30. If elected, what will you seek to achieve in Iran and North Korea, and how? Smarting from the Israeli air force's destruction of Saddam Hussein's Osirak nuclear facilities in 1981, Iran has dispersed its nuclear facilities and dug them deep underground to help withstand conventional missile attacks or aerial bombardment. One way to destroy the Iranian facilities is to use nuclear warheads, whose radiation would kill our own troops and allies in the region, and is therefore not a viable option. Another way to destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities is via ground invasion. Since our armed forces are already stretched thin in Iraq and Afghanistan, invading Iran would require reintroducing the draft to raise an army, for which America is in no mood. A third way would have been to leverage Saddam Hussein's secular Iraq to militarily keep Iran's radical Islam in check as we did in the 1980s, but we eliminated that option on our own. Geopolitically, there are no other options. Iran knows it. We know it. And Iran knows that we know it. With respect to North Korea, led by a shrewd and ruthless dictator parading as a buffoon, its willingness to negotiate its nuclear program is increasing as the dictator ages without a viable successor. But negotiations with North Korea should also address Kim Jong-il's penchant for using Christians to test his chemical weapons.
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