1 Seems idiotic to me. Escalating to a Middle East war would be stupid.

2 Drop something right next to it. Non-explosive, something that suggests a cartoon gun with a flag that says "bang." Give 'em the idea that we can pinpoint them with a weapon but chose not to -- this time. Let 'em know that they are in our sights and if they pull any more shiite, we can and will very likely hit them with something a lot bigger and much louder.

Something like this would get their attention for sure but would not "start a war."

3 Schoolyard bullies, who bluster and threaten, virtually always get brought down and shown to be the cowards that they actually are. The strong will always, "speak softly and carry a big stick," concealed until it is necessary to use it.

4 Well Bill, I think after they fired off all those rockets at our troops and caused a lot of injuries it's time we showed our power - at least some of it. And no, the Iranians are not going to war with us over one rocket.  But we have made rockets and nuclear weapons our line in the sand and if we fail to act to stop them now we won't be able to stop them in the future. We have to take some sort of action, like it or not. The aggressor sets the rules in such situations, and Iran has been the aggressor.

We are already in a state of war with Iran, just our side has refused to admit it - even to ourselves.

That's not to say we should blow up the whole region, but destroying their rocket makes the point quite plain.

I really don't understand how you can see us as the bully here; we killed their terror master in retaliation for attacking our embassy, then they hurt a bunch of our service personnel with rocket attacks. In all instances it was the Iranians who were the aggressors.

If we fail to respond then Iran knows we are weak. Read what Osama Bin Laden said; he decided he could defeat us because we pulled out whenever challenged, from Beirut, from Somalia, etc. Muslims have a different view of strength and weakness than do we. They have to know we aren't going to take it or they'll keep pushing.

That's why a surgical strike is better than either a full blown attack or doing nothing. It puts the onus back on them.

5 We took down their elected government in 1953, and took possession of their oil industry in the process. More recently, we crippled their economy with sanctions, and told the world that we would punish anyone who bought their oil. They fired this handful of nonlethal missiles in response to our assasination of one of their government leaders while he was on a diplomatic mission in a nation militarily occupied by us without international authority. They have, in recent recent interchanges, killed not one American, while we have killed many of them with economic sanctions and assasinated more than one government official. Who is the aggressor?

As you know from the body of my comments, I am a veteran, support this nation's security needs and am disgusted by the Democrat's freak show. But I do not believe that force begets anything but more and bigger force, and an international posture of this nation as the world's biggest thug is neither becoming nor useful.

Either declare war and fight to the death, or keep your sword in its sheath.

6 Bill I greatly respect your opinion but just disagree. We took down their government because it was becoming a pro-Soviet Marxist state under the Tudeh Party, the equivalent of Hugo Chavez' Venezuela.

And the government of Prince Moussadek was trying to nationalize the oil industry aka seize all the assets of private companies. The British were going to be particularly hurt by this. This was not OUR seizing the oil industry but our keeping it open.

We didn't impose anything on the Iranian People; many were very happy about our intervention.

And after seizure of our embassy in 1979 we did not retaliate - which led to the Beirut Marine barracks bombing. In fact, through Hizbollah Iran has attacked us repeatedly and we have largely done nothing.

The sanctions are in place because Iran refuses to give up their nuclear weapons program, and they refuse to stop funding terrorism. Both directly affect us. We should have put crippling sanctions in place long ago. The only reason we didn't was because we feared what would happen to world oil markets.

Bill, Iran has picked most of the fights over the years.

I agree we should declare wars, but we also cannot allow certain things - like the Iranians to develop atomic weapons and delivery systems. And you don't say "well, ours are better" because they are the types who will use theirs and dare us to do the same, knowing we are too weak. That's why we can't let them get away with firing missiles at our military in the first place.

7 You probably should read someone who has more military experience than I do, and who has spent many years in the area. http://thesaker.is/u-s-posture-in-the-middle-east-preparing-for-disaster/

He tells us that the current status after that latest Iran missile strike reveals that "it is undeniable that all the US/NATO/Israeli forces in the region are now exposed like sitting ducks" because despite multiple warnings that they were coming, "not a single Iranian missile was intercepted, that the missiles all landed with very high accuracy, that the U.S. base itself suffered extensive damage." Looks like we learned a valuable lesson and decided to leave well enough alone. Read the entire article; is is highly informative.

Bear in mind that we have been in Afghanistan for eighteen years now and have never been within shouting distance of anything that even approximately resembles victory. There is no real reason for anyone to think that we can win a war anywhere. We can cause a lot of destruction. more than any other nation in the world by far. But we cannot win wars.

8 Thanks Bill; I'll check out the article.

Yeah; we need to learn to actually fight and win wars, not keep playing  with "police actions" and "winning hearts and minds".  You have to win the actual war first.