A nuclear strike at Iran is a very bad idea

U.S. Rep. John Murtha, at a town hall meeting yesterday in Queens, New York, confirmed that Congress has been asked to consider the possibility of strategic, surgical strikes in Iran with nuclear weapons, according to a report on the Democratic Underground website. His perspective was that it wasn't a realistic strategy, because surgical strikes are never as accurate as we would like them to be, and we don't have the necessary troops to have a full-scale military presence in Iran, and we are already facing a huge deficit and that Iran would be a much more expensive target than Iraq. However, the report suggested, the fact that it was brought to Congress at all may be an indication the Bush administration is trying to test the idea to see where public sentiment is at.

Well, for what it’s worth, here’s one person’s “public sentiment.” [ As an aside, it is very difficult to not slip into a Mike Malloy-like total flipout that this insanity is even being given serious consideration, but I will try to approach this from a reasonable viewpoint… ]

Using any nukes against Iran is a very, very bad idea for the following reasons:

- First, Iran does not represent an imminent threat. No one, including Bush, is saying Iran is an imminent threat. So why are we even talking about such a draconian measure as a nuclear strike?

- Second, even if Bush was alleging that Iran was an imminent threat, after the lies and deceit over the justification for the war in Iraq, I would think the American people and particularly the U.S. Congress would demand clear, incontrovertible and overwhelming evidence that Iran was about to develop a nuclear weapon.

- Third, even if there were this clear, incontrovertible and overwhelming evidence that Iran was close to creating a nuclear bomb, using small, so-called surgical nuclear weapons would probably not take care of the problem anyway, because many of the alleged facilities are buried deeper underground than these small weapons could effectively reach.

- Fourth, using a nuclear weapon against Iran would not make us safer, in fact, it would make us infinitely less secure. Using a nuclear weapon against Iran would so inflame Islamic fundamentalists (terrorists, if you prefer) that they would receive hundreds of thousands of new recruits who would willingly walk into American shopping malls carrying suicide bombs. Using a nuclear weapon on Iran would be the best thing George Bush could for the terrorists!

Since this trial balloon has supposedly been floated in Congress, as an American I am urging Congress to send a clear message to the President to abandon this ill-considered and reckless plan.