Victor Davis Hanson has some thoughts on what he views as the inevitable American air strike on Iran.

As I've said, this is our Munich moment. A world in which the mad mullahs have nukes is a frightening one indeed. Our previous totalitarian enemy in the Cold War at least had a keen sense of self preservation, that allowed MAD to work, at least for a while. We can't bet on that from the Iranian government.

I've finally gotten around to begin reading all of Churchill’s 6 volume history of WWII (having owned it and read bits and pieces for years) and the first 250 pages or so of volume I, "The Gathering Storm", are full of events and reactions to events that are remarkably like present day, just change the names of the countries and leaders.

Your choice of the description "Munich moment" is most definitely, and unfortunately if we don’t do better this time around, appropriate.

We will be forced by the ignorant and the cowardly to wait until this is well out of hand. However Israel does not find itself in that same constraint. Being nearly universally hated in all the diplomatic bodies we find ourselves constrained by, is at this moment a great advantage. Don’t look for retaliation from the Arab street. There are no Arab countries that wish to live under the cloud of a nuclear Iran. They grudgingly live under the Israeli cloud with the solace that leveler heads control the button. Their world would be far more threatened with an angry Mullah armed for the final battle.

Iraq is not Vietnam. Similarly, Iran is not Germany in 1938. Those that don't know history are doomed to misapply historical precedents.

Or more aptly, those with only a hammer are likely to see every problem as a nail. I think
it's time to use some different tools in our kit.

You're right, K. Screw 'em.

Okay, K.

And Hitler wasn't the Kaiser (he was a greater danger), and many Brits in 1935 thought as you do (student unions declaring "I will not fight for King and Country") that the problem didn't deserve a "hammer" yet in the end they were proven wrong.

You bemoan what you see as an overly eager desire to use the hammer rather than other tools yet for many years we avoided using the hammer (post Vietnam timidity) to the point of lying to ourselves that a nail is not a nail when it most obviously is.

Iran isn't a nail today, but given the lack of result from the thus far tried diplomatic solutions to achieve “peace in our time” Iran is rapidly becoming a nail in desperate need of a hammer. Failure to see that is no different than Chamberlains failing to see through Hitler’s lies.

Or as Churchill states in "The Gathering Storm":

"…if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival."