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Thank you for a considered reply.

I presume that you did not contest any of the 11 points I submitted, largely because you believe they are irrelevant. In other words, even if the war is brought to a prompt conclusion, it does not matter because " Iran is going to eventually acquire nuclear weapons ."

10 of the 11 points, however, deal with the symptoms that have confounded the president's objective because he has consistently declined to state or recognize that the fixed goal of the war is to effect regime change.

Without regime change, I agree with you, an Islamist regime will eventually acquire nuclear weapons. With regime change, miracles can happen. Epiphanies make for rehabilitation. That is the essential message of Christianity. But it has happened in Islam more than once; witness Anwar Sadat. That is why, for example, we failed to arm dissident Iranians, because we failed to define victory properly.

So the 11 symptoms are but the product of a failure to define victory. A meaningful, permanent victory is indeed achievable with regime change - however difficult that might be to accomplish without boots on the ground.

I consider that achieving what you keep referring to as "regime change" in a place like Iran would bear close to the price of regime change in Germany and Japan in 1945.

Not as burdensome, OK. A draft Army of ten million instead of 15 million. 50,000 dead Marines instead of 80,000. A 1500 ship Navy instead of 2500.

That's the Iran discount.

But regime change with the forces available? I think the idea of it is absurd, and the ease with which people speak of it as if they were talking about Granada, or Panama, or even Venezuela is just ridiculous.

Regime change means conquest and occupation of a mountainous country of 90 million people, and it therefore means raising a force of sufficient size and combat power to accomplish the task.

And doing THAT means THIS:

"the President is hereby authorized and directed to employ the entire naval and military forces of the United States and the resources of the Government to carry on war against the [insert preferred enemy]; and, to bring the conflict to a successful termination, all the resources of the country are hereby pledged by the Congress of the United States."

Do you think the new Congress is going to do anything remotely like THAT? Neither do I.