Atomic Iran: A Diplomatic Riddle More Than a Military Challenge

A friend of mine in the field of national security receives periodic visits from an acquaintance of his who happens to work for the government of Israel. This foreign gentleman quietly and periodically makes the rounds in Washington, trying to gauge the level of interest for U.S. military action against Iran's nuclear facilities. As Iran frays internally, these visits are significant for a couple of reasons.

Reason first is that those alarmed at the prospect of an Iranian theocracy armed with nuclear weapons – and this includes any American who has contemplated the prospect of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with his finger on the button – tend to assume that the Israelis are poised to carry out this thankless task themselves. Perhaps they will, but Israel is clearly and deeply hopeful that someone else will do it first.


That someone, of course, is the United States. There's a feeling in Washington, however, and it began even before the nation elected a president who ran on the proposition that invading Iraq was a mistake, that insofar as preemptive military actions are concerned, Americans had, for better or worse, already used up their chits before Iran entered the conversation. Moreover, there is a new national realization than when it comes to acts of war, preventive medicine is not always an effective cure.

Israel has been down this road before. On June 7, 1981, Menachem Begin dispatched a squadron of eight F-16s, with cover support from six F-15s, across the Arabian desert to destroy a nuclear reactor being built by the French for Saddam Hussein in the heart of Iraq at a facility called Osiraq. The Israelis' daring raid was a stunning success, even to the point that it was carried it out on a Sunday afternoon to limit civilian casualties. But then came the criticism.

The U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution condemning the Israeli strike as an act of unprovoked aggression; the Reagan administration made a point of suspending the sale of warplanes to Israel; and a burning desire to achieve arms parity with Israel was stoked within the Arab world. And, as Israel is presumed to have a nuclear capability of its own, one effect of the Osiraq raid was to redouble the desire for such weapons among Israel's hostile neighbors. This was true even for moderate Arab leaders, such as Jordan's King Hussein. After the raid, Hussein began to characterize a nuclear capability for his side as a necessary component in Middle East stability, for reasons of Arab pride, if nothing else.

"[In] armaments, a certain equilibrium is necessary," said Jordan's leader. "If there is no equilibrium, there is no limit, and if there is no limit, the door is open for aggression. We all know that Israel has several atomic bombs. Arabs should not be held for less intelligent than they are." The king also predicted that Israel's atomic superiority would not exist very much longer.

Iran is primarily Persian, not Arab, but in the ensuing 28 years, pan-Arab nationalism has been partially replaced by pan-Islamic fervor. In the 1980s, as Pakistan acquired its nuclear capability, some Muslim commentators welcomed the arrival of "an Islamic bomb." Under the logic that previously ruled this region, Iran's admittance into the nuclear club would herald the arrival of a "Shiite bomb." Yet with Iraq on its knees, Iran has filled the power vacuum that exists across the Middle East and Persian Gulf region – even in Sunni areas, an inadvertent consequence of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Shiite Iran has forced an unlikely alliance with Sunni Syria. Iran has also underwritten Hezbollah in Lebanon, actions that put Iran at the forefront of Israel's enemies.

To the question of whether Iran's mullahs are apocalyptic enough to contemplate annihilating Israel, there is no easy answer. If you listen to what they say, it's very difficult to be reassured of either their rationality or humanity. In 2005, shortly after assuming power, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asserted that Israel should "be wiped off the map." It's a sentiment that Ahmadinejad attributed to Iran's ranking cleric, the nation's "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who never denied it, and it's a threat Ahmadinejad has subsequently repeated, in one form or another, many times.

Barack Obama, in one of the most off-key notes of his presidency, seemed to excuse his tepid response to the recent crisis in Tehran, where marchers protesting a stolen election were shot and beaten, with this remark: "It's important to understand that although there is some ferment taking place in Iran, that the difference between Ahmadinejad and (Mir-Houssein) Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as has been advertised." That's a mouthful. It's also wrong in two important respects. For starters, it's a straw man: Who has "advertised" Mousavi as the second incarnation of Thomas Jefferson? More importantly, that he's not Ahmadinejad is precisely the point.

Ahmadinejad may, or may not, actually be the unhinged maniac he plays on the world stage. At the very least, however, his thinking is imbued with a troubling mix of hatred and ignorance. Ahmadinejad routinely spins dark conspiracies about everything from 9/11 to the supposed "Zionist" influence over the international financial system, and his most consistent passion is casting aspersions on the Holocaust, which he has termed "a myth." This is not someone you'd want to see with his finger on the button.

Which brings me back to point number two. Neither Israel nor the United States is in a political position to launch a preventive first strike on Iran – both nations already used up that arrow in their quiver by preemptively invading Iraq. Moreover, the Israeli friend of my friend concedes privately that it wouldn't solve the problem anyway.

"How long will this set back the Iranian nuclear program?" my friend asked his visitor.

"A year or two," is the answer.

If this is correct, it suggests that the United States would have to undertake such attacks every year or two – or until there is regime change in Iran. That's a highly unlikely scenario. Moreover, the inevitable result of each such bombing (unless one of them was a tactical nuclear attack) would be that the regime would hide its nuclear program ever deeper underground even as the bombings solidified the government in Tehran.

"Military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities can at best slow down enrichment until it is completely reconstituted at hidden locations," says another friend of mine, esteemed arms control expert Michael Krepon. "Airstrikes are therefore unlikely to make a meaningful, long-term difference in Iran's nuclear potential. They (would) however ... have seriously negative repercussions on U.S. interests in the Gulf, the Middle East, Pakistan, and Afghanistan."

Krepon also believes that it's not necessarily a certainty that Iranian authorities desire an actual atomic weapons arsenal, as opposed to a capability to enrich uranium should they conclude that they need one. "In other words, the choice facing Iran's leadership is whether to acquire actual bombs, or to possess a virtual nuclear deterrent," he says. "The choice facing Israel then, is whether it can live with a nuclear deterrence relationship, or a virtual nuclear deterrence relationship in their neighborhood."

That's a helluva risk to ask Israel to take. But neither they, nor us, have too many other options. Although the United States should formally state its preference for a change in regime, it should also state publicly "that Iranian affairs are a matter for Iran, and call for relations based on full recognition of Iran's right to security," Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic & International Studies said this week. "The United States should offer to ease or lift economic sanctions, particularly those that put more pressure on Iran's people than its regime. It should not ease sanctions that affect Iran's arms and nuclear imports, and should resist any such efforts by other countries."

The implication of that approach is that Iran's ruling mullahs are rational creatures. Perhaps they are, but it seems strange to calmly negotiate with men who sic religious militias into the streets to shoot women and who install a Holocaust denier as their president. What a world.