Still no military solution

Two years ago, the Atlantic Monthly ran a "war game" to explore America's options in dealing with Iran. The depressing conclusion was that there was no military solution to Iran's nuclear ambitions. The idea that the US could use pre-emptive airstrikes to destroy Iran's nuclear programme was nothing but a fantasy - and a dangerous one at that, whose best outcome would be simply to delay acquisition of nuclear weapons, while dramatically increasing Iran's incentive to use them. Now, with the Bush Administration sabre-rattling and threatening to bomb (with nukes, even), Atlantic correspondent James Fallows has revisisted the scenario. And what he finds is even less encouraging:

That was the situation nearly two years ago. Everything that has changed since then increases the pressure on the United States to choose the “military option” of a pre-emptive strike—and makes that option more ruinously self-defeating.

[...]

The biggest change has been in what Soviet strategists used to call the “correlation of forces.” Every tool at Iran’s disposal is now more powerful, and every complication for the United States worse, than when our war-gamers determined that a pre-emptive strike could not succeed. Iran has used the passing time to disperse, diversify, conceal, and protect its nuclear centers. Instead of a dozen or so potential sites that would have to be destroyed, it now has at least twice that many. The Shiite dominance of Iraq’s new government and military has consolidated, and the ties between the Shiites of Iran and those of Iraq have grown more intense. Early this year, the Iraqi Shiite warlord Muqtada al-Sadr suggested that he would turn his Mahdi Army against Americans if they attacked Iran.

(Emphasis added)

And that's without even looking at their ability to remove their oil production from the market at a time of shortage and send oil prices through the roof. Bombing had a low chance of success and a high vulnerability to retaliation last year, and now those chances are even lower and that vulnerability even greater.

Unfortunately, Bush doesn't seem to understand this - and his constant threats of bombing are making things worse, not better:

By giving public warnings, the United States and Israel “create ‘excess demand’ for military action,” as our war-game leader Sam Gardiner recently put it, and constrain their own negotiating choices.

Or in English, by publicly threatening to bomb, there is a risk they will back themselves into a corner where they are forced to bomb simply to avoid looking "weak". This is the same sort of gross stupidity which led to World War One, and the results will be disastrous for us all.

Military action should not be an option in Iran. It will not work, and will only make things worse. The only way this problem will be solved is by negotiation, not bombing.