Is it time to strike Iran?

There is apparently growing momentum to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. The September issue of The Atlantic Monthly features a cover story suggesting Israel will soon undertake a bombing run on its own -- with or without the permission of the United States.
And John Bolton, America's former ambassador to the United Nations, said this week that such an action should take place "within eight days," before Iran fires up a reactor using Russian nuclear fuel.
Is Iran's nuclear program so advanced that military action is now required? Would such an attack be worth the costs and consequences?
Joel Mathis and Ben Boychuk, the RedBlueAmerica columnists, debate the issue.
JOEL MATHIS:
An attack on Iran, whether by Israel or the United States, would have devastating consequences for the rest of us: Iran would almost certainly respond by unleashing its terrorist proxy groups to make war on Western targets, and it could easily make life miserable for shipping in the Straits of Hormuz -- a critical passage for oil exports from the Middle East to the rest of the world. Many people would die, and a shaky world economy might be plunged into depression.
And that's what would happen if the attack worked.
Iran learned the lessons of Israel's attacks on nuclear facilities in Iraq and Syria during the last three decades. The country has spread out and buried its key nuclear facilities. Western intelligence probably doesn't know where all those facilities are located. Even proponents of an attack admit that bombing Iran might not keep that country from obtaining a nuclear bomb -- it just might slow the process a little bit.
Whether you believe an attack is justified, then, depends on your answer to this question: Are Iran's leaders so crazy they would actually use a nuclear bomb once they obtained it?
Certainly, there's little reason to love President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or the mullahs who back him. They are Holocaust-denying totalitarian theocrats. But there's little evidence they're ready to commit national suicide. If Israel didn't destroy Tehran with a retaliatory nuclear attack, the United States almost certainly would.
A nuclear-armed Iran is undesirable. It may also be inevitable. The suffering unleashed by an attack on the country, though, would be guaranteed -- while the consequences of a nuclear Iran remain, at this point, hypothetical. If the debacle in Iraq has taught us anything, it is that we should wait for a true threat to reveal itself, instead of squandering blood and treasure trying to ward off a chimera.
BEN BOYCHUK:
A nuclear-armed Iran isn't merely undesirable. It's unacceptable. A nuclear Iran, backed by Russia (and perhaps China), would alter the balance of power in the Middle East, destabilize saner Arab countries in the region, undermine U.S. interests and pose a mortal threat to Israel -- a nation Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said would one day be "wiped off the map."
Knowing this, the United States responds with ... talk. Look at the rote denunciations of Iran from the past three presidential administrations. If you've read one, you've read them all. From Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Obama, it's the same thing: Warnings, strongly worded communiques on State Department and U.N. letterheads and toothless sanctions, all aimed at dissuading the mullahs from treading along the nuclear path.
Well, so much for that.
The United States would do well to abandon this James Brown foreign policy of talking loud and saying (and doing) nothing. But if the United States is going to do something, it needs to really count.
Surgical strikes against nuclear facilities would be a futile gesture.
Besides, a nuclear reactor isn't the problem. The mullahs are the problem. Let's kill the mullahs. A nuclear reactor can be rebuilt. A decapitated theocracy in a country teeming with unrest and dissent would invite the sort of "regime change" U.S. leaders often seek, but never seem to pull off effectively.
The "green revolutionaries" who marched and bled for democracy in Tehran last year wouldn't invite American meddling, but they might be grateful if American force broke down the remaining barriers to change.
Unfortunately, failure is an option. An inept strike against Iran would indeed invite retaliation. But remember: The West and Iran have been at war for decades. A nuclear-armed Iran could easily turn the struggle for the worse -- for Israel and for the United States. No more half-measures.
(Ben Boychuk and Joel Mathis blog and podcast every week at http://www.freedompub.org and http://joelmathis.blogspot.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)