Originally Posted by retmil46

Indeed. In that part of the world, with it's current societal norms and government, that might be the only sentence, short of something even more drastic, that would truly be viewed as "punishment" by others even willing to contemplate such an act.

And it could be just enough of a shocker, even by Iranian standards, to be the kickstart that starts moving them down the path towards a judicial system similar to us Anglophones as Botnst put it.

I've made the same argument regarding the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - it definitely sucked that those people died in such a way, and the survivors had to contend with slow deaths from radiation poisoning and genetic anomalies in their offspring - but for the rest of the world's population, having those two first-hand examples of the devastation and suffering those weapons would cause if used on a wide scale, over the past 70 or so years might have given more than one leader with his finger on the button some pause and kept them from getting an itchy trigger finger.