Iran: Is war a viable option?
from The Week  http://www.theweekmagazine.com/news/articles/news.aspx?ArticleID=1300
 
 Iran has left the civilized world with just two options, said Alan Caruba in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Either we stand by, as the “certifiably insane” new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, defies United Nations inspectors and builds a nuclear bomb. Or the U.S. and Israel launch a “massive bombing campaign” to set back Iran’s apocalyptic ambitions a decade or two. Make no mistake: The choice is that stark. Ahmadinejad is openly calling for the destruction of Israel—“no ambiguity there”—and if he gets nuclear warheads, he’ll mount them on missiles and fire them at Tel Aviv. He would probably also slip a nuke or two to al Qaida, said the Detroit News in an editorial. And then it would only be a matter of time before New York or Washington were incinerated. “The Free World would never be able to rest easy again.”
 
 If only it were that simple, said Ivo Daalder and Philip Gordon in The Washington Post. The Iranian nuclear program has been spread out among dozens of sites—specifically to limit the effectiveness of airstrikes. We could destroy a few critical facilities, but we’d be left guessing what we’d missed. “And are we prepared for what Iran could do in return?” Working through sympathetic Shiites, Tehran could “wreak havoc” in Iraq and Afghanistan, tipping both fledgling democracies into chaos. By blockading the Straits of Hormuz, Iran could shrink the world’s oil supply by more than a third, sending oil past $100 a barrel and wrecking the global economy. And we could surely expect “retaliatory strikes” on U.S. soil from Iran’s network of sponsored terrorist groups. The “dangers of an Iranian bomb are clear”—but so are the dangers of bombing Iran.
 
 So why not follow Iran’s example? said Mark Steyn in the Chicago Sun-Times. By its “sponsorship of terror groups in Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority,” not to mention the insurgency in Iraq, Tehran has put on a clinic in the art of destabilizing nations from within. So why not give Iranian leaders “a taste of their own medicine”? For a fraction of both the cost and the risk of an all-out assault, we could “upgrade Iran’s somewhat lethargic dissidents into something a little livelier.” A popular uprising would sorely distract Ahmadinejad and the fundamentalist ayatollahs from their nuclear ambitions. And as we’ve learned in Iraq, it only takes a few thousand insurgents to give a shaky government a giant headache. “If they can destabilize us, we can destabilize them.”