Age of Reason
Retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner’s Century Foundation‘s report The End of the “Summer of Diplomacyâ€: Assessing U.S. Military Options on Iran is worth a read (download pdf file here. This is the third paragraph of the introduction:
Unfortunately, the military option does not make sense. When I discuss the possibility of an American military strike on Iran with my European friends, they invariably point out that an armed confrontation does not make sense— that it would be unlikely to yield any of the results that American policymakers do want, and that it would be highly likely to yield results that they do not. I tell them they cannot understand U.S. policy if they insist on passing options through that filter. The “making sense” filter was not applied over the past four years for Iraq, and it is unlikely to be applied in evaluating whether to attack Iran.