Details of the alleged plot by an Iranian-American to hire Mexican drug cartels to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador in Washington remain few and far between. But that hasn’t stopped analysts at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and the Heritage Foundation from calling for a military response.

The Heritage Foundation’s James Jay Carafano weighed in with a blog post promoted at the top of the center’s website. Carafano lists actions “required” in response to the Justice Department’s allegations against Texas used car dealer Manssor Arbabsiar. The first action is:

Take strong measures to respond. The U.S. is fully within it rights to conduct a proportional military response against suitable, feasible, and acceptable targets in Iran. (In many ways, the situation is similar to military operations conducted against al-Qaeda in Pakistan.) The Iranian government knows full well that the Iran Qods Force is a terrorist group that has provided material support to the Taliban and other groups. The Tehran government has not restrained this organization and is responsible for its conduct.

Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at AEI, called for an end to diplomatic outreach to Tehran, colorfully writing in the New York Daily News:

The terror plot was no rogue action. Obama may hold an olive branch, but the White House must recognize the Iranian regime’s fist holds only blood.

The time for talk has ended.

And FDD executive director Mark Dubowitz taunted the White House for what he anticipates will be an indecisive reponse to a “brazen attack” — albeit ineptly planned and nowhere near a point of execution — in Washington. While coming up short of explicitly endorsing military action, he writes in the Huffington Post:

What will be a surprise to the Iranian regime is if the United States, in the face of a brazen attack on its capital, finally responds decisively.

Under Obama’s watch the U.S. has imposed tighter sanctions on Iran than those implemented during the George W. Bush administration. Perhaps more importantly, assuming the Attorney General’s indictment holds up, federal law enforcement agencies were highly effective at breaking up a terrorist plot well before it was operational or posed an immediate threat to the U.S. or diplomatic targets in Washington.

Now, with analysts and the media still scratching their heads over what to make of a convoluted plot alleged to have been hatched by an Iranian American in collusion with Mexican drug cartels, FDD, AEI and Heritage analysts — along with their friends in Congress — are quickly declaring the end of diplomatic strategies to curb Iran’s nuclear program and regional ambitions.

Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL), one of Washington’s most reliably hawkish politicos on Iran, made clear yesterday that he wants to go over the heads of the Iranian regime and appeal to the Iranian people’s hearts and minds — and he’s willing to forsake their stomachs to do it.

Appearing on a local Chicago radio show, Kirk said the allegedly Iranian-backed assassination plot exposed by the Obama administration yesterday was the perfect excuse to impose broad-based economic sanctions. So broad-based are Kirk’s sanctions that they’re specifically designed to collapse Iran’s currency, the Rial, by targeting the Islamic Republic’s central bank. Kirk was one of a few Republicans to say in the past two days that the allegedly Iranian-backed assassination plot constituted an act of war.

One of the show’s hosts, Ron Majors, asked Kirk whether, as is often the case with sanctions, going after the Iranian economy with such a broad brush stands to hurt ordinary Iranians. Kirk, who acknowledges later in the interview that the current government was “only able to hold onto power by stealing [the] last election,” then made the stunning admission that he didn’t see anything wrong with literally denying food to ordinary Iranians.

Here’s the exchange:

MAJORS: Once we get into sanctions and taking those kinds of actions, the argument immediately becomes, ‘Are you really going after the government of the country, or are you taking food out of the mouths of the citizens?‘

KIRK: It’s okay to take the food out of the mouths of the citizens from a government that’s plotting an attack directly on American soil.

Listen to the clip here:

There is no delicate line to tip-toe here: One cannot both see the Iranian regime as an oppressor of the Iranian people and simultaneously decree that it is fine to punish the Iranian people for the actions of a government that has no accountability to them. There is a simple phrase to describe this, and it’s collective punishment.

Perhaps Kirk wants something similar to the sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which did not satiate Washington’s war hawks, and caused serious suffering in Iraq. During the initial years of broad-based sanctions after the first Guld War, infant mortality in Iraq rose more than threefold, from one death out of 30 births in 1990, to one in eight in 1997.

With news yesterday of a foiled bomb plot that allegedly ties the Iranian government to an attempt to assassinate foreign diplomats in the U.S., Republicans are now calling for escalated actions against the Iranian regime. Many have focused their talking points on describing the alleged Iranian-backed plot as a declaration of war on the U.S. Here’s a quick rundown:

FORMER REP. PETE HOEKSTRA (R-MI)

Pete Hoekstra told the right-wing magazine Newsmax that the plot allegedly coordinated by Iran constituted “acts of war”:

The plot will “heighten the tensions throughout the Middle East… These are acts of war, and they need to be viewed and treated as such,” said Hoekstra, the former ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told Newsmax in an exclusive interview.

REP. PETER KING (R-NY)

House Homeland Security Committee Chairperson King told CNN that he considered the plot an “act of war” and said “the Iranians have crossed a red line”:

KING: This is such — again, this violates all international norms, violates international law. Basically, you’re talking about an act of war. I think we have to — the United States has to really consider taking very significant action. [...]

[W]e should not be, I don’t think, automatically saying we’re not going to have a military action. I think everything should be kept on the table when you’re talking about a potential attack against the United States, an act of war.

SEN. MARK KIRK (R-IL)

Appearing on a Chicago talk radio show, Kirk boosted his recent legislative attempt to collapse the Iranian currency by going after the Iranian central bank. Though Kirk didn’t endorse “military action” by the U.S., he justified a new push to move his legislation forward by saying that the Iranian government has already declared war on the U.S.:

KIRK: I think the declaration of war has already happened by Iran on us. If their intelligence service, called the MOIS, is seeking to blow up American targets, we are already in a state of conflict with them, but for the good work of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Justice Department.

RADIO HOST: …You believe this to be true? This is an act of war?…

KIRK: …This is pretty in-your-face by the government of Iran, to be trying to put together bomb plots inside Washington, D.C. And it’ll be now time for the Obama administration to take action.

Watch King and listen to Kirk here:

The plot itself remains merely in indictment form, and, as many commentators have pointed out, we don’t know exactly what was going in this situation, and we do know that a bold move like this would be well out-of-character for Iran’s normally very professional intelligence agencies. Considering the high stakes of possible regional conflagration, perhaps it’s best to save all the “declaration of war” talk until the facts of the case and Iranian complicity are more clear.

Last night on Fox News, GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain — who has seen his popularity jump in recent weeks — explained how he would have responded to the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States: missiles:

CAIN: I would have done something earlier such that it probably would have encouraged them not to do something like this and that is one of great capabilities we have is our ballistic missile defense systems that could be upgraded, and we could place these Aegis ballistic missile defense systems in international water in that part of the world. [...]

I would send strong signals to let them know that we would be prepared to take whatever actions we needed to take. … We have got to show them our capability. And one of the capabilities that this president is not maximizing is the use of these ballistic missile Aegis warships that we have. We have a great number of them, and we are not flexing our muscles.

But by this morning, Cain appeared to have come to his senses. When MSNBC host Chuck Todd asked Cain how he would’ve responded to the alleged plot as president, Cain said he’d take time to get the facts before making a decision:

CAIN: A President Cain would respond to these allegations about Iran by first asking all of my intelligence sources to come in, asking the Joint Chiefs of Staffs, getting everybody that knows something about this situation to come in. Let’s take a look at the complete picture. Let’s take a look at all of the data and then make a decision. I can’t say what I would do sitting here based upon just the news reports.

Watch the clips:

As the New York Times notes, the plot is a “bizarre scheme involving an Iranian-American used-car salesman who believed he was hiring assassins from a Mexican drug cartel for $1.5 million.” According to Cain, apparently nothing scares Mexican drug cartel triggermen more than ballistic missile defense on ships in the Persian Gulf.