Right Wing Nut House

My latest at PJ Media is up and it deals with our slowly evolving policy toward Iran, begun during the Bush administration and carried on by Obama’s team, that the US has rejected the military option entirely (or nearly so) and is working toward containment and deterrence.

A sample:

The number one unpleasant truth the UN refuses to face is that the Iranians are not going to stop their drive for developing the capability to build a nuclear weapon unless someone physically restrains them from doing so. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has made this perfectly plain and there should be no reason to doubt him. He has tied the Iranian nuclear program to the issue of Iranian sovereignty and demands the same rights any other nation has to a nuclear program granted under international law.

The “P-5 + 1? talks (the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany) in Geneva will simply confirm what everyone already knows: no sanctions regime will prevent Iran from continuing their nuclear work. There are no enticements, no blandishments that the Iranians will accept in exchange for abandoning what they clearly see is a matter of national pride and international prestige. To think otherwise is not logical.

There have been all manner of grandiose proposals for a “grand bargain” that would establish a multinational enrichment facility on Iranian soil, or a vastly increased inspection regime by the IAEA, in exchange for inducements to Iran that consist of sponsoring Iranian membership in the WTO to increased trade with the West.

But when Iran refuses, what then? And here is where I think it fairly obvious that the United States, the West, and the rest of the world have already accepted the idea that Iran is going to eventually develop the capability to construct a nuclear bomb.

It’s easy to declare that bombing Iran will get them to see reason (how this is so is never quite revealed). But taking a hard headed look at the military option necessarily means trying to ascertain what you would gain by a strike versus what you would lose. And I think in the fall of October, 2006, the Bush administration finally reached a consensus that the military option would cause far more problems than it would solve.

The recent revelation about a previously unknown Iranian enrichment facility drives that point home. For any military action to be successful, we would have to identify the the targets that would have to be destroyed in order to set back the Iranian program several years (the relentless logic of zero sum benefits/consequences demands that we don’t have to go back and do the same thing in a matter of months). But it is likely now that Iran has been surreptitiously adding to their capability by building facilities of which we are totally unaware.

You can’t bomb what you don’t know about. And given the ruinous consequences of military action to American interests, you damn well better be sure that any such strike took out enough of the Iranian program that they could not threaten anyone for at least a couple of years. (I am not even going to address invasion and regime change. Such notions are silly.)

And what of the consequences to the innocent? No one has ever - repeat ever - deliberately bombed a nuclear enrichment facility (the Israeli strike on the Osirak reactor never hit the reactor itself, targeting the vast infrastructure that supported it). But by definition, a strike on Nantanz or the vast complex we would be hitting centrifuges and reactors full of enriched uranium:

The Persian Gulf nations of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran have more than half the world’s known oil reserves. The 1981 study by Fetter and Tsipis in Scientific American on “Catastrophic Releases of Radioactivity” estimated that bombing a nuclear reactor would cause 8600 square miles around the reactor to be uninhabitable, depending on which way the wind blows. Bombing the Bushehr reactor will mean half of the world’s oil is instantly inaccessible. Bombing Iran means that Americans will not be driving cars any where, any more, for a long, long time. The American Way of Life will be finished. An economic collapse unimagined by Americans will follow. Mechanized farming and food transport will be finished. Famine is a possibility. Food riots are a certainty, in the land of plenty, with the fuel gauge on empty.

By the way - we’d probably end up killing some Russians if we bombed Bushehr as they are assisting the Iranians in construction.

And Israel? Richard Clark sums up the Israeli dilemma on bombing Iran:

Well, put yourself in Israel’s shoes. The President of Iran has said repeatedly that he wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. He’s repeatedly denied that the Holocaust ever took place. He talks in mystical terms about the invisible Imam and the return of the expected one, the Madi, all of which sounds like an Islamic version of the fundamentalist Christians talking about rapture and final days and if this person had the authority to throw nuclear weapons around, would he perhaps throw them at Israel without further provocation because he wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth? From the Israeli perspective, two or three nuclear weapons going off in their country is the end of their country. This is an existential issue for Israel. So, we, as Israel’s ally, have to take that into account. This is not just a question of another country getting a nuclear weapon like, say, Pakistan or India. It’s a question of a country that has actively supported terrorism, has had complete disregard for international law and talks openly about destroying Israel. So, this is a serious question for the United States and for Israel. But it doesn’t mean that because it’s a serious question that the answer is necessarily a military option.

As I point out in the PJM piece, Israel is apparently taking a wait and see attitude - at least until the end of the year. At that point, unless the world applies “crippling” (word used by the Israeli ambassador to the US) sanctions on Iran, all bets are off and the clock may strike midnight.

Israel is in a horrible position - but so are we if they strike. Iran will simply blame us anyway and the same consequences that would accrue if we ourselves bombed the Iranians would probably be visited on us anyway. Logically, this would mean that we may threaten Israel with a cutoff or a substantial reduction in aid if they choose the military option towards Iran. My guess is, they’ve already been told that which has probably delayed a strike on Tehran to this point.

If the rest of the world has already accepted the fact of Iranian nukes, this means that Israel is probably alone in their desire to start a war over the issue. Would that stay their hand in attacking? Obama would not stand still for an Israeli strike on Iran where America was blamed so in addition to all the other consequences that the Jewish state must calculate, there is the very real possibility of an actively hostile America to consider. If that becomes part of the calculation, it is very possible that Israel would not bomb Iran and would work with us to develop missile defense and other countermeasures short of war.

I fully realize that many supporters of Israel would like to see either the US or the Jewish state bomb Iran. Sometimes, a military response is necessary regardless of the consequences. But in this case, where the gain in bombing is so uncertain while the consequences of military action are stark and predictable, responsible policy makers here, and in Israel, I believe, will eventually come to the conclusion (if they haven’t already) that the second option - unsatisfying as it is - of not taking military action while working to protect our friends and deter the Iranians otherwise, is probably the wisest course.