Irani Attack Was in US Nat'l Security Interests

Northampton County approved a number of livable landscape grants and have awarded a contract for a new parking deck at the courthouse campus, but those stories will have to wait until tomorrow.

On Saturday evening, US B-2 stealth bombers launched precision strikes at three Irani nuclear sites, including the underground site at Fordow. Not only was this attack justified, but it was in the interest of our own national security. six American warplanes dropped 12 30,000-lb GBU-57 massive ordnance penetrator (MOP) bunker-busting bombs on Fordow

According to the Institute for the Study of War, satellite imagery of Fordow from June 22 shows six probable entry-point craters on top of a ridge above the underground complex that houses two halls of at least 2000 centrifuges. These were producing nearly enough highly enriched uranium to fuel one nuclear weapon per month. Initial Israeli assessments indicate that US strikes did not destroy but inflicted serious damage. Iran may have moved materials and equipment from the site ahead of the strike. A senior US official similarly said that the US strikes did not destroy but severely damaged the Fordow nuclear site and took it “off the table.”

Was it the right thing to do?  Opinion is divided in both parties. 

House Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that Trump acted unconstitutionally and has given the House grounds for yet another impeachment. But the attack was praised by Democratic Senators John Fetterman and Josh Gottheimer.

Republican congressional leadership lined up behind Trump.  But there are voices in the isolationist MAGA movement, like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Greene Taylor, who condemn our involvement in yet another foreign war.

I believe this strike was an absolute necessity and in our own national security interests. Iran's raison d'etre since 1979 has been to promote a Shia version of an Islamic revolution, including state-sponsored terror by the 3 Hs - Houtis, Hamas and Hezbollah.  It has been a driving force behind international instability. 

British journalist Matthew Syed, whose father was a Pakistani immigrant, makes the case at Triggernometry. Here are some excerpts. 

"The doctrine of mutually assured destruction is what prevents people with nuclear bombs from initiating the first strike, because they worry that in the counter stripe they will be eliminated. So it's a very strong doctrine that even though there are nuclear weapons in the world, we have not yet, thankfully, be subject to a nuclear holocaust."

But Iran, unlike most countries, has no interest in the mutually assured destruction doctrine because they are religious fanatics.  

"They believe that they have absolute truth, many of them in the regime, and that anyone who disagrees with them by implication are infidels, and, moreover, they glorify martyrdom, they believe that if they can take out infidels, they will go through a door, into heaven, and be blessed for eternity." 

"A lot of people don't seem to know about the 20,000 child martyrs who are indoctrinated by the fanatics and the clerics who took over after the ' 79 Revolution to believe that the greatest duty they could perform for Allah was to walk and sometimes run into minefields and up against machine gun fire, to clear a path for the adult military coming in behind, and they died, their limbs strewn across battlefields, and they were then glorified in government propaganda , held up as icons of the Revolution. 

"The fact that the people who are supposed to protect [children] indoctrinated them into what is effectively a death cult seems to me very good evidence, in addition to all the more contemporaneous stuff, - the repression of women, the killing of people who have a sexual [difference], the funding of genocidal proxies committed to the elimination of Israel -  tells me that if they got a nuclear weapon, it is likely they would use it. 

"I could envision an aging fanatical leader initiating a first strike and then looking at the radar screen and seeing the inevitable response in which that person would die in thinking that I am closer to Allah. I don't think that that is true of Vladimir Putter. I don't think Putin is prepared to die for his ideology. He's a venal corrupt leader, of the old school. He's worth billions. He had a Black Sea palace, he's got a young girlfriend . He wants to live. I think the same is true of the North Korean leader, with this ham and his looted opulence. It is not true of religious fundamentalists who glorify martyrdom. 

"Nuclear weapons, potentially 9 or 10 nuclear devices being held by a militarian cult that is committed to the destruction of Israel and calls America the Great Satan. A nuclear war of that kind, even if it occurred between Israel and Iran, would kill hundreds of millions of people around the world."  

So yeah, eliminating Iran as a nuclear threat is in our own national security. If Canadian wildfire smoke can travel to France and interfere with the Criterium du Dauphine, there is little doubt in my mind that the nuclear fallout of a nuclear winter involving as few as 15 nuclear bombs following an exchange between Israel and Iran would kill millions worldwide.