By Paul Avallone, author of Tattoo Zoo
Save yourself the grief and high blood pressure, tune out all the back-and-forth discussion of a no-nuke agreement with Iran. It’s a sideshow, it’s a utopian shell game. No matter what is now said or argued or eventually signed, Iran is going to nuke up, period.
It may be in a few months, or a year, whatever; time is irrelevant, it isn’t a question of time. The answer is in the question: Who’s going to stop them?
Not the us, America. Serious, strangling sanctions are as good as dead, with Russia quick to be soon selling the Iranians S-300 missile defenses. Even without those missiles, military action by us isn’t on any rational person’s table. No matter how misguided George W’s Iraq War proved to be, it was invaluable for the lesson learned: The utter folly of waging a land war in a country four times the size and population of Iraq—Iran. Not to mention, fighting against a culture and people many times more nationalistic and warrior-hearted than those of Iraq. Lest we confuse the Iraqis and the Iranians; one’s Arab, the other Persian. (Let the ethnically politically correct dispute that, though they’d best not waste their breath.)
And if you think the Israelis are going to stop the Iranians, put down the bong, your mind’s clouded with unicorn dreams. The massive aerial attack necessary to devastate Iran’s dispersed nuclear sites (whether from Israeli nukes or conventional bombs) would be an act of war, plain and simple, undeniable, which would be condemned by the world order (read: United Nations, et al.) and, more importantly, it would not be backed by the U.S, neither militarily nor diplomatically.
If that’s a shocker to you, that we will not back Israel, I told you, put down the bong. Focus clearly, first, on President Obama and what you know of him, disregarding what spews from his mouth, his words are meaningless blather; will he back Israel?
Are you through laughing?
Now focus on the next president, whomever he/she might be. Remember from above about the S-300 missile defense and the land mass and population of Iran and the tremendous cost in blood and treasure of such a war, and then tell me with a straight face that the next president will back Israel on an all-out attack.
Case closed, Jack: Iran is soon going to be nuclear.
So, bong-free, are you troubled that a nuclear Iran will make good on its promises of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”? Reasoning, are you, that next on Iran’s “Death To” list will be Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, and you-name-it?
Not to worry. Iranians aren’t stupid. They know that a nuclear attack on tiny Israel, even resulting in the entire land laid waste, would be revenged by Israel with a total deep-silo- and submarine-based nuclear counterstrike. (And who knows how many nuke warheads the Israelis have?) Yes indeed, Middle East nuclear Armageddon, a return to the good ol’ days of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), and the Iranians know it.
See, with a clear head we can see that it’s really nothing to worry about. MAD worked out quite well once, did it not, from the 1960s on, between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, to the point of comfort that, though it exists still today, no one even thinks of it, let alone frets about it.
Sure, you argue, even with an Israeli assurance of MAD, the Persians may want to feel their jihadist oats and test the Jews’ mettle. Again, no problem. To prevent that Iranian brazen foolishness, we Americans must lay out today a clear red line. Not an Obama red line scrawled in chalk that washes away in a drizzle. A Churchill-Roosevelt-Stalin red line laid down in enamel oil paint that withstands a torrential nuclear rain.
It would be a red line that would in treaty promise our allies that we would have their nuclear backs. That we would respond in kind to a nuclear attack upon one or any of them.
Promised in a blood-red line that we would hold over Iran like the Sword of Damocles, even taunting them, “Go ahead, we dare you.”
It would not be MAD, we won’t call it that, because Iran could never out-nuke us and could thus never “mutually destroy” us.
Instead, we’ll call it A-DOPE. How’s that for an even more in-your-face proud challenge? Assured Destruction Of the Persian Empire.
I feel better already, don’t you? Who cares about any Iranian nuclear debate in echo chambers, and ambassadorial handshakes across craps tables, and agreements written in sand at low tide? I’m comforted knowing that we’ve got A-DOPE. The hard-and-fast threat that if the Iranians nuke Israel or any other ally, we turn their entire land into black obsidian glass.
Hmmmm, or wait. Perhaps it is I who’s sucking on the bong. Clear-headed, the sober question becomes: Even with someone other than war-repellant Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama as president, do we 21st century Americans have the stomach to do just that, to act upon A-DOPE?
Do we? Do we have the stomach to turn any land into glass?
Would even Harry Truman today?
You’ll have to find your own answers. Count on one thing: the Iranians who are soon to have nuclear weapons are asking those questions and, concerning their own possible first-strike upon Israel, they’re most likely assessing us as having very weak stomachs indeed.
Regardless the words blathered and written and sworn to, weak stomachs in deed.
Yes, in the end it is deeds that matter, not words.
Paul Avallone spent three-plus years in Afghanistan as a Green Beret then an embedded civilian journalist. His big, literary novel of the Afghan War, Tattoo Zoo, was published in December.