There has been a lot of discussion recently in the NY Times about our Iran policy, and the hawks are still beating the drum for war.
Mid-East expert Juan Cole has an informative summary of this debate and clearly explains why the hawkish attitudes toward Iran are misguided. The whole thing is worth reading. But here is the bottom line:
To recap: Iran does not have a bomb, is forbidden by its theocracy from getting a bomb, exhibits no evidence of having a nuclear weapons program visible to US intelligence, would not give its non-existent bomb to Hamas or Hizbullah anyway, and moreover it would be useless to them. A strike on Natanz would completely destroy the nascent reform movement and ensure the survival for perhaps decades of the current theocratic regime. All this is not to take into account that no such strike could actually hope to eliminate Iran’s enrichment capabilities, and that it might well, change the mind of the Supreme Leader, so that he launched Iran on a crash program to get a bomb for defensive purposes (having noticed the difference between the way the US dealt with Iraq and North Korea).
