Striking Iran

This week's Weekly Standard hosts an article by Reuel Marc Gerecht in which he discusses several issues concerning the Middle East, one among them being dealing with Iran.

Gerecht is not a nut. He doesn't advocate, as Krauthammer does, that the United States needs to stage a massive pre-emptive invasion of Iran with the intent of toppling the Islamic regime in power. He also seems to understand the most of any conservative I've read of the hardships and risks faced in even a limited pre-emptive strike. Nonetheless, after laying out the various options available to the United States (of which he finds four) he states the only one that has any chance of success is a pre-emptive military strike against targets in Iran related to the nuclear weapons program.

Four. Realize that the only option that passes the pinch test--that realistically offers a good chance of delaying Iran's nuclear-weapons production by years--is a preemptive military strike against all of the facilities that American, European, Israeli, and (in private) IAEA intelligence suspect are associated with weapons production. There are certainly many arguments to be made against a preemptive attack, though only one is really free from a pre-9/11 mindset that advances defense over offense in counterterrorism. The weak arguments--the Iranian nation will rise against us, the democratic movement in Iran will die, the Iranian clergy will retaliate in Iraq and globally--are not historically or psychologically particularly compelling. Iranians as a people may well rally around the flag, but so what? The Iranians rallied around the flag when Saddam Hussein invaded in 1980. The invasion didn't prevent the spiritual collapse of the Islamic revolution and the growing popular animus towards the ruling clergy, which were both well underway by the mid-1980s.

The "strong" argument that Gerecht does not mention until the end of the discussion of Iran is the high probability that an attack against these facilities will not entirely destroy the Iranian nuclear program. Gerecht is well aware of this himself; he participated in the "simulation" the Atlantic Monthly ran in November (see my earlier post about it) and knows the difficulty the American military would face, even if it limited itself simply to trying to strike targets related to the weapons program.

The stronger argument against attacking Iran's nuclear-weapons facilities is that we may not technically be able to do it. This point needs to be debated by military men, intelligence officers, and senior officials. Given how diligently Iran has tried to hide certain facilities and deny access to others, the evidence certainly suggests that the clerical regime's research and production may not allow for that much duplication and concealment. The American, European, and Israeli intelligence communities have a good deal of information on a wide variety of likely and possible sites. Quite unintentionally, the IAEA has also aided in what is becoming a targeting guide. And given the awful terrorist track record of the clerical regime toward us and others, it would be wise for the administration--assuming it wants to pass the pinch test and not continually punt to the Europeans--to posit that we can severely hurt the Iranian nuclear-weapons program until proven otherwise.

Unfortunately, this short paragraph is all the time Gerecht spends talking about the unfeasibility of a military strike. The fact that the Iranians have prevented access to certain facilities is evidence enough for him that there must not be that many facilities. Gerecht doesn't clarify his argument, but it appears what he is suggesting is that if the Iranians in fact had multiple concealed facilities for their program, they wouldn't mind allowing access to the ones that we happen to know about. I think this is a highly flawed assumption. The Iranians could have hundreds of facilities and still try to prevent access to the ones that we know of; the idea that if they did they would willingly allow access to them to fool us into thinking those were the only facilities they had, is speculative and in my opinion, an unreasonable conclusion to arrive at. I don't think it's safe to assume they'd be willing to play such mind games with us if they could, and that since they are not, they must not be able to. Unfortunately, that's the only evidence he offers that a strike might even be remotely effective.

The fact of the matter is that we have no good options, and that option "number one" that Gerecht talks about-learning to live with the Iranian bomb-may be forced upon us regardless of our wishes. Gerecht suffers from the same affliction that many on the right suffer when it comes to Iran. They assume that unremitting hostility with Iran is a given, and they look at the situation only with any eye towards American interests, while utterly failing to consider the interest of the Iranians. Why exactly does Iran want the bomb? What are they attempting to protect themselves against, or against whom do they wish to assert themselves? Can we work with the Iranians on allaying their fears, or satisfying their desires, so that they will find for themselves that the stigma of acquring the bomb outweights the benefits they hope to achieve by it? No one is asking these questions, because to do so requires that we take steps to end 25 years of non-engagement with Iran, and we do so not entirely on our terms. Given that in truth we have no good options when it comes to preventing the Iranians from requiring nuclear weapons, such an engagement may be the only choice we have.