Iran - North Korea

Iran & North Korea

Smarting from the Israeli air force's destruction of Saddam Hussein's Osirak nuclear facilities in 1981, Iran has dispersed its nuclear facilities and dug them deep underground to help withstand conventional missile attacks or aerial bombardment.

One way to destroy the Iranian facilities is to use nuclear warheads, whose radiation would kill our own troops and allies in the region, and is therefore not a viable option.

Another way to destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities is via ground invasion. Since our armed forces are already stretched thin in Iraq and Afghanistan, invading Iran would require reintroducing the draft to raise an army, for which America is in no mood.

A third way would have been to leverage Saddam Hussein's secular Iraq to militarily keep Iran's radical Islam in check as we did in the 1980s, but we eliminated that option on our own by invading Iraq under a false pretense and destroying its army (see Iraq and Afghanistan).

Geopolitically, there are no other options. Iran knows it. We know it. And Iran knows that we know it (see Islam: What the West Needs to Know).

With respect to North Korea, it already has broken the deal that the wide-eyed Jimmy Carter made with Kim, not unlike the one Neville Chamberlain made with Hitler. We need to deal with North Korea's weapons program now, before it turns into another Iran. Any negotiations with North Korea should also address its use of Christians to test chemical weapons.