I understand all that. The real question is what you want the US to do about it. If I could throw a switch and have Iran magically stop having nukes forever without deeply damaging US interests, sure, I'd do it. But do you launch a unilateral, unprovoked attack on a (ostensibly) popularly-elected government not for anything they are doing but for what you are afraid they will do? That level of global intrusiveness is well beyond anything we've done up til now. Since the big beef we have with Iran is they are aggressively fundamentalist Islamic, it is about as close as there is to a genuine declaration of "War of Civilizations." It's the equivalent of them launching a pre-emptive attack on us in fact. We are far more of an existential threat to them than they to us.
We are also debating the aim as if there is no problem achieving it and no blowback afterwards. I have to ask, did Iraq teach us nothing? Murhpy's Law seems to be optimistic when it comes to the results of wars of choice.
We obviously "can" do this -- nobody can stop us. We "can" do anything, we can take out the PRC tomorrow if we want. There will always be dangerous states. There will always be good reasons for wanting them to disappear. There will always be people lurking to say "how could you not have acted!" if anything happens after the fact. The world has sharp edges. How far are you willing to go?
I don't mean any of these questions as rhetorical. We need to have a very adult national discussion about it, but all I see from the right is the usual "anybody who doesn't agree with what I happen to think right this moment is a coward / traitor / blah blah blah" that they've always done. We made the mistake of being browbeaten by them once for purely domestic political purposes, and that turned out to be a disaster for the country. We need to show a little more backbone this time.
