Put boldly and simply, we have to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran.
Not, of course, the unleashing of full-scale thermo-nuclear war on the Persian people, but a limited and tactical use of nuclear weapons to destroy Iran's military facilities and its potential nuclear arsenal. It is, sadly, the only response that this repugnant and acutely dangerous political entity will understand.
The tragedy is that innocent people will die. But not many. Iran's missiles and rockets of mass destruction are guarded and maintained by men with the highest of security clearance and thus supportive of the Tehran regime. They are dedicated to war and, thus, will die in war.
Frankly, it would be churlish of the civilized world to deny martyrdom to those who seem so intent on its pursuance. Most important, a limited nuclear attack on Iran will save thousands if not millions of lives.
Yea, the 72 sturgeons and all
The spasm of reaction from many will be that this is barbaric and unacceptable. Yet a better response would be to ask if there is any sensible alternative. Diplomacy, kindness and compromise have failed and the Iranian leadership is still obsessed with all-out war against anybody it considers an enemy.
Its motives are beyond question, its capability equally so. It is spending billions of dollars on a whole range of anti-ship, anti-aircraft and anti-personnel missiles, rockets and ballistic weapons:
The Shahab 3ER missile, with a range of more than 2,000 km, and the BM25 and accompanying launchers, which are so powerful that they can hit targets in Europe. Raad missiles with a range of 350km. The Misaq anti-aircraft missile, which can be fired from the shoulder. The Fajar 3 radar-evading missile and the Ajdar underwater missile, which travels at an extraordinarily high speed and is almost impossible to intercept. The Zaltal and the Fatah 110 rocket, the Scud B and Scud C and the BM25 with a range of 3,500 kms.
Iran is also developing enormous propellant ballistic missiles and began a space program almost a decade ago that will enable it to bomb the United States. It is also assumed in intelligence circles that Tehran has Russian Kh55 cruise missiles stolen from Ukraine which are now being copied in large numbers by Iranian scientists.
Comparisons to the Nazis in the 1930s are unfair -- to the Nazis. Hitler had the French army, the largest in Europe, on his border and millions of Soviet infantry just a few hours march away. Iran has no aggressive enemies in the region.
Its fanatical leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, controls a brutal police state, finances international terror and provokes bloody wars in foreign countries. It is unimaginably wealthy because of its oil revenues and is committed, in its leader's words, to "rolling back 300 years of Western ascendancy" and wiping another nation, Israel, from the face of the earth.
A conventional attack would be insufficient because Iran and its allies seem only to listen to power and threat. Better limited pain now than universal suffering in five years.
The usual suspects will complain. The post-Christian churches, the Marxists, the fellow travelers and fifth columnists. But then, the same sort of people moaned and condemned in 1938. They were clearly wrong then. They would be just as wrong now.