Responding to Hugh Hewitt's "Arguments Against Striking Iran" Post

Major Mike

My reply to Hugh's request for thoughts on his post entitled "Arguments Against Striking Iran"...

The Arguments Against the Arguments Against Attacking Iraq

False Assumption #1…The Military is Incapable of doing the job.

Conventional Wisdom…there is more than one way to skin a cat.

Destruction, denial of use, barricade, harassment and interdiction…are all ways to preclude the use of a facility or an operational site. Destruction is not the only way to preclude the Iranians from continuing their development of nuclear material.

Access to and from known sites can be denied through direct air interdiction, air-delivered scatterable mines, continuous harassment, site blockading, and supply vehicle targeting. Eventually a combination of these activities will result in the “virtual” denial of use of the facility; stymieing or halting production of nuclear material. Targeting entrances, ventilation systems, electrical service systems and power generation systems would all have the same…denial of use, result.

The activities listed above also assume that we still have not cracked the nut on deep penetrating conventional munitions. Although I am not privy to any specific weapons programs relating to the development of such weapons, I know enough about the compartmentalization of classified programs to know that such programs would be “black” enough that the likes of Korb and Alter would have no clue about their existence.

And if such programs were viable, simply keeping their existence unconfirmed would be a critical priority. The secrecy of such a program would be critical in building an overconfidence in our enemies about the security of their underground facilities. The more we “fail” at development of penetrating weapons the more secure our enemies feel about the safety of their existing facilities, and the more vulnerable their facilities become to our weapons. This would be the merging of Psychological Operations and Operational Security in order to make the chances for success of an operational attack logarithmically greater. Korb and Alter likely think that most of us were last in our class in some public University, and not capable of complex operational planning, or the devious recombination of weapons, in order to make the seemingly impossible, possible.

Name one military technological problem that we have focused on for over 20 years that we have failed to solve. Just because the program has yet to be leaked to the NYT and Korb, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Possibilities include… rocket assisted, hyper-sonic penetrators, with time delayed tail fusing systems; sonic systems that target sensitive equipment, Electro-Magnetic Pulse weapons.


False Assumption #2…Striking Iran will cause Iran to strike against our troops in Iran.

Conventional Debating Requirement…Significance is an essential element of an argument.

There is little more that Iran could do in Iraq to support the insurgency than they are already doing. The nature of the insurgency, a semi-guerilla action, necessarily keeps the force levels low for the insurgents. Elevated levels of activity expose their cells to a higher level of detection.

Greater numbers of Iranians in Iraq would require higher levels of food, ammunition, explosives and other supporting equipment. As Napoleon knows, this stuff does not just show up at the right place, at the right times, and in the sufficient quantities without a significant logistical effort. The more significant level of activity, the easier the detection.

For all of you who are about to say…”What about Vietnam?” There is no triple canopy protection. Our sophisticated detection equipment would be able to detect the significant increase in cross-border traffic necessary to significantly ramp up the activity against our forces.

The amount of increased activity against our forces is necessarily limited by the need for the insurgents to avoid detection…it is a natural trade off in this type of conflict and they could not significantly step up their activity.

In debate…no significance to the harm, no argument.

Additionally, their internal political future is not entirely secure…should they weaken their position by fighting outside the country, it is possible that their internal opposition will cause considerable political instability at home…something they have shown little tolerance for, and is potentially risky to their government. They are not likely to get bogged down outside of Iran.

True Assumption #3…An attack on Iran will unleash Iranian-sponsored terrorism around the world.

How would this be significantly different than what is occurring today? We are living under the threat of Iranian-sponsored terrorism everyday…I am in no hurry to face this same threat with a state that has a nuclear weapon.

I see no change in the ultimate threat to the West by denying Iran the opportunity to blackmail us with nuclear weapons. I’d rather fight terrorists that have conventional weapons, than those armed with nukes.

False Assumption #4…America’s position in the world will crumble if we attack Iran.

Conventional Wisdom to my daughter…do the right thing, don’t care what others think.

A diminishing of our status, amongst a zillion no count countries in the world, and the idiots in the EU, would hurt us exactly how?

I am not sure what the idea of “status” has in this debate. There is a country, that everyone acknowledges, will likely use nuclear weapons if they complete the development of them, and ZB is worried about the “status” and prestige of the US in the world? What status will the 200,000 victims of their first strike have? What will be their epitaph? “They died to preserve American status”?

False Assumption #5…There are other ways of deterring Iran’s nuclear program.

Conventional Wisdom…yeah right. UN resolutions? Food for Oil?

No half-hearted measures are going to deter Iran from their goal. They know one thing…if they get a nuke, they have a chip in the big game, and they can bring us, the UN, the EU, the gulf region, and Israel to the table as equals. Be prepared to live the remainder of your life with a nuclear weapon pointed at your head. This is precisely why they want it, and precisely why they will NEVER be deterred, no matter how many times JEC, ZB, Korb, Alter and the rest, visit the Magic Kingdom. They will only be stopped if they are physically prevented from continuing.


The world was changed forever when we dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It became infinitely more complex, and the study of “nuclear” politics became a mind bending conundrum that could turn the most brilliant political scientist into Rainman. But the easiest part to understand about nuclear proliferation and nuclear politics in the modern age is…you CANNOT have crazy people with nuclear weapons. There is no way to escape this reality.

The left, as brilliantly dissected on your (Hugh Hewitt Radio Show) show the other day by Dennis Prager, view the world as a struggle of the weak against the strong, not the right against the wrong, or the good against the evil, so consequently, they will see nothing wrong with letting Iran have “one little nuke” because we have thousands. They will expose themselves as knowing little about international politics in the nuclear age and they will unwittingly put us at risk by their naiveté.