I Think I See The Confusion...

Atrios seems to think that M.A.D. will solve all our problems with Iran:

I don't want Iran to have nukes. I don't think that's a good thing for the world. I certainly didn't want Pakistan or India to have nukes. But is a nuclear Iran really a threat to us? Certainly an Iran-with-nukes could blow the hell out of a city or two, but an Iran that did such a thing would pretty much cease to exist. It isn't mutually assured destruction, it's you fuck with us a little bit and YOU NO LONGER LIVE BITCHES!

The problem, you see, is what exactly "fuck with us a little bit" means. The Iranians have been "fucking with us" more than a little bit since 1979, and they seem to still be nicely radiation-free. Iran has been exporting and funding terror for a long time, and has yet to pay any serious consequence for it. There has been hope, since 9/11, that the mullarchy would collapse of its own unpopularity, but so far it's been more like 1905 than 1917 over there. And now they're going nuclear.

Atrios may sound bellicose now (do you notice how he sounds like one of those stereotype SAC generals from the sixties, babbling about "acceptable losses"?), but you can bet he'd be against doing anything against Iran once they've made their first mushroom cloud. Hell, the Bush Administration will oppose action at that point. And that's why the mullahs want them. Nations don't go nuclear to blow anything up; they go nuclear to join the exclusive club of countries that may not be attacked or invaded.

Nuclear Iran means an Iran that will be a worldwide troublemaker for a long time to come. Nuclear Iran means the Iranian people will suffer under the weight of tyranny for a long time to come. Nuclear Iran means a Cold War with Terror with the extra wild card of terrorists who will suddenly have access to nuclear weapons. Is Atrios proposing that we blame Iran if a dirty-bomb is strapped to the Lincoln Memorial? Is Atrios proposing that we launch nuclear weapons against Iran if a dirty-bomb goes off in Times Square? And if he is, could we have him on record on that? Wouldn't want any confusion on the order of the Clinton Administration's determination of what "regime change" means...

By the way, I know that he wrote that this isn't "mutually assured destruction," and in a sense, he's quite right. But the argument that the enemy won't launch because he faces obliteration is the same.