You're still carping about the west's inabillity to understand the Muslim/ME mindset and how we view the situation constantly in the present, while the ME views it through the lens of 1000 years of history, yadda, yadda, yadda. All the missteps and outright humiliation the ME has suffered at the hands of the west, etc. etc. etc.
Actually, no, that is not what I said. There is no need to consider motives at this point, because there is no capability.
There is no doubt in any reasonable mind that the Taliban are more extreme and brutal than the rulers of Iran-and more crazy. Yet no one loses an ounce of sleep over the Taliban nuclear weapon, because there is no Taliban nuclear program...and there likely never will be.
As for Iran's weapons, the issue is not complicated at all. The question is: Does Iran have nuclear weapons, or the immediate capacity to produce them?
The answer is quite clear: No.
The second question you have to ask is, if Iran were to have nuclear weapons, does it have any intercontinental delivery system?
That answer is also No.
All of the "what if'ing" is not justification for a war, and it's obviously not proof that Iran is a threat. Again, if Iran were a real threat....we'd be negotiating, not threatening attacks every day, because that's how we deal with countries that do actually present the possibility of real harm to our country.
Russia and North Korea, for example, are certain nuclear powers with very real military capabilities-no sabre rattling with them, and no threats of invasion or "regime change" are on the table. Instead we end up in long, dragged out negotiations and lodging "international law" protests (the same ones we disdain when they are lodged against anyone else, including the USA, as a waste of time) whenever they bomb an ally of ours.
There is no need to consider motives or "cultural realities" here because the geopolitical facts are quite easy to discern. Iran has no real military power, and so it can be threatened at will. Russia does, and so it can even go so far as to attack a U.S. ally and it will not be attacked or threatened with attack in response.
As for Israel-of course it will gamble on Iran, because it has no choice. There is simply no realistic scenario whereby the same army that failed miserably to stop a rag-tag guerrilla force with bottle rockets is going to destroy Iran's military.