Decision ‘08

A Deadline That Cannot Pass Unobserved

The editors of the National Review have it right:

At midnight tonight, the U.N. Security Council’s deadline for Iran to stop enriching uranium will pass, but the centrifuges at Natanz will keep spinning. That Iran has defied the deadline should surprise no one. What does surprise us is that the president who swore he would not “permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons” does not show more urgency in fulfilling that pledge.

According to a senior administration official, the U.S. will hold off on seeking sanctions through the U.N. for at least a month while trying to hammer out the details of a Security Council resolution with Europe. The charitable (and highly implausible) interpretation is that Condoleezza Rice and her top aide, R. Nicholas Burns, have good reason to believe that Europe is finally ready to break with its four-year history of appeasement and back some meaningful penalties. But as a display of resolve, the delay is rather less than impressive. If the West were really united against the mullahs — and if the U.S. and its allies really agreed on how to thwart them — the Iranian regime would see a draft resolution Friday morning. Instead, it will see a Security Council so irresolute that its members take weeks, even months, to agree with each other, and a United States that gives no clear signal of its willingness to move beyond fruitless and feckless diplomacy.

In truth, the situation cannot be solved by diplomacy; it truly saddens me to write this, because I am not a ‘warmonger’, though I’ve been called one on more than one occasion, but the reality is that we have three realistic options with Iran: one is military, one is containment, and the other is nothing.

In other words, it looks like war or acquiescence or a big gamble. The NRO editors say it must be war:

The paramount mission of the Bush administration in its remaining two years should therefore be twofold: to keep the mullahs from going nuclear, and to speed their fall from power. Unfortunately, these objectives do not admit of a single solution. We should redouble our aid the Iranian democracy movement, but we quite obviously cannot assume that the revolution will come before the bomb.

Stopping the bomb will require us instead to hasten the diplomacy to its inglorious denouement and think very seriously about our military options. A preemptive air strike is a nasty thing to contemplate. The mullahs could retaliate against us in Iraq (either by attacking our forces or by increasing their support for the Shiite militias). They could sabotage tanker shipments in the Persian Gulf, causing a spike in crude-oil prices. They could back terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. But the alternative — a nuclear Iran — is vastly worse. Even if the mullahs never used their arsenal, its simple existence would deal a catastrophic blow to U.S. interests. It would effectively give Tehran a veto over U.S. military action in the region. Since the nuclear facilities are protected by the Revolutionary Guard — rabid ideologues who operate with a high degree of autonomy — a weapon could conceivably be transferred to terrorists without the central government’s okay. And an Iranian bomb would likely produce a regional arms race and multiply the number of Middle Eastern nuclear powers. This too would raise the likelihood that a weapon of mass destruction will fall into terrorist hands; and by making it harder to determine where a detonated bomb had originated and retaliate against the guilty party, it would give the jihad that much more incentive to push the button.

Critics of the Iraq War like to claim that (a) it was unnecessary, and (b) that it has tied our hands with respect to the much bigger issue of Iran. Both involve a considerable measure of hindsight, and I believe (a) to be untrue (we simply had to deal with Saddam sooner or later, and the will was present). Regarding (b), though, they certainly have a point.

This is a tough nut to crack, and it presents us with our biggest strategic challenge since the fall of the U.S.S.R. Every possible path seems to lead to a world of hurt. Jonathan Rauch says we can contain a nuclear Iran (subscription required), but James Fallows says that’s wishful thinking:

…[T]he United States can’t accept Iran’s emergence as a nuclear power, but it cannot prevent this through military means—unless it is willing to commit itself to all-out war. The central flaw of American foreign policy these last few years has been the triumph of hope, wishful thinking, and self-delusion over realism and practicality. Realism about Iran starts with throwing out any plans to bomb.

It’s hard to parse Fallows here; his recommendation is obscure - but if I take him at his literal word in that paragraph, he seems to be sneakily advocating the all-out war option.

I do know this, as I said yesterday: if the Security Council doesn’t impose sanctions, then the Security Council is for all intents and purposes dead as an enforcement mechanism. It will be impossible for anyone to take its threats seriously again, if this crisis is not enough to motivate it to act…

One Response to “A Deadline That Cannot Pass Unobserved”

1 Sean P Says:
August 31st, 2006 at 8:42 pm
“Regarding (b), though, they certainly have a point.”

Not really. Even assuming the situation in Iraq over the last 3 years had remained stable (ie: assuming Saddam would not have attempted to take advantage of unrest in Lebanon and Saudia Arabia, an overly generous assumption), we still would have had 50,000 troops stationed in Saudi Arabia (which would probably become targets of Al Queda by now), plus the troops manning the northern “no fly zone” over the Kurdish region of Iraq. And that’s assuming we fully drew down from our immediate pre-war deployment, which all but the most Chomskyite critics still claim to have supported.

Furthermore, don’t forget that the war in Iraq has also “distracted” Iran itself, in perhaps equal measure. Without US troops in Iraq, Iran would not be funding and arming Shiite militias in Iraq and would be able to focus all its attention on preparing for an assault by the US (or, alternatively, it would be free to focus all its efforts in stirring up trouble in Afganistan, which Iran also borders).