Who Is Afraid of Iran’s Nukes?
03.20.2008 - 10:24 AMNorman Podhoretz has been courageously making the case for a U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear-weapon’s program for some time now. He also has — or had — been predicting that President Bush would carry out such a strike before the end of his presidency. As time grows short, that seems increasingly unlikely.
But let’s not rule it out entirely.We have already pointed to the fact that as Iran acquires sophisticated Russian air-defenses, which it may deploy as early as this fall, the execution of a U.S. strike will be greatly complicated and the risks associated with it will rise. It would be easier for the U.S. to the job before the SA-20s are pointing toward the skies.
There is another factor as well that pushes in the same direction: growing pressure from an insecure but highly influential ally in the region — and, no, it is not Israel.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has taken a look at Saudi Arabian attitudes toward Iran’s nuclear program:
senior and mid-level Saudi officials express an apparently unambiguous belief among the upper-echelon of the Saudi Government that the Iranian nuclear program does not solely exist for peaceful purposes. One senior Saudi official told staff confidently, “Iran is determined to get a nuclear weapon.”. . . One senior long-serving U.S. diplomat in Riyadh said he had “never met anyone from the King on down who didn’t think it was a nuclear weapons program.”
Saudi officials believe Iran wants a nuclear weapon in order to become a regional superpower, to alleviate a sense of marginalization, to serve as a deterrent, and to be a more dominant force in the Gulf. While senior Saudi officials describe a nuclear-armed Iran as “an existential threat,” most Saudi officials do not believe Iran would actually use nuclear weapons against Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia worries that Iranian nuclear weapons would encourage and enable the Iranians to pursue a more aggressive, hegemonic foreign policy in the region. However, it would be inaccurate to completely characterize SAG [Saudia Arabian government] anxiety regarding Iranian nuclear weapons as a purely “balance of power concern.” Based largely on Iran’s subversive activities directed against the Saudi regime in the 1980’s, some senior Saudi leaders find a nuclear-armed Iran especially disconcerting. Such past Iranian subversion efforts has imbued the senior Saudi leadership with an intense distrust of Tehran.
What do the Saudis think should be done about the mounting danger?
When presented with a hypothetical choice between a nuclear-armed Iran and a U.S. [preventive] attack, a significant number of Saudi officials interviewed explicitly or implicitly preferred a U.S. attack. A correlation seems to exist between the seniority of Saudi officials and views on Iranian nuclear weapons. More senior Saudi officials tended to be more “hawkish” in their viewpoint toward Iran. Some key Saudi officials believe a U.S. attack could set the Iranian nuclear program back over a decade. More cautious members of the senior inner circle express concern that a military attack would affect “everything and will not be easy to pull off,” and doubt whether a U.S. attack could destroy all key components of the Iranian nuclear program. Based on U.S. actions in Iraq, some key Saudi officials feared a “nightmare” scenario in which the U.S. attacks Iran but fails to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
The Saudis have a lot of oil, a lot of money, and a lot of influence in Washington. If the U.S. does take action, and if it is successful, they will surely reap some of the credit. And if it goes badly, we will surely hear from John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that the “Israel Lobby” is to blame.
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March 20th, 2008 at 10:44 AM
What about the blockade option?
March 20th, 2008 at 12:39 PM
This is a tough one because no option is good. There are only bad and worse options. The most obvious option — striking only Iran’s nuclear-related installations (which would also entail striking its air and air defense facilities) — is not the work of a day. It would take, conservatively, 3-4 days of sustained strikes and restrikes, combined with specops intervention (e.g., at the Bushehr reactor), to ensure that Iran’s nuclear program was well and truly dead. However, killing the nukes without killing the current regime would immediately prompt a Tehran-backed worldwide Islamist backlash — and one that would spread overnight into Iraq and Afghanistan, and probably Pakistan as well. (Particularly if, as is likely, we had to operate support aircraft — tankers, airborne command and control — from Pakistan. The strike aircraft would come from aircraft carriers and the continental US; it’s unlikely Qatar and Kuwait would allow our USAF aircraft to launch strike sorties from their soil.)
I believe the main reason Bush appears no closer to acting against Iran than he does today is the concern voiced to him from his theater commanders about a backlash in the region — particularly Iraq, where the fear is that full-scale civil war would erupt. Victor Davis Hanson captured that concern when he was recently in Iraq, speaking with our forces there; his “dispatches” indicate that this in-theater assessment, which was originally voiced at the outset of the surge last year, is still a priority issue for the surge force.
VDH piece here: http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson030208.html See “Iran and the Shiites” about two thirds of the way down the page.
As noted in the discussion of the SA-20 system, this most obvious strike option, with all its drawbacks, will be effectively cut off for us, once that system is in place. It will not then be feasible to do ONLY a “surgical strike” — and for Israel, even less so.
The most effective course we could pursue is to regime-change Iran, which would at one stroke remove the mullahs, remove the nukes, and have the “Qaddhafi effect” on Islamic extremists everywhere. But, of course, that’s a mighty big stroke. Although Iran would coalesce better after a regime-change than Iraq has, it would still require a ground invasion to change the regime — and this one would absolutely have to be two-pronged, from northwest of Tehran and south of it. It would require denuding our forces in the Far East, and deploying almost everything we have in home bases in the US, to do this job.
Blockade? Blockades only work if everyone honors them. Russia would not, and Russia can sneak things into Iran on multiple axes we have no way of plugging up. With a little more effort, China can too. Given Europe’s penchant for Iranian oil, it is doubtful even our European NATO allies would join us in an effective blockade of Iran.
If I were making policy, I think I would go for something more than just striking Iran’s nuclear facilities, but less than regime-change — something that could be achieved by air power and specops. The pretexts are there to both take out the nukes, and take out all of Iran’s conventional military facilities and materiel in the western half of the country: these are the resources that support Iran’s meddling in Iraq. But they also represent a significant portion of Iran’s capacity for national defense, which is always oriented primarily toward the West. To ensure quiescence to the south, on the Persian Gulf, Iran’s major naval combatants, air and coastal defense, and naval infantry forces should also be destroyed. Tehran’s major national command and control facilities should also be struck, along with the regional ones inherent in the previous target sets. All these objectives can be achieved through air power and specops.
I would choose a more destructive, less focused strategy than merely taking out the nukes, because Iran should be left vulnerable, with great losses to make up, and uncertain of our intentions. (Who knows — this might even embolden insurgent elements in Iran.) Tehran’s leaders know we can do this as often as we have to, with nothing near the inconvenience that has attended our occupations that flank Iran. These leaders would undoubtedly begin plotting big terror attacks on the US right away — but they are doing that already. What they would NOT do, being now sure of the price of it, is sustain or step up their agitation in Iraq and Afghanistan.
March 20th, 2008 at 1:37 PM
We frankly need to get the entire region on board if we launch a preemptive strike. I’ve had it with the US carrying out the Saudis interests, and the Saudis hiding and jacking up the price of oil when things go bad.
March 20th, 2008 at 10:20 PM
We frankly need to get the entire region on board
You can’t be serious? Has anybody been able to, let alone the US? About the only thing that you can get everybody on board for is the destruction of israel.
March 21st, 2008 at 8:54 AM
Russia and China have apparently adopted Iran as their anti-American proxy, notwithstanding the seeming inconvenience of having a nuclear-armed jihadi state in their vicinity. Anything that ties our hands and degrades our status is useful to them in their own quest for power. This suggests that our failure to confront the mullahs — or at least to confront somebody — could have ramifications beyond even the GWOT. We could be at one of those historical turning points where our ability to influence events anywhere is at stake. It would be nice if a moderate Shia Islam could assert itself now in both Iran and Iraq without our further active intervention, but that seems an unlikely prospect. And the probability is that if we wait much longer Russia and China will distract us more forcefully elsewhere as well. It’s a little like having several small but potentially deadly fires in your house and having to decide whether to douse them one at a time or fight them all at once..
March 21st, 2008 at 3:59 PM
Putin has his own problems with rebellious Islamists… makes you wonder why Russia would so actively help Iran when this could result in Moscow or St. Pete becoming targets of those very weapons they’re helping the mad mullahs build.
What price destabilization of the US and Israel? A big risk for Putin in my view.
March 21st, 2008 at 9:35 PM
Dave, Seth — I don’t think Russia and China are competing to cultivate Iran as a means of undermining the US. Rather, they are doing it because they are all on the same continent, Iran is a factor they cannot get away from, and they must address Iran one way or another. If there were only Russia, or only China, either nation would have the option of simply battening down the hatches against the Shi’a Caliphate. But they both exist, and therefore the one that doesn’t compete loses Iran to the other, and sees the continental balance of power — involving oil, Islamic tolerance, and access to the Middle East — tilt against him.
This is something a lot of Americans don’t understand. There is no vacuum-sealed steady state in Asia, as long as Russia, China, and Iran all exist in their current form. We can’t induce either Moscow or Beijing to leave Iran alone (or shun Iran) by merely puffing up our feathers and strutting. The respective interest of each Asian power in not letting Iran be turned AGAINST it, by the other, will always be more compelling to Moscow and Beijing than abstract moral arguments from the conveniently distant US.
The Russians see cultivation of Iran precisely as a way of diverting Iran’s sponsorship of Islamic terror away from Russia, and toward China and the US. Likewise the Chinese. And note: Iran hasn’t been plaguing Russia with Islamist attacks since Russia publicly avowed her intention of supporting Iran’s nuclear programs. Russia is also thrilled to see China repressing Muslims and other separatists, and trying to put on a good face for the Olympics — in the Islamofascist playbook, evidence of infidel truckling to the Great Satan in the West.
America, meanwhile, offers Russia no guarantees against either threats from Iran or a collaboration of Iran and China. We instead ask Russia to just back off, and don’t seem to recognize that doing so leaves a door wide open for China, whose cooperation we have never succeeded in getting for anything.
March 21st, 2008 at 11:10 PM
We could be at one of those historical turning points where our ability to influence events anywhere is at stake.
I’ll go further: due to atrocious internal and external policies the US has ALREADY lost its ability to influence events anywhere. We are watching a decline.
makes you wonder why Russia would so actively help Iran
Pro-Iranian policy for the purpose of getting away with anti-islamist policies at home.
We instead ask Russia to just back off, and don’t seem to recognize that doing so leaves a door wide open for China
The US has no leverage over China, but China has trillions worth of leverage over the US.
So we push he who does not have us by the balls.
It is farcical to call the US a superpower in such circumstances. But there is still the delusion, and both China and Russia see through it, and so does Iran. Only the US has not realized it yet.
March 22nd, 2008 at 12:17 AM
JE Dyer, actively suborning the creation of a nuclearized Iran and deliberately thwarting US and allied attempts to contain it, seems an awfully over-the-top form of Sino/Russan appeasement. There is no reason why these two mammoth authoritarian powers must truckle to Ahmadinejad & Co. — creating that Frankenstein contrary to the wishes of key Western and Sunni Islamic countries — unless they harbor not only mutual distrust but a mutual desire to destabilize the international system. So if they are competing it is also to downsize us. Otherwise it would save them no end of trouble to assist in stifling the mullahs rather than submit to petty blackmail. Russia in particular has a funny way of expressing its fear of Chinese hegemony — by threatening its European neighbors, all but restarting the Cold War and (taking your expertise as representative) provoking a “use it or lose it” Pentagon mindset vis-à-vis Iran. Well — do you suppose those clever Kremlin bastards are actually goading us to attack Tehran? Rube Goldberg scenarios aside, I agree that mere puffing and strutting will not deter either Eurasian rival’s recklessness. Neither, I suspect, will clobbering Iran — not that that isn’t worth considering just the same.
March 22nd, 2008 at 1:29 PM
Seth - Actually, Russia doesn’t see herself as a mammoth authoritarian power, and neither does China. Both see themselves as powers that ought to be great, and ought to own Asia, but are stifled in that aspiration by each other, by the limitations of their geography, and by the United States, which keeps them hemmed about with alliances and military force.
Their perception of key factors in their national situations is layered: first Asia (and for Russia, Europe), then the US-led rest of the world. Iran is a permanent factor for them due to geography and history, which particularly for Russia goes back way farther than 1789. Russia and her proto-Russian ancestors have been alternately defending themselves from and cultivating the Persians for centuries. Russia has long aspired to at least control, if not own, the pathways into Asia, and among her other attempts after WWII, sought to invade Iran, and present the West with a fait accompli like those in Eastern Europe. Russia never accepted the US connection with Iran as a fait accompli, however, and colluded with Marxist and Islamist insurgents against the Shah throughout the Pahlavi reign. Iran’s worth to Russia is more than a guarantee of national security, it is a means of gaining concessions in and near the Persian Gulf, which could very easily include military basing, and the influence of intimidation with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf nations, as well as economic benefits.
China, meanwhile, aspires to dominate Asia in her own way, which means securing Chinese access to (eventually tacit hegemony over) the Middle East: leapfrogging (surrounding) India and blocking Russia. China does what she can with what she’s got, and has made the greatest inroads with Pakistan and the Horn of Africa, where (in the latter) Chinese interests in oil, transportation, warehousing, and manufacturing are fast taking over the economic picture. Typical China: approach the ultimate target slowly, via a longheaded pincer movement. China may never “own” the Suez Canal outright, but if she effectively controls the Bab el Mandeb Strait (between the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf, off the north coast of Somalia), the Strait of Hormuz (via Iran), and eventually the Strait of Malacca, over on the other side of the Indian Ocean, she can still control the approaches to the Persian Gulf. (China is laboring diligently to hold US hegemony over the Strait of Malacca at risk, by militarizing the South China Sea/Spratly Islands to the east of it, and gaining naval basing concessions from the military junta in Burma/”Myanmar” to the west).
Russia and China will always desire to dragoon Iran into their respective “clubs,” for their own reasons. It will never be enough for the US to merely swat their hands and say “No-no!” The compulsion for each to promote its ascendancy over the other, by — among other things — making Iran a quiescent client, is too great to be overcome solely by admonition. The only effective course for the US is to promote an outcome that Russia and China can’t undo, and will be dissuaded by its decisiveness from trying to. In practical terms, that means that sooner or later, there will have to be a different government in Iran, a moderate one with Western leanings that is America’s client, and that poses no threat of Islamic terror sponsorship to other governments in Asia. No other outcome will make either Moscow or Beijing back down.