REINING IN IRAN
U. S. must take the lead in pressing for global nuclear disarmament
SPECIAL TO THE NEWS
Updated: 08/17/08 6:46 AM
There are a number of ominous signs that Israel, alone or perhaps together with the United States, may be preparing a so-called pre-emptive military strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities. Whether or not that happens, the more general issue it raises is this: What can be done about the inevitable spread of nuclear weapons, especially to possibly dangerous states such as Iran, or even to terrorist organizations such as al-Qaida?
The existing nuclear states have taken a number of unilateral or cooperative steps to safeguard their weapons and uranium or plutonium stockpiles. In addition, diplomatic pressures, economic rewards and punishments and even covert intelligence operations have been employed in efforts to prevent or at least slow down the spread of nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, these measures have not always worked, so other strategies must be developed to deal with new states or terrorist organizations that are on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons, or already have done so.
It is still uncertain whether Iran is actively working on producing nuclear weapons, but the indications are not good. If the Bush administration is planning an attack against Iran, the best guess is that it will take place after the November presidential elections — to avoid harming John McCain’s electoral chances — but before the administration departs next January.
However, in the overwhelming consensus of official and nongovernmental security and military experts, both in the United States and throughout the West, such an attack would not work and would have disastrous consequences.
Fortunately, it has become obvious that the top military and civilian Pentagon leaders are among those who are highly skeptical about the wisdom of U. S. military action against Iran.
For example, in March Admiral William Fallon, formerly the overall head of U. S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, was forced to retire from the military after giving a series of interviews making clear his opposition to attacking Iran. Fallon is not alone. Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker’s famous investigative reporter, recently has
written that the Joint Chiefs of Staff are “pushing back very hard” against White House pressure to strike Iran, and that at least 10 other active four-star generals have stated their opposition. There have even been rumors that the Joint Chiefs have threatened to collectively resign if they are ordered to attack Iran without prior congressional authorization.
Perhaps most importantly, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has made a number of public statements to the effect that a war with Iran would be disastrous on a number of levels. Significantly, he has just published an article in a leading professional military journal arguing that while “the military option must be kept on the table . . . another war in the Middle East is the last thing we need.”
Even in Israel a number of security and military officials and nongovernmental experts believe that an Israeli attack, unilateral or not, is neither necessary nor wise. Last October Ephraim Halevi, the former head of Mossad, the Israeli CIA, stated that while the Iranian threat was worrisome, “it would not put Israel in danger of destruction,” and that the chances of such an attack would be further reduced if Israel reached a settlement with the Palestinians.
According to Israeli news reports and commentaries, Halevi’s views are shared by a number of active-duty Mossad and military officials who are arguing against an Israeli attack, particularly if it is a unilateral one. There are a number of arguments against a preemptive military attack, either by Israel alone or even together with the United States:
• An attack won’t work. Advocates of a pre-emptive attack typically cite the apparently successful 1981 Israeli attack on Iraq’s first nuclear reactor. For a number of reasons, however, that attack provides no model in the current situation.
First, the attack set back Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program for only a few years; over the next decade, wary of renewed Israeli strikes, he concealed key components of his renewed program by burying them underground. Second, Iran has learned the lesson of the 1981 attack and has diversified, duplicated, hidden and buried the various components of a potential weapons program. By some estimates there are at least 70 separate sites, many of them deep underground under tons of reinforced concrete.
For this reason, an Israeli attack would have no chance of success, for it would require not a single surprise attack by a relatively small number of fighter-bombers, but scores or even hundreds of massive attacks, over a number of weeks — a capability that Israel does not have. Perhaps the United States does, but what that suggests is that if President Bush decides against U. S. participation, Washington has an effective veto over any Israeli attack.
• The likely consequences are unacceptable. First, while it is far from certain that even a series of joint U. S.-Israeli massive attacks would produce lasting results, it is certain that there would be vast civilian casualties. Aside from the obvious moral issue, that consequence alone guarantees that almost the entire world would condemn the United States and Israel, with political consequences that would reverberate into the indefinite future.
Thanks to the Iraq War and other Bush administration actions, the United States already is one of the most unpopular states in the world, even in the West. An unprovoked attack on Iran would turn the United States and Israel into pariah states, with vast consequences for the genuine national security of both countries.
So far this analysis has been based on the assumption that a U. S. or Israeli attack would be with conventional weapons, an assumption that could prove to be a shaky one if conventional attacks failed to permanently destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities. Some Israeli hawks are arguing that nuclear weapons cannot be ruled out, and it is known that early in the Bush administration, some officials ordered studies of the possible U. S. employment of tactical nuclear weapons against underground Iranian sites.
If the nuclear advocates won the day, the moral, political and long-run security consequences for both countries would be catastrophic. In short, the use of nuclear weapons against Iran would be simply insane — but not necessarily unimaginable.
The prospect of vast Iranian civilian casualties or the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons aside, Iran could retaliate in highly painful ways against a U. S. attack, or even in response to an Israeli attack that the United States failed, or chose not, to prevent. First, at least for awhile, it could blockade or in other ways effectively close the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, bordered by the Iranian coast, through which much of the world’s oil-carrying tankers must pass. The price of oil and gas is already wreaking great damage on the American (and world) economy, so it is not difficult to imagine what an Iranian-American war would do.
Beyond that, almost certainly Iran would find other painful ways to retaliate. Iran could use its close ties with Iraqi Shiites to make trouble for the United States in that country. As well, Iran is the main source of outside support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, and would be likely to use its leverage to greatly increase terrorist attacks against Israel and possibly even U. S. targets, such as American troops and warships in the Middle East.
Of course, the United States could always counter Iranian or Iranian-sponsored retaliation by escalating our own military actions to range far beyond attacks on nuclear-related targets — but down that road lies a full-scale war, including the eventual “necessity” of a ground force invasion of Iran. And with what troops? We are hard pressed to fight simultaneous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq now, and may even be losing the war in Afghanistan and against Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida.
Iran has a population of 70 million, a large land army and a country three times the size of Texas. A sustained conventional war — and subsequent occupation? — would be orders of magnitude more difficult than either Iraq or Afghanistan. In light of these impossible difficulties, the temptation to resort to tactical nuclear weapons might prove irresistible.
• There is no basis for the assumption that Iran may go nuclear in order to attack Israel, let alone the United States. No state has ever used nuclear weapons against countries that could, and assuredly would, totally annihilate it in return.
Despite some dangerous or even crazy public statements, there is no evidence that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is literally insane, and even if he were he would not have the effective power, by himself, to initiate an Iranian nuclear attack that would amount to national suicide.
Even Israeli hard-liners sometimes admit that an unprovoked Iranian nuclear attack on Israel would be highly unlikely, and that their main worry is that Iran would secretly provide terrorist organizations with nuclear weapons. Against this concern, however, is the evidence that no state has ever done such a thing, if only because states correctly fear that any terrorist nuclear attack would lead to retaliation directly against the state that provided the weapons — or perhaps simply was presumed to have provided them.
For these reasons, most experts argue that while Iran might want nuclear weapons in part for reasons of national “prestige,” their primary purpose would be defensive, to provide a deterrent against attacks by powerful enemies — and not only by the United States or Israel, but by other powerful potential enemies. It is instructive that the Iranian nuclear program began after Iran suffered at least 1 million casualties in its war with Iraq in the 1980s, a defensive war that was initiated not by Iranian religious fanatics, but by the secular aggressor regime of Saddam Hussein.
What to do? As long as we and the Israelis refrain from unprovoked preventive attacks that not only don’t prevent but practically guarantee wider war, Iran is unlikely to use nuclear weapons or give them to terrorists. Still, there are good reasons to try to prevent it from having the theoretical capability of doing so. Recent history has demonstrated that a variety of nonmilitary measures, including diplomatic pressures, economic sanctions accompanied by the promise of economic rewards if nuclear programs are ended, and vigorous international inspection systems can work to halt or even possibly reverse the nuclear ambitions of some states. We now know that during the 1990s these measures against Iraq worked far better than was widely understood at the time, inducing Saddam to end his nuclear and biological weapons programs.
The North Korean case is particularly striking, both in demonstrating the futility of military threats but also the effectiveness of diplomatic and economic punishments and rewards. North Korea has had an active nuclear program for more than two decades, and may have begun producing nuclear weapons in the mid-1990s. Both the Clinton and Bush administrations seriously considered bombing North Korean nuclear reactors and weapons production facilities, but rejected that course in part because the most important targets were buried deep underground, and in part because South Korean and U. S. intelligence feared that a fanatical and desperate North Korean government might retaliate against an attack by unleashing nuclear weapons against South Korea or Japan.
Faced with this intolerable risk, the U. S. government has wisely decided to rely on diplomacy and economic rewards, rather than on pre-emptive war or even economic sanctions, and in the last year there have been ongoing negotiations that have raised hopes that North Korea will agree to refrain from further development of nuclear weapons in return for an end to its isolation.
As well, in 2003 a similar set of U. S. and U. N. economic and political but nonmilitary measures persuaded the Moammar Gadhafi government in Libya to abandon its own developmental programs for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
This history strongly suggests that the U. S. and Israeli governments should forget about bombing Iran into submission, focusing instead on diplomatic and economic carrots-and-sticks that would have far more promise in inducing Iran to end its nuclear weapons program. While the latter process creates only the possibility rather than a guarantee of success, that’s a lot more than can be said about military attacks, which are all too likely to produce the worst possible outcome: intolerable consequences that are not offset by success in destroying the intended targets.
Suppose, though, that nothing can force or induce Iran to change its policies, and within a few years it begins producing nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them? The task would then be to deter Iran from ever using them, or giving them to uncontrollable terrorists. There is no reason to doubt the effectiveness of deterrence, meaning the implied or even explicit threat of massive nuclear retaliation if Iran or terrorist groups allied with it ever used nuclear weapons against Israel or the United States.
So far, deterrence has worked throughout the post-World War II nuclear age. No state has dared to use its nuclear weapons even against non-nuclear states, let alone against states that can retaliate in kind. Nonetheless, deterrence is a very bad way to continue to run the world. Aside from the greatly magnified difficulties of maintaining a stable deterrence system in a world of increasing numbers of nuclear states as well as, possibly, nuclear terrorist groups, we now know that even the relatively stable and simple two-state U. S.-Soviet mutual deterrence system came perilously close to breaking down on several occasions during the Cold War — during the Cuban missile crisis for sure, but also because of several hair-raising accidents, miscalculations and misunderstandings of radar, communications and other data.
Since deterrence can fail in many different ways, the only true solution to the problem of nuclear weapons is to get rid of them. It used to be thought that only woolly-headed liberals believed that global nuclear disarmament was a good idea or even possible, but Ronald Reagan began the process of changing all that in the mid- 1980s when he called for the abolishment of all nuclear weapons, which he considered to be “totally irrational, totally inhumane [and] possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization.”
Perhaps inspired by Reagan’s vision, recently an elite group of four pillars of the establishment — George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry and Sam Nunn (two former secretaries of state, a former secretary of defense and the former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee) — have been writing, lecturing and lobbying on the need for the United States to take the lead in pressing for global nuclear disarmament. In the last two years, 14 other former secretaries of state and defense and national security advisers have endorsed the Shultz committee’s program.
During the Cold War, the existing nuclear states kept the nuclear peace by creating a system of Mutually Assured Destruction, also known appropriately as MAD. So far, MAD has worked. But it is, well, madness, to believe that it will continue to work perfectly for an eternal future. In the absence of nuclear disarmament, time is not on our side and the prospect of unimaginable catastrophe will continue to haunt our world.
