Last week, Republican Senator Tom Cotton criticized President Obama's nuclear deal framework with Iran, saying that Obama was refusing to admit that airstrikes against Iran's nuclear facilities would only take "several days," and wouldn't require any longer-term military commitment to be effective. Obama, he said, was offering a "false choice" between the deal and war.
A number of influential foreign policy analysts, particularly at some of the more hawkish conservative institutions in DC, have openly endorsed military action as the best possible way to prevent Iran from getting a bomb. And while Cotton is notably more hawkish than most politicians, few of whom openly support a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities now, many 8u suggested that airstrikes or even war should be on the table if talks fail.
Advocates of bombing Iran sincerely believe that it's the best possible option for dealing with a bad situation. And the position isn't totally crazy: if Iran is dead-set on getting a bomb, it'll be hard to stop them peacefully. A nuclear armed Iran would be a major threat to the Middle East, and the US military is easily capable of overpowering Iran's armed forces in a straight fight.
But attacking Iran would end in disaster. Surgical strikes would only set Iran's nuclear program back temporarily; destroying the country's nuclear capacity entirely would require outright war. That would kill thousands of people, destroy whatever vestiges of political stability remain in the Middle East, potentially wreak havoc on the global economy, and — barring a total, Iraq-style military occupation of the country — fail to permanently end Iran's nuclear program.
