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• Tuesday, July 31, 2007 09:05 AM

  Minor footnote? Don't think so.

  How about the future shams? These people need to be exposed before they do more damage.

  Pollack: Finally, and only as part of a new containment of Iran, the United States should look hard at the possibility of waging a targeted air campaign intended to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities and so set back the entire program. At present, this policy has little to recommend it since Western intelligence agencies do not believe they know enough about the Iranian nuclear program to know all of the sites to be hit; there is reason to believe that even strikes that successfully destroyed the entire program as it currently exists would not set Iran’s efforts back for very long since Iran is probably far enough along in its efforts to be able to reconstitute quickly; and Iran can do considerable damage to Western interests, with terrorist attacks, subversion, and clandestine operations against Coalition forces in Iraq. However, in time, Western intelligence efforts might be able to answer most, if not all, of the uncertainties regarding such a campaign. In addition, if Iran has demonstrated such recalcitrance that it is withstanding multilateral sanctions to try to hang on to its nuclear program, U.S. policy-makers should consider the possibility that Iran’s intentions are truly nefarious, and so should be stopped even if there are considerable risks and costs involved in trying to do so. Testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, September 2005

  http://www.brookings.edu/views/testimony/pollack/20050929.pdf

  Kagan & O'Hanlon: Sound US grand strategy must proceed from the recognition that, over the next few years and decades, the world is going to be a very unsettled and quite dangerous place, with Al Qaeda and its associated groups as a subset of a much larger set of worries. The only serious response to this international environment is to develop armed forces capable of protecting America’s vital interests throughout this dangerous time. Doing so requires a military capable of a wide range of missions—including not only deterrence of great power conflict in dealing with potential hotspots in Korea, the Taiwan Strait, and the Persian Gulf but also associated with a variety of Special Forces activities and stabilization operations. For today’s US military, which already excels at high technology and is increasingly focused on re-learning the lost art of counterinsurgency, this is first and foremost a question of finding the resources to field a large-enough standing Army and Marine Corps to handle personnel intensive missions such as the ones now under way in Iraq and Afghanistan. (From the April, 2007 “Grand Plan” Glenn linked to)

  —EJ Read EJ's other letters
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