Would bombing Iran work

I live in a brick ranch in West University that I could not have explained to my 11-year-old self on the flight out of Mehrabad. The 11-year-old thought America was a movie. The 46-year-old thinks America is a set of procedures that mostly work until they don't. I design around heat and pressure for a living. I get irritable when people treat a nuclear program like a mood.

Tehran is not enriching because it felt left out of a brunch. Centrifuges are not a cry for respect. They are hardware. Hardware has a timeline. If you have ever had to explain to a plant manager why a vessel cannot be "a little over" spec, you understand why I twitch when a panel says Iran is "years away" as if years were a personality they might grow out of.

My politics, if I have to pin them, sit to the right of most people I eat lunch with in this city, which is saying something. I voted for Trump twice and I did not enjoy the rallies, I enjoyed the fact that he scared the people who had spent a decade calling every pressure campaign "warmongering" while the IAEA played a slow game of find-the-undeclared. I also think he is capable of trading a principle for a photo. I am not a chaplain for him. I am a man who wants the hardware delayed.

Sanctions hurt my cousins. I will not lie about that to win a room in Katy. Medicine is a mess. Inflation is a thief. The rial is a joke they have to live inside. If your whole argument for maximum pressure is that suffering will produce a liberal democracy, you have not been paying attention to how people actually huddle. Suffering produces huddling. Sometimes it produces a revolt. Often it produces a black market and a speech about resistance.

So why do I still want the pressure. Because the alternative I am offered is a deal that buys a calendar and sells it as peace. Calendars expire. The knowledge does not. I can live with a deal that is verified like a hostile audit, cameras, snaps, short notice, the ugly stuff. I cannot live with a deal that is a vibe plus sunset clauses, which is how we do too many things in this country, from HOA rules to arms control.

The diaspora is split in a way that dinner cannot fix. In Houston we have the oil people, the doctor people, the cafe people on Westheimer who still argue 1979 like it might reverse if they find the right verb. Some of them want Reza Pahlavi the way sports fans want a trade. I am not a monarchist. I am also not going to pretend the Islamic Republic is "Iranian culture" just because it has lasted. Longevity is not holiness. The Soviet Union lasted too. My father lasted in a prison for a year and change. Longevity can be a talent for cruelty.

Protests. I supported them. I sent money through the channels you don't put in an essay. I did not support the American kids who turned those protests into a costume for their own faculty fight. And I did not support the faction that said any Western contact poisoned the street. The street can use money, satellite internet, and attention. Attention is not a Marine landing.

A strike on the nuclear sites is the argument nobody wants to have without a costume. The costume is either "WWIII" or "just bomb it, it's easy." It is not easy. Fordow is not a warehouse in a cartoon. Casualties would not be a rounding error. I have stood in plants. I know what a hit does to a neighborhood even when you miss the tank you wanted. If I still say a strike has to stay on the menu, it is because I think a nuclear Iran is not a talking point, it is a regional permission slip, and the first people who will pay are not in Dupont Circle, they are in Haifa and Riyadh and, eventually, in the kind of Houston I live in if the market for chaos gets another shareholder.

You can call that alarmism. I call it reading. Pakistan is a nuclear state with a messy politics and we live with it. That comparison gets made a lot by people who want to nap. Pakistan did not spend forty years chanting death for a superpower as liturgy. Liturgy matters. I wish it didn't. I am an engineer. I would prefer numbers. The liturgy is part of the number.

Israel will do what Israel will do. I am not Israeli. I am a U.S. citizen who would like his country to be the adult, which lately means: pick a verification regime and mean it, pick a red line and mean it, stop letting the file become a way for Democrats and Republicans to call each other names. A bomb is not a personality test for your domestic enemies. It is a device.

The left's better argument, the one I actually chew, is that U.S. credibility is shot, that we lecture and then shop, that Iraq made every subsequent warning sound like a sales pitch. Fair. I was in college for the Iraq speeches. I believed too much. That embarrassment is not a reason to treat Fordow like a spa for diplomats. It is a reason to be specific, to show the stockpile math, to stop doing the mushroom-cloud poster.

My daughter is in band at Lamar. She thinks my Iran talks at dinner are a genre. Maybe they are. I still make her learn the map. I still tell her that leaving a country does not make you the expert on bombing it, and staying does not make the people who left traitors. We are all guessing with better and worse information. My information is family plus plants plus the stubborn fact that physics does not care about our therapy language.

If there is a deal that snaps closed on cheating, I will take it, even if the man who signs it is someone I wouldn't hire. If there is only a press conference, I will not. That is my whole doctrine. It is not pretty. Pretty is how this file got so long.

On Fridays I buy bread at the Persian bakery off Richmond and I listen to old men do foreign policy with their hands. They are often wrong. They are more serious than the panel I watched last week, the one where a man in a good jacket said "it's complicated" four times and sat back like he'd moved a river. It is complicated. The complication is not a lullaby. It is a reason to stay awake.