Paddy Mack says bomb Iran

Patrick McIlheran is positively giddy at the prospect of Israel dropping tactical nukes on Iran to take out its nuclear program.

“The Israelis believe that Iran’s retaliation would be constrained by fear of a second strike if it were to launch its Shehab-3 ballistic missiles at Israel,” writes the Times: That is, the Israelis feel they have the threat necessary to make Iran accept that it can’t actually do what its president says he will, wiping Israel off the map.

All of this would be wretched, horrible, in that even if it didn’t escalate into Iran launching war on Israel, there would be millions of angry guys with bomb-making on their minds eager to redress what they’d see as another humiliation of Islam at the hands of Israel. Not to mention what it would do to oil prices.

Still, it would be immeasurably better than seeing Israel, the one truly stable, free country in the region, blown up, which is what Iran’s president seems to really want.

Yeah, we’ve heard the arguments that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doesn’t really mean it or somehow doesn’t count, despite being Iran’s president, and despite the other big power in Iran, supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei, also calling for Israel to be nuked -- one simply needs to state these arguments to see them as nonsense.

The Brawler doesn't have a lot of time, so he'll make a couple quick points. Iran is many years away from making any kind of weapon. Taking out Iran's program would be difficult at best -- and Israel's botched war against Hezbollah doesn't inspire confidence. And while the Iranian regime is deplorable, as is its rhetoric about Israel, it is not insane and they're not suicidal. They understand nuking Israel would be suicidal -- if Israel missiles wouldn't kill them, American ones would.

Speaking of loathsome rhetoric, some rightists in Israel call for the "transfer" -- a euphemism for ethnic cleansing -- of the Palestinians from the West Bank. Given that rhetoric -- and the de facto cleansing that's taken place under the auspices of the settlement movement -- would McIlheran say the Palestinians are justified in resorting to violence to prevent this?

There are other huge gaps in McIlheran's analysis. He doesn't seem to realize that if Israel were to mount such an attack on Iran the US occupational force in Iraq would quite literally cease to exist.

The other gap is a moral one: For a purported Catholic, McIlheran seems shockingly blase about potential casualties of an attack with "tactical" nuclear weapons on Iran. I dunno. Maybe he figures the just war theory covers preemptive nuclear attacks.