I understood your point, I just think you’re underestimating the capability our of intelligence and defense agencies to know about and/or trace that back to the parent country that sponsored such action:

http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/News/2002/10-17-722025.shtml

We’re often led to believe we are at imminent risk to justify further spending and actions to secure ourselves. War on Terror, see also TARP, War on Drugs, Global Warming, mass shootings (which seem to always happen in gun-free zones), etc, etc, etc.

I don’t doubt that Iran is pursuing weapons, but I think they are doing so more as a defensive power play and as a balance against the other nuclear power in the region rather than anything approaching aggression. They aren’t that stupid. But they also saw how we treated Pakistan and India after they announced their nukes (after secret development programs)… The rules change substantially once a country is “in the club”, it’s just getting in the club that is the problem. But we can’t forcefully keep technology away from them without significant blowback down the road. At best, all we’re doing is pushing more countries towards the BRIC countries, and guaranteeing that this will be the Chinese century, if that isn’t the case already. At worst we would be guaranteeing major attacks on American soil. And it will be our own short-sightedness, fear, and greed that brings that about. Human nature at it’s finest.

Rogue nukes are indeed a concern, but in most cases they are not a justification for preemptive action, in my opinion (But then again I’m not much of a hawk). If you do believe it’s sufficient cause for preemptive action, then I would question again why Pakistan and North Korea are not at the top of the list instead of Iran, since both of them actually *have* nuclear weapons, whereas Iran is at least several years away. Could the difference in how we’re approaching them have something to do with the natural resources of those three countries?

“If that happens, then we turn their entire country into green glass…”

No. You’re missing my point. There’s no way that Iran is going to attack us if their “fingerprints” are going to be on the bomb. My point is that the government could get one of their terrorist minions to do it. Put a few nukes on a barge and send it down the Hudson river. The Iranian government would then deny all knowledge of it.
(Most likely they would go after Israel first).

If that happens, then we turn their entire country into green glass… but preemptive strikes are counterproductive actions born of fear. And we all know what Yoda said about fear. Anger, hate, suffering, etc. The only thing that is an existential threat to our country is ourselves.

If we were really serious about nukes we should’ve given A.Q. Khan more than a slap on the wrist. But that took a backseat to politics and courting Pakistan’s influence. That’s worked out so well, with our puppet Musharraf getting thrown out and the population becoming more radicalized.

There are many reasons to justify action against Iran: new market for Western companies, control of energy resources, keeping it away from BRIC, further destabilization of the region to allow Israel to dominate further… all of which I don’t necessarily agree with but at least see the logic behind. The only logic I see behind the fear of their nukes is as cover for one of these other reasons. And if we can’t be honest about our reasoning behind huge strategical decisions then that is a hint we shouldn’t be doing them. Idealistic I know, but naive it is not.

@cvienne

I don’t think we have to go it alone, but we do have to focus less on negotiating with other countries through the barrel of a gun. That was one of the interesting dynamics about the Cold War.. militarily, we were at a stalement, so we had to compete with communism on the strength of our ideas (and the size of our wallet). Now if anyone disagrees, we take the easy route and just bash them over the head. That breeds resentment that costs us in the long run.

If we had been less belligerent this past decade, our corporations might have the deals to develop Iran’s energy fields instead of Russia and China. But as it stands, their investment in Iran’s energy fields pretty much guarantees that we (or Israel) can’t take any significant military action against them, even if we wanted to, without starting WW4. We can defend our interests without being so offensive (in both senses of the word).

I totally agree that this is mostly about human nature and control of finite resources. I just think that if we try to lay claim to everything we’ll end up with nothing.