Charles Krauthammer recently wrote an article on nuclear proliferation and deterrence.  Of course, he wrote the article two weeks ago, but I was busy that day.  Since the problem has not been solved in the intervening weeks, I've decided to comment anyway:

Kennedy was pledging that if any nuke was launched from Cuba, the United States would not even bother with Cuba but would go directly to the source and bring the apocalypse to Russia with a massive nuclear attack.

The remarkable thing about this kind of threat is that in 1962 it was very credible. Indeed, its credibility kept the peace throughout a half-century of the Cold War.

Deterrence is what you do when there is no way to disarm your enemy. You cannot deprive him of his weapons, but you can keep him from using them. [...]

This is how you keep Kim Jong Il from proliferating. Make him understand that his survival would be hostage to the actions of whatever terrorist group he sold his weapons to. Any terrorist detonation would be assumed to have his address on it. The United States would then return postage. Automaticity of this kind concentrates the mind.

This policy has a hitch, however. It works only in a world where there is but a single rogue nuclear state. Once that club expands to two, the policy evaporates, because a nuclear terror attack would no longer have a single automatic return address.

Which is another reason why keeping Iran from going nuclear is so important.

Assuming anyone really is interested in deterring rogue states from going nuclear as opposed to letting them turn into America-weakening agents of doom, the solution obviously is to stop Iran. Is that going to happen?  Let's look at some of the likely levers the international community has to affect a change in Iran's atomic ambitions.

Negotiations.  Let me rephrase that.

Begging.  We continue the policy of tag-team pleading, sending in an assortment of French and Russian diplomats as well as Jimmy Carter if it's not past his nap time, to beg Iran to stop building the bomb -- or at least to remember that once it's built, it should only be launched at the Other Guy.  Hey, until the day an Iranian nuke is provably detonated, this policy cannot yet be said to have failed, and in the diploverse, that counts for a lot.

Incentives.  Let me rephrase that.

Bribery.  We can give them nuclear technology to encourage them not to seek nuclear technology, and then pray they don't use it in the bomb they aren't admitting building anyway.

Meditations for Peace.  Actually, I think these should have already started last week if they were going to actually work.  At this point, it's probably too late already.  But for the peace-minded, it might not be too late to meditate against retaliation (or threat of same) to any Iranian nuclear attack -- after all, that's deterrence too.

Midnight Basketball.  All right, I'm not sure this strategy ever worked, anywhere.  And Ahmadinejad, at least according to the photos I've seen, appears to be shorter than Spud Webb, so he might not be interested unless it's a five-foot and under league.  But isn't peace important enough that we should at least try?  What do we have to lose, besides Israel and a few air craft carriers?

Education.  Since Iran is officially ruled by leaders from the Religion of Peace, this whole (alleged) nuke thing must be a big misunderstanding. Probably Ahmadinejad just doesn't realize how dangerous those things are. A few well-placed Greenpeace pamphlets explaining how radiation kills and that one nuclear bomb can ruin Israel's entire day just might influence his thinking.

Sanctions.  Sanctions could work, I suppose.  Hopefully sanctions against Iran would work better than a decade's worth of them did against Iraq, where they couldn't even convince Saddam to give up weapons he apparently didn't even have.  But I suppose most people expect sanctions will suceed more like they did in South Africa:

On 6 November 1962, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 1761, condemning South African apartheid policies. On 7 August the United Nations Security Council established a voluntary arms embargo against South Africa. Following the Soweto uprising in 1976 and its brutal suppression by the apartheid regime, the arms embargo was made mandatory by the UN Security Council on 4 November 1977 and South Africa became increasingly isolated internationally. Numerous conferences were held and the United Nations passed resolutions condemning South Africa, including the World Conference Against Racism in 1978 and 1983. A significant divestment movement started, pressuring investors to refuse to invest in South African companies or companies that did business with South Africa. South African sports teams were barred from participation in international events, and South African culture and tourism were boycotted.

After much debate, by the late 1980s the United States, the United Kingdom, and 23 other nations had passed laws placing various trade sanctions on South Africa. A divestment movement in many countries was similarly widespread, with individual cities and provinces around the world implementing various laws and local regulations forbidding registered corporations under their jurisdiction from doing business with South African firms, factories, or banks.

By 1994 apartheid was dead. Those sanctions, begun in 1962, did their job.

It's easy to see why Ahmadinejad might feel a slight tremor of fear as he engages in his defiant posturing -- surely he realizes the living hell the UN has planned for his near- to mid-term future, if not for the future of his grandchildren.  So, as long as Iran agrees to stop short of actual nuclear annihilation of Israel or the pulverization of a major American citry for the next two or three decades, serious and concentrated UN-led sanctions might have time to work. And I suppose in this case, might makes right.  Or at least it might make right, which might have to be good enough.

Military options.  I know, I know, I'm a warmonger. Get used to it.  Something about having placed gas masks over children's faces inside an air-tight room tends to heighten militaristic sensibilities as rabid threats of nuclear annihilation mushroom in the crazy neighbor's yard.

I don't really bring up military options to call for an Entebbe/Osirak style Israeli intervention.  Yes, of course that would be nice, but it's not realistic.  The chances of a few Israeli planes taking off one morning and pinpoint bombing the entire distributed and buried Iranian nuclear program to smithereens seem slim.  I mention military options more as the necessary component of deterrence.

I admit that in discussing most of the preceding options I might have been a little less than serious.  But that is also how those options will be received by Iran and others -- less than seriously -- if that is all they are given to think about when making the decision whether to nuke or not to nuke.  Ahmadinejad will no more be deterred by threats of international conferences equally condemning his nuclearization and the assumed nuclearization of his intended victim, than by the threat of midnight basketball or peace meditations.

And that is why it is time for serious discussion of military options as a deterrent response. But these are the days when the diplomatic among us are busy pre-negating the idea of ever using so much as an iota of force against Iran even to deter their own destruction.  It is apparently wrong even simply to threaten force in response to a theoretical future destructive attack that is supposedly never going to happen anyway.  Since deterrent threats only have value if they are boldly and believably announced in advance, there is little deterrent value in an international community that already promises Iran it will never ever face threat of force, no matter what. 

Of course these pseudo-pacifists are idiots.  They are not true pacifists because they are not actually against all violence, just violence by established western powers.  The possibility of Iranian atomic violence doesn't seem to register as a big negative with them so far.

In the face of so much idiocy, because there are so many who just don't get it, someone needs to make that much stronger a case for sure and certain deterrent force, so that Iran's leadership recognizes the price that will be paid.  And, of course, the people who elected that certain someone, whoever he might be, then need to be sure they don't later elect someone who dangerously guts that important deterrent message.

Unfortunately, to this point, the deterrent conviction amongst those who truly count has been unacceptably vague. Those who do speak clearly do so without real world influence.  I would say bloggers, or at least a subset of them, are enunciating deterrent possibilities more clearly than any political leadership at this point.  Sure, we bloggers can invent all the unrealistic deterrent fantasies we'd like:

• sending assassins after Ahmadinejad and Khameini if they give the atomic order
  
• dropping leaflets over Teheran asking them not to bomb anyone else and hoping we get take out some of the top Iranian military brass with the resulting papercuts.

But blog-threats have little deterrent force, unless of course Ahmadinejad fears being delinked from all the articles we've written about him so that his post-attack Google rating drops below that of Castro, Chavez and even Kim.  Unfortunately, Ahmadinejad and other nuke-aspirants like Osama or Assad, aren't even reading the deterrent threats we right wing bloggers are inventing -- they only seem to read and quote from left-leaning blogs.

Ahmadinejad, and anyone else whose finger itches to rest on a red trigger, certainly must hear and believe that should they go nuclear or even just issue highly destabiliizing threats of first-use, there will be terrible consequences.  That is hard enough to do under normal circumstances, let alone in the case where the field of potential successors to the White House are already telegraphing "don't worry, it's only temporary" messages, and where it's not entirely clear whether the martyrdom-preaching mullahs would be deterred in any event.

At this pivotal time, when legitimate and believable threats of deterrence are our best chance, we hear too many reassurances to Iran that it need never suffer the indignity of including the threat of Western force in its nuclear calculations.  Germany.  Russia.  Nut-root democrats who can't tell the difference between Iran and Vietnam, or between Bush and Hitler.  They still just don't get it.  I hate to think what it will take for that to change.  At this point in history, 5 years after the Mossad took down the Twin Towers in order to enforce Zionist world domination and draw America into a war with Islam, even a mushroom cloud over Manhattan could be explained away ("only the CIA and the Mossad are sophisticated enough to blow up a city," "Iran follows the Religion of Peace and could not possibly be responsible,"  "the Jews were all called out of New York that day," etc.)

It's going to be a race from here on out to see who gets it first.  Maybe the pseudo-pacificists will get that Iran must be deterred even if it involves the distasteful contingent threat of theoretical force.  Or maybe a major American city or Israel will get it. 

One or possibly two of those are going to get it. I know my preference.