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| Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on March 8, 2015 |
Joshua Muravchik is a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
The logical flaw in the indictment of a looming “very bad”
nuclear deal with Iran that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered before Congress this month was
his claim that we could secure a “good deal” by calling Iran’s bluff and
imposing tougher sanctions. The Iranian regime that Netanyahu described so
vividly — violent, rapacious, devious and redolent with hatred for Israel and
the United States — is bound to continue its quest for nuclear weapons by
refusing any “good deal” or by cheating.
This gives force to the Obama administration’s taunting
rejoinder: What is Netanyahu’s alternative? War? But the administration’s
position also contains a glaring contradiction. National security adviser Susan Rice declared at
an American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference before Netanyahu’s
speech that “a bad deal is worse than no deal.” So if Iran will accept only a
“bad deal,” what is President Obama’s alternative? War?
Obama’s stance implies that we have no choice but to accept
Iran’s best offer — whatever is, to use Rice’s term, “achievable” — because the
alternative is unthinkable.
But should it be? What if force is the only way to block Iran
from gaining nuclear weapons? That, in fact, is probably the reality. Ideology
is the raison d’etre of Iran’s regime, legitimating its rule and inspiring its
leaders and their supporters. In this sense, it is akin to communist, fascist
and Nazi regimes that set out to transform the world. Iran aims to carry its
Islamic revolution across the Middle East and beyond. A nuclear arsenal, even
if it is only brandished, would vastly enhance Iran’s power to achieve that
goal.
Such visionary regimes do not trade power for a mess of foreign
goods. Materialism is not their priority: They often sacrifice prosperity to
adhere to ideology. Of course, they need some wealth to underwrite their power,
but only a limited amount. North Korea has remained dirt poor practicing its
ideology of juche, or self-reliance, but it still found the resources to build
nuclear weapons. Sanctions may have induced Iran to enter negotiations, but they have not
persuaded it to abandon its quest for nuclear weapons. Nor would the stiffer
sanctions that Netanyahu advocates bring a different result. Sanctions could
succeed if they caused the regime to fall; the end of communism in Ukraine and
Kazakhstan, and of apartheid in South Africa, led to the abandonment of nuclear
weapons in those states. But since 2009, there have been few signs of rebellion
in Tehran.
Otherwise, only military actions — by Israel against Iraq and
Syria, and through the specter of U.S. force against Libya — have halted
nuclear programs. Sanctions have never stopped a nuclear drive anywhere.
Does this mean that our only option is war? Yes, although an air
campaign targeting Iran’s nuclear infrastructure would entail less need for
boots on the ground than the war Obama is waging against the Islamic State, which
poses far smaller a threat than Iran does.
Wouldn’t an attack cause ordinary Iranians to rally behind the
regime? Perhaps, but military losses have also served to undermine regimes,
including the Greek and Argentine juntas, the Russian czar and the Russian
communists.
Wouldn’t destroying much of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure merely
delay its progress? Perhaps, but we can strike as often as necessary. Of
course, Iran would try to conceal and defend the elements of its nuclear
program, so we might have to find new ways to discover and attack them. Surely
the United States could best Iran in such a technological race.
Much the same may be said in reply to objections that airstrikes
might not reach all the important facilities and that Iran would then proceed
unconstrained by inspections and agreements. The United States would have to
make clear that it will hit wherever and whenever necessary to stop Iran’s
program. Objections that Iran might conceal its program so brilliantly that it
could progress undetected all the way to a bomb apply equally to any negotiated
deal with Iran.
And finally, wouldn’t Iran retaliate by using its own forces or
proxies to attack Americans — as it has done in Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia
— with new ferocity? Probably. We could attempt to deter this by warning that
we would respond by targeting other military and infrastructure facilities.Nonetheless, we might absorb some strikes. Wrenchingly, that might be the price
of averting the heavier losses that we and others would suffer in the larger
Middle Eastern conflagration that is the likely outcome of Iran’s drive to the
bomb. Were Iran, which is already embroiled in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and
Gaza, further emboldened by becoming a “nuclear threshold state,” it would
probably overreach, kindling bigger wars — with Israel, Arab states or both.
The United States would probably be drawn in, just as we have been in many
other wars from which we had hoped to remain aloof.
Yes, there are risks to military action. But Iran’s nuclear
program and vaunting ambitions have made the world a more dangerous place. Its
achievement of a bomb would magnify that danger manyfold. Alas, sanctions and
deals will not prevent this.
***
***
Matthew Kroenig in his book A Time to
Attack comes to a similar conclusion:
“Chapter 3 showed that there are no swans that are
likely to save us from the Iranian nuclear threat. We cannot sabotage, assassinate,
regime-change, or cyberattack our way out of this problem. We also saw that allowing Iran to obtain a latent
nuclear capability, aka the Japan Model, is unacceptable and would be
tantamount to giving up and acquiescing to nuclear weapons in Iran.
...
We might be left then with only one option; the
military option, the subject of chapter 6. This chapter made clear that a US
strike on Iran's nuclear facilities is not an attractive option either. Such a
conflict would result in Iranian military retaliation, spikes of oil prices,
and anti-American sentiment. Yet a military strike would also have benefits. It
could destroy Iran's nuclear facilities, set back Iran's nuclear program and
create a significant possibility that Iran would never acquire nuclear weapons. If diplomacy fails, this is our only hope
for keeping Tehran from the bomb.”
The Americans seems to be waking up while Israelis are falling into a delusional daze just before the elections.
