Experts weigh in on Iran.
That's Robert Baer's advice:
Donâ??t do anything about Iran. No statements out of the White House. No support for the opposition. No covert action. If we could get the press to stop covering it, that would be all the better....At the end of the day, the regime in Tehran, properly ignored, will fall under its own weight.
Other security experts weigh in here.
Paul Pillar's contribution is also worth highlighting:
The prime defect of the debate is not only that it has focused myopically on Iranâ??s nuclear program and even more narrowly on the issue of uranium enrichment (despite a modest amount of broadening since the stolen Iranian presidential election), but also that it presumes prevention of an Iranian capability to produce a nuclear weapon to be a sine qua non. We hear otherwise serious people saying that if diplomacy failed to prevent such a capability, then we would have no choice but to resort to military force. Nonsense. We would have just as much choice as at previous junctures in the history of nuclear proliferation, when the proliferators included Stalinâ??s Soviet Union, Maoâ??s China on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, and the producer of the first â??Islamic bomb,â? Pakistan. To contend that something is fundamentally different in the case of Iran is to say that the principles of deterrence somehow do not apply in the Persian Gulf or that the leaders of the Islamic Republic are uniquely suicidal in a way that none of those other regimesâ??or any other regimes in modern times, for that matterâ??have been.
