a concerted, all out onslaught... total infrastructural/administrative annihilation followed by restructuring and social re-education.
IMO, that is something that is never going to happen, you can't change an entire culture. Sure, you can blow everything up and rebuild it (at great expense and loss of life) but you can't make them like us, just like you can't make the Sunnis and the Shiites get along. It's not the religion, it's the primitive culture there that is the problem. If Christianity was the predominant religion in the middle east, you would have the Baptists killing the Methodists and the Head Bishop would be dictating foreign policy.
I've said this before in another post, but the reason that successful, long lasting gov'ts over there are harsh and rule with iron fists is because that is the only method that general populace over there reacts to. Different groups just want to kill each other and cannot be reasoned with, so you have to make a choice and harshly suppress one of them to maintain peace.
I think that if push comes to shove, and military action is the last and only resort, then we should simply make every nuclear site they attempt to build a smoking hole. No cultural change, no ground troops, no unnecessary loss of life, no governmental change, no embargos, just a flat statement, "We deem that you having Nuclear capabilities is a threat to regional stability and to our national security. If you build it, we will destroy it."
We have some conventional bunker busting munitions that are certainly up to the task.
Eventually, as alternative energy sources are discovered, oil will become less important and they won't have the income to invest in nuclear stuff.
Ian
