It's not about what the world thinks. It's about the Straits of Hormuz being shut down and 30-40% of the worlds oil not making it to market and the global economic disaster that would result. It's about a nuclear response against Israel, the Gulf states, or European states. It's about 10's of thousands of Iranian terror agents being loosed on the world.
I'm not suggesting that we should stand by and let Iran continue on it's path but we really have to be smart about this or the world is going to be a very ugly and uncomfortable place for a long time.
Or the longer we put it off, the worse it will be.
Generally that is the case on such things.
You both make very good points (and scary). My question is do you think McCain could handle such a situation if it does happen?
I wish more people here would take this approach to this very delicate situation instead of being all gung ho to make Iran glow, or take them out, or whatever other term is used. Unfortunately, many people think that this would be easy when Iraq should show anyone with a brain that it most definitely will not be.
In fact, military action against Iran would be far more problematic than what we have faced in Iraq, and Iraq certainly hasn’t been easy. For one thing, we are already spread thin in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran is a much bigger country with a population that is probably much more likely to rally around their leaders in the event of an attack. The economic ramifications would be disastrous for obvious reasons. We could never expect anywhere near the kind of support, militarily or logistically, we had going into Iraq. And finally, the mismanagement of the first few years of the Iraq campaign has turned off the vast majority of Americans to any further pre-emptive campaigns.