Forgive me for being skeptical, but I am not jumping for joy with relief over the recent agreement with Iran to freeze it's uranium enrichment program. The agreement is likely more tactical on all parties part than meant to guarantee long term regional stability.
> Iran delays or forestalls an Israeli attack on it's facilities, but knows it can continue again when the world is looking elsewhere (remember North Korea anyone or Pakistan)
> Israel, under tremendous pressure from the US not to attack Iran, gets back in American good graces and buys more time to prepare for any eventual strike.
> The United States under a president that is perceived internationally as weak and indecisive can tout a diplomatic victory to the home audience and avoids what it really wants which is another war in the Middle East.
However based on the North Korean example there is no reason to believe that this deal will prevent an eventual Iranian nuclear bomb(s) and a resulting larger conflict. The United States may not want another war but if Israel believes it's existence is threatened, there will be a war, and likely a wider regional one.
Regardless of what the hawks of either the Republican's or Democrats say about 'all options being on the table', the truth is they are not, not in a serious way and not for several years.
Why? While it can be said the US and it's allies had a right, even an obligation to over throw the Taliban in Afghanistan, (the process largely botched after 2002), the world's most powerful military has essentially exhausted itself in the past dozen years with it's political masters ignoring the Duke of Wellington's dictum that "big countries don't fight small wars".
There is no appetite in the US high command for another war, after over a decade of conflict the US Armed forces gained valuable counter insurgency experience but any war with Iran would be largely conventional, and fought by an exhausted rank and file.
More importantly than all that, the American Public has a say in all of this, and they don't want any more Mid East wars. The Us public will not support a large scale attack on Iran. As learned again and again, any President that goes to war with less than overwhelming public support (I"m not talking 55 - 60% - I mean more like 70 - 80%), automatically hamstrings the war effort and ends up fighting a political rearguard action rather than the enemy abroad.
So what should be done? Well the realist in me thinks it's too late, the nuclear genie is already out of the bottle. What SHOULD have been done - if it could have - would have been to make the prospect or the act of going nuclear so terrible, so final for any regime trying to do so that the response would have been seen as a warning to others.
Rather than spending blood and treasure fighting long wars half halfheartedly, having gone after North Korea or earlier Pakistan in a devastating manner. One that surely would have been awful at the time for those involved would have served warning to others of the consequences of going down the nuclear road. Rather a painful lesson now, than 15 years from now we leave our children to deal with a world of a couple dozen nuclear armed nations most of whom would be hostile to us and held hostage by their parents generation's lack of early action.
The thought process behind occasional signs you see at peace marches proclaiming "no more Hiroshima's" may be well intention-ed, but may also be indicative of a mindset that will guarantee more Hiroshima's, and eventually one on our own continent.
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