Nuclear Weapons and Iran

Both the New Yorker and the Washington Post have had leading articles in the past few days about the desire by the Administration for a military strike on Iran. Taken together, they paint a picture of an Administration which counsels diplomacy on the one hand and actively pushes for nothing short of regime change on the other. Different officials have different views on how genuine the threat is at the moment. Many comment that it is being calibrated to urge diplomacy along and intimidate the Iranians into negotiating away their nuclear schemes. But, particularly in Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker piece, there are more ominous signs. From a government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon, we hear that Bush believes that “saving Iran” will be his legacy. From a former defense official, we hear that the President also believes that a sustained campaign would hobble the leadership and cause the Iranian people to rise up. The most explosive revelations, however, are that the Pentagon’s option plans include the possibility of using nuclear weapons against Iran, and that American ground forces are already in Iran, conducting covert operations.

Explaining in greater detail, Hersh told Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s Late Edition that: “[N]obody in their right mind would want to use a nuclear weapon in the Middle East, because it would be, my God, totally chaotic. When the… joint chiefs, and the planners wanted to walk back that option, what happened is about three or four weeks ago, the White House… the Oval Office, the vice president's office, said, no, let's keep it in the plan.” This was Hersh’s fundamental point, and it was missed by most bloggers and news outlets. So far as the people Hersh spoke with are concerned, the problem was not that a contingency plan was made (they are, in fact, standard), but that, the White House refuses to relinquish it. Hersh’s article, in fact, was about how unpopular the idea is outside of the Administration.

Kevin Drum was one of the few to grasp this, noting that “what's important isn't the existence of the contingency plans. Rather, it's the fairly obvious fact that the Bush administration is publicizing them as part of a very public PR campaign in favor of a strike against Iran.” Lending credence to this idea, Lawrence Kaplan has an intriguing piece about the Iran-Syria Operations Group, an entity of the Administration recently (and quietly) created within the State Department and headed by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Liz Cheney. Circumventing the Bureau of Near East Affairs (still staffed by only two people), the ISOG is nominally in charge of promoting democracy in Iran. In actuality, it seems positioned to make the internal case for a military strike against Iran, and could also become the manner by which the Administration will get the intelligence befitting that case from the State Department.

Denials abound, of course. Bush has stressed diplomacy and Jack Straw has sharply ruled out an attack. Iran itself has joined the chorus and, in its own way, Israel has also given a caveat of sorts. Thus progresses the PR campaign of pressure-release, pressure-release.

But the point still stands, and it should have escaped nobody’s attention that the United States is caught in quite a bind over Iran’s nuclear policy. On the one hand, it absolutely cannot tolerate the reorientation of power in the Middle East that would follow from a nuclear-capable Iran. On the other hand, the difficulties attending any US military operation against Iran would potentially dwarf those in Iraq. Leaving aside all of the domestic and international political and economic considerations, these alone might make the Administration's desire for regime change untenable. Meanwhile, Iran remains breathtakingly defiant in its acquisition of nuclear power. Indeed, the next step in that acquisition, seems to have just been taken with Iran’s first uranium enrichment procedure completed yesterday.

In an excellent article on the reasons behind Iran's current defiance, Ray Takeyh notes that the Iranians are not fooled by the nuclear rhetoric:

"[T]he hardliners insist that American objections to Iran’s nuclear program do not stem from its concerns about proliferation, but its opposition to the character of the regime. They argue that should Iran acquiesce on the nuclear portfolio, the perfidious Americans would only search for another issue with which to coerce Iran. ‘The West opposes the nature of the Islamic rule. If this issue [the nuclear standoff] is resolved, then they will bring up human rights. If we solve that, they will bring up animal rights’, emphasized Ahmadinejad. Given such views, there appears no sufficient incentive to compromise on such critical national issues, since acquiescence will not measurably relieve American antagonism."

America's occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan (both of which border Iran), its quest to abandon the non-proliferation regime, re-orientate the war on terror along an unbounded axis and revitalize its arsenal in a way that has even Russia worried, has done little to assuage these concerns.