The truth can only be denied for so long, then it becomes impossible.  We're pretty-much there when it comes to Iran and its nuclear ambitions:

Why, for example, are Iranian scientists experimenting with triggers that are only used for detonating nuclear weapons? Why are Iranian technicians devoting so much energy to developing a ballistic missile warhead that can carry a nuclear warhead? And why have they designed simulation programmes whose sole purpose is to test nuclear weapons systems?

You don't need a trigger for a reactor.  You also don't need highly-enriched uranium for it either; indeed, HEU makes a reactor much more dangerous since it makes criticality (K >1.0) in the absence of a moderator possible.

Now let's ask the following questions and pay particular attention to the prejudices you apply to your answers: They're important.

• Does Iran have a right to pursue nuclear weapons?  Remember two things: Their leadership has promised to use them and the United States has used them. Now granted, we used them in a war that the other side started and in a situation where it appeared that we would have to literally slaughter half our opponent's population in order to obtain peace without them.  Does that make us better or worse?  I don't know, but it does put the question on the table in a very uncomfortable fashion.
  
  
• Will Israel hit them anyway, whether we like it or not?  Remember that Israel has been told repeatedly that they would be "wiped off the map" by Iran.  Do they mean it?  I don't know.  But it's not so simple as saying "oh it's just talk" when being wrong means you're all dead. 

We better figure this one out, and fast. And incidentally there's some history on this I've written about before, including the so-called "unwitting" participation of some banks that failed to implement the legally-mandated "know your customer" rules that should have prevented them from "unwittingly" funding these guys.

Never mind that if you asked me as a non-nuclear power to come up with a way to exploit nuclear energy for peaceful purposes I'd tell you that we were going to build LFTRs -- Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors -- which are intrinsically safer in regard to accidents than "conventional" nuclear power.  The "side effect" of such a decision is that it's very hard (read: damned expensive and difficult compared to the uranium fuel cycle) to use that technology to make bombs.

Our issues in the Middle East are directly related to our failed energy policy and the blowjobs we have given to Arab Sheiks so we can "have" their oil.  This in turn has led to disastrously-bad foreign policy needs and an insane amount of spending on defense to support those needs.

We have the technological means to not need any foreign petroleum of any sort and we proved it in the 1960s.  We can literally supply ourselves for 500 years using technology we already know how to exploit.  We've simply refused to do what we have to do, and as such we spent roughly $100 per barrel of imported oil in the form of unnecessary defense spending - spending that could instead have gone and still could go toward building out our energy independence.

That, incidentally, is $350 billion a year.  This is covered in detailed in Leverage and has been written about before on these pages as well.

So have the intentional failures of our government to deal with this problem as it implicates certain "favored" financial entities.

We know who's responsible for this garbage and we also know which governments and which banks and other civilian institutions worldwide enable and permit it to go on.  They're some of our "favored" energy and financial "partners", which is why you don't like this course of action. 

Indeed, as was recently disclosed by The Wall Street Journal, you and Tim Geithner at Treasury are allowing banks who are alleged to have intentionally illegally routed money to Iran to get away with nothing more than mere fines.  Iran, for it's part, has been paying the Taliban "bounties" for the murder of our troops.  Yet these institutions continue to be allowed to profit by being a dealer in US Government debt auctions!  HOW DARE YOU!

Yeah.  It isn't exactly news now, is it?  I wrote that more than a year ago, and what has been done?  Nothing. 

Well, perhaps the right choice is to do nothing and perhaps it's not, but I'll tell you this: Israel doesn't think that it should figure out whether all this is ok when Tel Aviv is turned into a 3,000 degree hellhole.

Can I blame the Israeli government?  Not really.  Our policy failures in the Middle East are indeed uniquely ours; nobody else deserves "credit" for them and they go back a literal sixty years to the end of WWII.  But that we've been dumb doesn't mean that stupidity cannot be corrected -- and more importantly, that it is not without consequence.  In a world where simple, crude nuclear weapons are easily constructed with the only tough part being access to highly-enriched fissile material and complex (read: small and light enough to mount on a moderate-sized missile) ones are not beyond anyone who has the physics knowledge and some computer modeling equipment this is a real problem and one that cannot be met with sticking one's head in the sand.

I find it very difficult to argue that anyone ever has a legitimate reason to preemptively start shooting.  But discernment here is quite difficult indeed; the question is whether such a move is preemptive or not. 

The man who pulls a gun at some point is fair game to shoot before his weapon goes off.  You're not required to wait until you have a hole in your chest to fire upon him -- when it becomes evident that he intends to fire upon you common sense (and unalienable rights) say that you have the right to use force, including deadly force, to stop him.

The key question of discernment here is when that moment arrives in the case of Iran.  A nation that undertakes everything out in the open makes the job easier.  A world where missiles are liquid-fueled and take time to fill and prepare makes the job easier.  But a world in which someone hides their development and possesses solid-rocket missiles that can reach someone they have threatened to blow up is more complex; at exactly what point is intent to use those weapons offensively demonstrated? 

The point at which the missile leaves the ground is too late, and this is the essential problem in regard to Iran that we all face today.

Iran, like all other nations, has the right to defensive weapons, even if their only "use" is the threat that they can use them in retaliation if attacked.  Such a weapon is by definition additive to world stability overall.  But the same weapon that can be used offensively leads us all to a problem in that we must discern where the line is crossed between defensive and offensive presentation of that same device.

This much is certain: In a world where the difference between the two is literally a press of a button apart there's a real problem in determination of intent, and I'm not at all sure how we solve it.