Are there any evidence to support that? Iran is sitting there essentially naked? No, I would argue that his comments failed the common sense test. I think if the Israelis had been as successful as he describes, we’d be hearing about it. The Israelis would be putting their successes up in bright lights and telling everybody how formidable the Israeli Air Force is, and they would be advertising the fact that Iran is naked. But you don’t see them doing that, and you don’t see them doing that because they actually ran into a significant amount of trouble. But I want to re-emphasize the point I made earlier, that even if it was true, Iran still maintains the capability to retaliate against Israel and do devastating damage.

Professor Mearsheimer, if Israel cannot penetrate Iran’s defenses, can the United States? Oh, I think we could, yeah. I think we have significant capabilities. This isn’t to say that we wouldn’t get our hair messed in the process. We surely would. But the United States has the capability to tear apart Iranians’ defenses and to hit all sorts of targets. And there is some real chance that we could take out their nuclear capabilities. They would, of course, rebuild them, and they would end up with nuclear weapons, so it would be foolish to try to do that. But I think in terms of our ability with our air power and our missile power, we could definitely tear apart their air defenses at some cost again and then go after a wide-ranging target set in Iran.

But I want to make it very clear. It is not, not in our interest to do this. And this is why we have gone to great lengths to avoid a war with Iran, because we understand that even if we have this capability, if you play it out and you think about where it all leads, it doesn’t have a happy ending. [tr:trw].

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