Saddam’s Iraq, Iran proves to actually have a far-less advanced WMD program than we believed: no one will be able to prove the truth one way or another and, given the gravity of our own actions, a majority of people will generally accept our word for it.

As I said elsewhere – and I fully believe this to be true – there’s no effective difference in the political cost between the use of a single nuclear bomb and the use of fifty. If we drop even one nuke on Iran, a certain percentage of the public is going to go absolutely nuts. They’re not going to be physically capable of getting any crazier or any more violent. Thus, if we use one nuclear bomb, we might as well use fifty or one hundred. No one in the general public (or the media, for that matter) really understands the reality of nuclear weapons or the difference between a 5KT explosion deep underground and a 1MT surface blast.

The above reality solves a number of other problems. Namely, once we start dropping any nuclear bombs, no one else is really going to care what else we do. Thus, the United States Navy will be perfectly free to sink anything that moves and can carry a machine gun and the Air Force will be able to simply eliminate any large Iranian ground forces caught in the field.

There’s another political reason to use nuclear weapons (and preferably a lot of them). To put it simply, I’d describe this as a “spin-the-wheel” situation. Political physics will only tolerate a chasm between major factions of a certain size. Thus, by dropping one hundred nuclear bombs on Iran, we’ll end up in a situation where the position of the President’s “moderate” critics will be to argue that he should have used fifty bombs instead.

Additionally, such a strike would be politically helpful for the President at this point in time. If would have the support of virtually every Republican in the land, along with a certain percentage of the Democrat Party. The radical left would find itself even further isolated from the political mainstream.

It’s time to act against Iran. We can’t wait for the day that Iran’s Uranium Dancer Team takes to the stage to announce the Islamic Republic’s first successful nuclear test – by then it will be too late. Now is the time to show the world that America retains the will to act. It’s time to remind all of America’s enemies and would-be enemies that the United States has the power to wipe their nations off the very face of the Earth and the wherewithal to do so.