More Stupid

Sanctions won’t hurt. All the other parties will ignore them (even if you have hopes for the Europeans, the Russians and Chinese will not participate).

Military action is useless. Even proponents like Bolton admit it could only delay development of a nuclear device for 5 years. 0 < 10 as TMC puts it.

Not only that, we’ll get our ass kicked. Losing the limited Shia support we have in Iraq will make it impossible to maintain our presence there (that’s actually a good thing- Out. Completely. Now.). It will make Syria and Lebanon an incredibly hostile environment. Iran can at will shut down the Persian Gulf and can probably sink an Aircraft Carrier or three (that’s how it usually games out at the Pentagon). Any airstrike is likely ineffective and very dangerous since Iran has the latest and greatest Russian AA. A Ground Campaign is a recipe for disaster, we have about 600,000 troops, all branches, worldwide. They are a nation of over 66 Million.

Oh, and North Korea has demonstrated Inter Continental nuclear capability today, right now. What incentive do they have to negotiate with a Nation of Liars who will not keep their agreements?

This is a very bad idea.

Behind Trump’s Termination of Iran Deal Is Risky Bet That U.S. Can ‘Break the Regime’
By DAVID E. SANGER, The New York Times
MAY 8, 2018

For President Trump and two of the allies he values most — Israel and Saudi Arabia — the problem of the Iranian nuclear accord was not, primarily, about nuclear weapons. It was that the deal legitimized and normalized the clerical Iranian government, reopening it to the world economy with oil revenue that financed its adventures in Syria and Iraq, and support of terror groups.

Now, with his announcement Tuesday that he is exiting the Iran deal and will reimpose economic sanctions on the country and firms around the world that do business with it, Mr. Trump is engaged in a grand, highly risky experiment.

Mr. Trump and his Middle East allies are betting they can cut Iran’s economic lifeline and thus “break the regime” by dismantling the deal, as one senior European official described the effort. In theory, America’s withdrawal could free Iran to produce as much nuclear material as it wants — what it was doing five years ago, when the world feared it was headed toward a bomb.

But Mr. Trump’s team dismisses that risk: Tehran doesn’t have the economic strength to confront the United States, Israel and the Saudis. And Iran knows that any move toward “breakout” to produce a weapon would only provide Israel and the United States with a rationale for taking military action.

It is a brutally realpolitik approach that America’s allies in Europe have warned is a historic mistake, one that could lead to confrontation, and perhaps to war.
…
Exiting the deal, with or without a plan, is fine with the Saudis. They see the accord as a dangerous distraction from the real problem of confronting Iran around the region — a problem that the Saudis believe will be solved only by regime change in Iran. They have an ally in John R. Bolton, the president’s new national security adviser, who shares that view.

Israel is a more complicated case. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pressed Mr. Trump to abandon an arrangement that he has always detested. But Mr. Netanyahu’s own military and intelligence advisers say Israel is far safer with an Iran whose pathway to a bomb is blocked, rather than one that is once again pursuing the ultimate weapon.

As a last-minute lure to convince Mr. Trump to pull the plug on the Iran deal, Mr. Netanyahu last week released Iranian documents, stolen from Tehran in January, that proved what Western intelligence agencies long knew: A decade ago or even longer, the Iranians were working hard to design a nuclear warhead.

To Mr. Netanyahu, this was proof that Iran could never be trusted and that it had reached the nuclear deal under false pretenses by pretending it never had a weapons program.

To Mr. Trump and his allies, the Israeli discovery said less about Iranian nuclear capability than it did about Iranian perfidy.
…
At the core of Mr. Trump’s announcement on Tuesday is a conviction that Iran can never be allowed to accumulate enough material to assemble a bomb. When the Europeans said that would require reopening the negotiations, Mr. Trump balked, and decided instead to blow up the entire deal.

It was a classic Trumpian move, akin to the days when he would knock down New York buildings to make way for visions of grander, more glorious edifices. But in this case, it is about upsetting a global power balance and weakening a regime that Mr. Trump has argued, since he began campaigning, must go.

How much luck have we had with “regime change” so far?

Oh, that’s right. None.