OPINION:
Iran’s rapacious quest for nuclear weapons is more than a mere dilemma. If the Islamists in Tehran are successful, the balance of power in the world’s most productive oil region will change - and not to the benefit of the West.
The military option against Iran, even when the far more pugnacious Bush administration gave it voice, was never very credible. The Iranians understand Western culture very well and have employed a rope-a-dope strategy against our negotiators for years as their uranium-enriching centrifuges whirr. They have called our bluff.
Better to abandon the fiction of a military strike and buckle down to a multiheaded policy involving tough sanctions and other approaches, such as more computer viruses and black ops. Assassination of nuclear scientists, never a comfortable topic in polite company, is nevertheless more acceptable than nuclear weapons controlled by Islamist radicals or a full-scale war against Iran with its attendant disruption of global oil flows and assured progressive hysteria here at home.
Of course, if everything short of military force is tried and deemed a failure, then we can consider the “kaboom” approach.
PAUL BLOUSTEIN
Cincinnati
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