Our occupation wasn’t as brutal as what we did to Iraq, and they knew they brought it on themselves. Iraq was a pure war of aggression against them, and they know it.
Wait, what? Are you not familiar with the firebombing of Dresden?
Makes the occupation of Iraq look like a mild spanking.
And you don’t think an Iran that launched an unprovoked nuclear attack would think they might have “brought it on themselves”?
Would they really think they would get lucky the second time, I doubt there is anyone in Iran who doesn’t know the USA is a nuclear power.
I said occupation, not during the war. There was no Marshall Plan, no serious attempt to rebuild Iraq - and no, funneling money to companies with ties to the Republicans isn’t “rebuilding”. We did the opposite with Iraq; they surrendered, we occupied the place and we just kept on pounding them. We didn’t rebuild what we ruined, and we put in a significant effort into preventing them from rebuilding it themselves.
So we’d nuke a country for defending itself?
He actually seems to. For instance, the mass genocide that, in his universe, we committed in Iraq. And let’s not forget the 11 billion people we killed during our occupation of Japan, and all the aliens we murdered on Neptune.
Maybe you’ve forgotten since it was several pages ago, but the whole point of the “occupation” tangent of this thread was the claim by yourself and others that invasion and occupation was not a viable alternative to nuclear retaliation because said occupation would inevitably lead to an unwinnable quagmire, a la Iraq.
What you seem to be saying in these last few posts is that Iraq turned into a quagmire because our reasons for invading were exceedingly flimsy and our interest in actually rebuilding was questionable. Whereas the occupation of Germany and Japan (terrible though you claim they were) were effective because there were valid reasons leading up to them and a genuine investment in rebuilding. This says to me that all occupations are not the unwinnable propositions you claimed they were earlier in the thread, particularly if the invasion followed a crystal clear provocation like, oh I don’t know, an unprovoked nuclear attack.
You’ve got to take into account that he views our occupation of Iraq as utterly malevolent and our behavior there several orders of magnitude worse than the Nazi occupation of Poland, or the Rape of Nanking. We apparently did nothing to help the Iraqi people, built/rebuilt nothing, and casually slaughtered millions. Oh, and we took all the oil.
Iran doesn’t have the sectarian divides (Sunni/Shiite; Kurds/everyone else) that Iraq does. Most of the violence in Iraq was the result of all sides declaring open season on one another in the relative absence of authority. Iran, in contrast, could actually be tractable, particularly since our very good behavior in Iraq might serve to reassure them. It would depend on how many mad mullahs remained alive and in power.
The no widespread nuclear fallout, less collateral civilian damage, not shooting the 5th grade bully in the face type of responsibility.
That wasn’t a giant logical leap…
The primary purpose of guaranteeing nuclear retaliation for a nuclear first strike is not to get revenge, nor to reduce second-strike capability, nor because it’s the most effective military response. It is all those things as well, but they are irrelevant in the larger picture.
The point is summed up by the usage of the word “insane” by so many in this thread. Nuclear weapons are not, of themselves, a weapon of insanity. The kind of early nuke a country like Iran would be able to produce would not be a city-erasing strategic behemoth, it would be a relatively small scale device with no greater capability of destruction than a sustained artillery barrage or concentrated bombing campaign. Low level nuclear weapons are nothing very special. If we’d simply employed tactical nukes on key Iraqi targets in 2003, regime change would almost certainly have been accomplished with less infrastructure damage and fewer fewer casualties in the long run than the occupation wound up causing. Nuclear weapons would, for many scenarios, be the logical and pragmatic choice.
It is the guaranteed retaliation doctrine, and that alone, that makes nukes a weapon of insanity. It draws a line beyond which nothing will be tolerated. There are no exceptions for the size of the nuke, there are no exceptions for the damage inflicted, and there are no exceptions for which country is firing the first shot. Any nuclear action will immediately bring utter ruin down upon the attacker.
There can be no allowances made for any reason, or it opens a path to a future legitimate use of nuclear weapons and the potential escalation from that into a larger nuclear exchange. It’s simple game theory. If the cost of an action can be avoided, mitigated, or if it’s simply not high enough, any action can wind up looking advantageous in a risk/reward calculation. The only way to prevent an action from ever being taken is to make the cost guaranteed and absolutely impossible to bear.
Quickly and completely destroying the initiating country’s ability to wage war, even with all the enormous collateral damage that comes with that, is the only sane response. To do anything else is to invite worse upon the world in the future.
It’s nice you can see the funny side of your benevolent war.
I’m sure you can give us the actual number of Iraqis killed as a result of your invasion to protect us from WMD’s!!!11one1!
The problem with this thread is in the OP’s assumption that Iran would drop the bomb if the had one. I doubt they would. They would employ some group (Hamas?) to do so, making retaliation much more difficult. If that happened, would we still retaliate against Iran?
Yes. It is a democratic republic. As opposed to, say, an aristocratic republic, like the Roman Republic, or the Republic of Venice.
In my experience, any American who says “This country is a republic, not a democracy!” is not arguing but whining; it has been so at least since the New Deal began.
Yes we would, and they wouldn’t do that either. They know we’d never believe they weren’t behind it, even if they really weren’t. It’s unlikely we’d care if they were actually behind it or not - we’d simply take the excuse. And handing over nuclear weapons to loose cannons like terrorist groups is something that governments simply don’t do; they wont do it any more than America or the USSR handed nukes over to their pet thugs during the Cold War. After all, if some American-backed group nuked Moscow or a Soviet backed group had nuked Washington DC, no one would have believed their respective backers protestations of innocence either.
How much time have you spent in Iraq?
I don’t recall personally invading Iraq. However, that was nine years ago so I could be wrong.
The number of Iraqis killed “as a result of ‘your’ invasion” is pretty small. The number of Iraqi deaths caused by other Iraqis during that time is pretty large.
And if you think that because we didn’t find any WMDs in Iraq, that means there weren’t any, well…all I can do is chuckle. 
Is this kinda like how Pittsburgh Steelers fans will say “We won the Superbowl!” but won’t say “We sexually harassed some non-zero number of women and drove our motorcycle in a reckless manner and jeopardized our careers and the lives of others!”
But in reverse?
Because I feel no inclination whatsoever to say “We” when mentioning atrocities committed by soldiers in the employ of the country I am also a citizen of…(parse that one baby!)
The same as I would feel no inclination to say “We liberated the world from the tyranny of Hitler!”
Because that was done by people who were either more evil than me, or more brave and altruistic than me, but certainly not ME. Therefore there ain’t no “we”, ain’t no “our”, and ain’t no “us”.
It’s American troops being directed by American war leaders being put into power by American politicians, who Americans all know don’t do most of what *any *American citizens actually want.
Read it slowly, it’ll make more sense…I know I had to. 
This.
The more I think about it, the worse I think the outcome would be for Iran. Think about it- out of the blue the US is at war with Iran, due to a nuclear strike against a civilian target (New York) which causes 1+ million casualties. Set the needle to DEFCON 1. It isn’t just war, it is Nuclear War.
The argument ‘they just blew their wad’ isn’t going to apply. In the hours after the attack, who is going to sit back and assume that’s all they got? Nope, we are going to destroy their ability to wage war immediately. Jet fighters don’t move fast enough.
I don’t think it matters if they give it to Hamas. That would be a stupid thing to do first of all- for all the trouble they are going through to get a bomb, why hand it over to some unaccountable group they are unable to manage? They wouldn’t. But if they did, it doesn’t matter as an Iranian bomb will have a particular isotope profile and we will KNOW it was theirs.
Once we know it is theirs, I think the response would be more devastating that I suggested upthread. Now I think we’d nuke the shit out of them. We’d tell Pakistan and India to blame Iran for the fallout, and ask them if they’d like some more if they don’t like it. It’s a nuclear war guys, don’t join it, that’s it. For centuries afterwards the area would be the Persian Wildlife Refuge, a place where the corpses don’t decompose because bacteria can’t survive the radiation.
Not to say any of this is a good thing. It isn’t. I have a better idea- how about nobody sets off any nukes ever again?
Again, I’m a bit confused why we’re spending so much time on debating how the US would respond to Iran nuking New York.
Why don’t we try something a little more plausible.
Once again, I suggest we ask how Iran would respond to the government of Israel sending an army of Golems crashing across the Iranian border.
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I’m sure our government as well as most of the other governments in the world that have a stake in the matter have spent quite a bit of time and effort gaming out this very scenario. Not being prepared for the “implausible” means getting caught with your pants down when it does, in fact, occur.
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Wouldn’t the golems have to march through Syria or Jordan before they ever got to the Iranian border?
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Isn’t a bit goofy to complain about the implausibility of an Iranian nuclear strike and then ask…
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I doubt that the Iranians are building a nuclear weapons capability with any intent other than to use them on one or more of their avowed enemies that they have sworn to annihilate. Sure, it would be a spectacularly stupid, evil, and self-destructive act. My evaluation is that that is the sort of act you expect from stupid, evil, and self-destructive people such as the mad mullahs who run Iran.