The Unknown Candidate: The Non-Solution

Monday, September 11, 2006

The Non-Solution

Starting Another War
By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

It is quite possible that President Bush will bomb Iran’s nuclear installations over the next couple of years.

Let’s hope he looks at how Israel shot itself in the foot in Lebanon this summer and resists the siren calls of neocons who claim that a few air raids would make the Iranian nuclear menace disappear.

The argument Mr. Bush is hearing in favor of an airstrike is pretty simple: Iran is a terrorist regime that has sponsored attacks on Americans and on Jews (as far away as Argentina). The president of Iran is a hard-liner who has used language that, while subject to debate among Farsi speakers, may mean that his aim is to wipe Israel off the map.

A nuclear Iran would also have a devastating ripple effect around the region: Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey might go nuclear as well. And considering how reckless Iran’s foreign policy has already been, imagine if it felt emboldened with a nuclear weapon.

Moreover, if Mr. Bush doesn’t strike Iran, there’s a good chance that Israel will — and the U.S. would still get blamed (partly because the Israeli planes would fly through American-controlled airspace over Iraq).

So if the U.S. is going to get the blame either way, why not do it right, with a combination of American bombers and cruise missiles destroying Iranian nuclear sites in Natanz, Isfahan, Arak and perhaps Bushehr? A successful strike would have to destroy not only buildings but also kill the scientists involved; this is one military strike that would surely occur during working hours.

That’s the argument. But Iran’s leaders are probably praying for such a strike; it may be the only way that they can stay in power for more than another decade.

I’ve never been in a country where the government is so unpopular as in Iran, with the possible exception of Burma. The government is so corrupt, tyrannical and incompetent that it will eventually collapse — unless we attack its nuclear sites and trigger a nationalistic surge of support for the regime.

We Americans are still paying the price for our involvement in the 1953 overthrow of the elected Iranian government of Mohammed Mossadegh; if we bomb Iran, we may cement the mullahs in power for another 50 years.

Moreover, the military options are wretched, partly because Iran is probably doing much of its work at sites we can’t destroy because we don’t know where they are. The Natanz site for now is an empty room. We might kill Russian technicians at Bushehr or elsewhere, and Iran might retaliate with terror attacks aimed at us (counterterrorism experts suspect that Iran has sleeper agents in the U.S. whom it could activate).

A military strike would also do nothing more than buy time. Ashton Carter, a former senior Pentagon official who has studied the possibility of a strike and considers it feasible (but unwise at this time), estimates that a one-time strike would delay Iran’s nuclear weapon at most three or four years. The U.S. could then go back and hit the sites again, but Iran presumably would hide the locations, so later strikes would be less effective.

Dov Zakheim, who was under secretary of defense in Mr. Bush’s first term, recalls that fears of Pakistan’s “Islamic bomb” proved exaggerated and notes that Iran doesn’t treat its 20,000 Jews as wretchedly as its rhetoric would suggest (Iran continues to be home to more Jews than any Middle Eastern country save Israel). Mr. Zakheim argues that the best way to protect Israel is to give Israel improved missile defense capabilities on the understanding that it not launch a first strike against Iran.

As for alternatives to bombs, the best option is more of the carrot-and-stick diplomacy that the West is already engaging in (including direct Iran-U.S. talks) — and keeping International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors in Iran to uncover the hidden sites. Few experts expect Iran to give up its nuclear program altogether, but it’s likely that Iran could be persuaded to adopt a Japanese model: develop its capacity to the point that a bomb could be completed in weeks or months, but without testing or stockpiling weapons.

Granted, expert reassurances are easier to accept if you live in New York than in Tel Aviv, and the consequences of being wrong would be horrific. But however one judges the risks, the one thing we should have learned from Iraq and Lebanon is that military “solutions” can leave us worse off than before.

Photo credit: Nicholas D. Kristof (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)