Choosing Between Bad and Worse

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The Times Online prints an interesting story about Leon Panetta's (our new CIA chief) efforts to "stop Israel (from) bombing (an) Iranian nuclear plant."
 
Check that, one paragraph in from that headline the story reads, "America’s spy chief was sent on a secret mission to Israel to warn its leaders not to launch a surprise attack on Iran without notifying the US Administration."
 
How "stop" becomes "please let us know before you potentially touch off another war in the Middle East," I don't know. What I do know is that the headline might have had it right, at least the part about stopping Israel from doing something that can potentially make a bad situation much, much worse.
 
For those of us that have spent some time delving into this issue, an attack on Iran's nuclear plants, or rather installations, is not by any stretch of the imagination like the attack that Israel waged on Osiraq in 1981. To begin with, given the quality of both U.S. and Israeli intelligence, can we really be sure that the sites that being targeted are the sites that need to be hit? Osiraq may have turned out to be the single most important nuclear installation in the Iraqi nuclear infrastructure. Can the same be said about the Iranian sites (that we know about) such as Esfahan (uranium conversion), Natanz (uranium enrichment), and Bushehr (a non functioning nuclear reactor)?
 
Secondly, assuming the target set is correct, do the Israelis even have the capability to destroy (or render unusable) those targets? There has been much written on this topic, but the consensus seems to be that this would be an extremely difficult mission to pull off. Perhaps tellingly, the Israelis seem to understand that as well.
 
Which brings us to the most important part of this discussion: What are the consequences of such an action? Well, we know what the potentially consequences are for Israel, but I haven't heard very much about the consequences for the U.S. With nearly 200,000 of our fighting men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan, a healthy appetite for oil, and no idea whether or not Hezbollah's reach includes the U.S., I can't imagine that those consequences will be very good should the Iranians decide that a retaliation against Israel must also include the U.S.
 
I think that we can all agree that from the U.S. perspective, Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapon is a very bad thing. However, the consequences of a military strike on their nuclear program may end up being worse. Sometimes in life, we're presented with the choice between bad and worse. Which do you choose?
 
The views contained in this post are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of current or previous employers.