Dog Bites Man, Chases Mailman, Urinates on Hydrant

Tell the all boys on our side to be on high alert, take out the nuclear resources with stealthy kisses and see what shakes loose - if they want to fight, they will and IDF can turn loose on Syria and hizbullah at the same time but this time without interference from the UN and world opinion as dictated by arabs. Let's see: we got aircraft on the left flank in Iraq,
aircraft on the right flank in Afghanistan,
aircraft on the southern flank via carriers
aircraft on the northern flank via Germany and whoever else wants to get into the fight and with lots of missles and other goodies hither and yon. I suppose the submariners would want to get in on the brawl with a few licks and send the Iranian navy to the bottom. It's finally show-down and throw-down time with the mullahs and their pals. allah will finally get his chance to sort them out this time. That's just my take. I'm a former grunt - what the hell do I know?

unfortunately, nothing will be done about it...
I do like goesh's plan very much but then I am a civilian, what the hell do I know...

Don't forget we have aircraft in Turkey to Iran's Northwest, and in the FSU republics. Basically we have them totally surrounded and could hit them from airbases at Al-Udeid as well right across the Straits of Hormuz.

A three week air/TLAM war promulgated by USAF and the USN could make mincemeat of most of their assets. It is only a question of political will. Which we apparently lack. War is coming sooner or later, it is just a question of how many losses the West is going to take.

One thing I get from discussions is that people seem to think that we either go the diplomatic / appeasement route or get into a protracted ground war with them.

Is there any particular reason why we can't just bomb their nuke facilities?

The risk you take by bombing the nuke facilities is that you will have bombed "milk factories". A better course of action, purely from a political point of view, would be to capure the nuclear facility and show it to the world. Of course, that isn't an option if the facility is in a hard-to-reach place.

Iran's rejection, vague as it was, certainly was news. It just wasn't unexpected news.

I believe the Iranian nuclear facilities are either deeply buried or hidden amongst civilians. No wonder Hezbollah is so good a luanching rockets from hospital parking lots!!

So if we go in and bomb the crap out of them we kill babies, that is a great PR strategy these days.

I agree the way to do it right is a massive air/ground raid on one of their facilities. Grab evidence, destroy the machines, kill the scientists and then leave.

Don't forget that the intel agencies supplying target data would be the same ones who did such a great job assessing Hezbollah's capabilities.
Getting less than all of it would be worse than not attacking at all.
Our options are simply not that good.

Doug, wouldn't it make more sense to capture the scientists and get them to work for us? A la Werner von Braun after ww2?

To make a mountain out of a molehill... Eleanor