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Stopping the latest attempt should only be one concern...the more prevelant being stopping them permanently through diplomacy...and how often does this happen?
About as often as it does through open warfare: rarely if ever.
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Where's the emphasis? On prolonging a hostile relationship, or resolving the ******* problem?
It's difficult to answer this without going into areas where you have already professed a very happy ignorance. As happiness is a rare commodity, I don't really want to intrude on your worldview..
It is sufficient to say that prolonged, hostile relationships are a way of doing business between nations, particularly when the nations at either end of said relationship have a vested interest in maintaining that hostility. Think of American rhetoric against the USSR during the cold war, then apply similar lessons to the current Iranian government as they sling invectives in our direction. Whipping up a public frenzy over an enemy - particularly one that's usually thousands of miles away, and across a bloody big ocean, to boot - is a good way of instilling some kind of national identity and political fervor in your people. Skip back to Orwell's
1984 and the two-minute hate for further reading.
The problem is when you begin taking active steps to turn your rhetoric into action, such as by building a ballistic missile ******* and working towards creating nuclear material with which to arm them. That changes the political playing field significantly. Everybody understands the point and nature of rhetoric, but putting missiles behind your words makes people edgy. Particularly when your nation is in a rather unstable region of the world, more particularly when you publicly espouse genocide against nearby neighbors and their foreign supporters.
There really aren't many good ways for solving this problem in the long run, aside from letting the ruling powers die of old age and hoping the next generation has better common sense. Nobody likes it when we do things through diplomatic means (much criticism of the Cold War with Russia) and nobody likes it when we take an active approach (the current administration's policy of regime change, which ousted Hussain in Iraq and which has tied up many thousands of our soldiers over the past couple of years). Honestly people in America don't much like it when anything happens that takes their focus off the latest reality tv show. There's no real 'win' in this situation.
The best we can hope for is that people don't so something so monumentally stupid that we wind up in a third world war, one that has glow-in-the-dark consequences.