Bomb, bomb Iran? Part 1
The foreign policy question of our time: to use overt military force to stop Iran’s nuclear program. I have studied it for more than five years with great interest and emotional investment. I’ve attended debates, read countless articles, participated in simulations, and more. In the midst of this quest to understand I was frustrated by an inevitable wall of ambiguity. There’s just so much about this issue that is unknown and still more that is unknowable.
Formulating coherent policy is extremely difficult in such circumstances, and I can’t offer foolproof recommendations. But, at the very least, I think I have winnowed the debate on the military option down to three key questions:
- Is Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons sufficiently dangerous to the national interest so as to seriously consider air strikes?
- Are there realistic military options available to the attacker(s) that could effectively damage the nuclear infrastructure?
- Are the political, military, and human costs manageable enough to allow for military action?
I see these three questions as the test to which policymakers should subject themselves, only proceeding to the next question if there’s a “yes” to the previous one. Military action should only be taken, then, if the answer is “yes” to all three questions.
I will devote a post to each of these questions, starting naturally with number 1, the question of whether a nuclear Iran is that bad. I’m going to cheat a little bit on this one and re-post a large portion of a post I wrote back in October 2010:
[A] lot of Iranian “irrationality” is assumed and not demonstrated. There is also a tendency to resort to other unproven ideas like the “nuclear domino theory” where Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab powers would try to replicate the Iranian feat. I find this unlikely, though conventional arms purchases, enhancement of asymmetrical capabilities, and perhaps even biological and chemical weapons programs are likelier developments.
A real danger in defensive realism’s analysis of nuclear proliferation is not the assumption of “rational actors” — that states act in logical ways — but the assumption of unitary actors. State decision making, especially in Iran, is complicated and not always predictable. Worse, Iran experts say that the chain of command over the nuclear program is at best blurry. With the IRGC and the mullahs vying for internal power, this could get even more unstable.
But even setting aside all the other potential factors — the loss of American prestige, the gain in Iranian prestige, the blow to the non-proliferation treaty, the buildup of regional arms, the emboldening of Iranian leadership, the damage to the peace process — the worst reason of all to cite the relative safety of nuclear weapons is the non-incidence of Cold War nuclear detonations; the U.S. and Russia nearly used nuclear weapons on each other multiples times.
For instance, a scheduled U.S. ICBM test occurred during the Cuban missile crisis. If the Soviets had better early warning systems at that point, they probably would have assumed the test was an actual ICBM launch aimed at them. In 1983, false alarms of an American missile attack on Russia nearly set off a retaliatory strike. A NATO exercise later that year nearly convinced Russia to preempt what they thought was a coming nuclear strike; overzealous KGB agents interpreted the NATO move to DEFCON 1 as real and not a drill. Even as recently as 1995, mistaken identity of a rocket almost led to Russian use of nuclear weapons.
The U.S. and the Soviet Union understood and trusted each other very little throughout most of the Cold War. I think it is safe to say that Iranian hardliners trust and understand the U.S. even less. Anti-Americanism is a core part of their ideology; for them, the Islamic Revolution depends on anti-Americanism. To some degree, it’s irrelevant whether Iran’s leaders intend to commit suicide. What matters is whether they would be able to prevent misunderstanding and brinksmanship from making nuclear war a 1-in-100,000 event to a 1-in-6 event.
Iran is highly unlikely to use nuclear weapons unprovoked or pass them off to terrorists with the expectation that they will use them. There are also understandable defensive reasons for acquiring nuclear weapons. Regardless, the security picture in the Middle East becomes far murkier with a nuclear Iran. The substantial damage to American and Israeli interests merits further consideration of whether a military strike is wise. That analysis will follow.
It’s too early for Israel to start bragging about Hamas
Israeli leaders are right to be excited by a rare bit of good news in their effort to secure their public against rocket attacks. The development of the Iron Dome anti-rocket system, funded in part by the U.S., is a breakthrough in missile defense: It is the first active defense system against short-range projectiles. Although not perfect (no anti-missile system ever is), it has performed beyond expectations and given a sliver of breathing room to Israeli residents near Gaza.
Most importantly for Prime Minister Netanyahu and the IDF, Iron Dome creates a small degree of “freedom of action” that did not exist before. Given how constrained Israel is politically and militarily in spite of its considerable security challenges, freedom of action is a precious resource. Specifically, the new rocket protection allows Israel to conduct limited military operations in Gaza when a specific threat — in this case, a supposed terrorist attack along the Egyptian border — merits action. Without the threat of debilitating waves of rocket attacks, Israeli leaders will see less need to send in ground forces, as they did in Operation Cast Lead. At a time when Bibi would like to have the world focus on Iran, keeping ground forces out of Gaza is critical.
Hamas, already reeling from significant turmoil among its leadership, now has been challenged by hardline elements in Gaza like Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees. Whenever Hamas decides to de-emphasize violence, PIJ is happy to fill the void. PIJ seems unimpressed by Hamas’s shift away from Syria and Iran toward Egypt. Indeed, PIJ is probably now Iran’s truest representative in Gaza. If successful, the reported terrorist plot would have complicated the growing ties between Hamas and Egypt. As it is, PIJ and the PRC were able to provoke a battle in spite of Hamas’s desire to maintain calm. It also apparently forced Hamas to turn to Egypt as an arbitrator, highlighting Hamas’s own inability to keep the peace.
There is a palpable feeling of relief and even confidence emanating from some in the IDF, owing to the overall military success of the skirmishes and Hamas’s increasingly visible struggle to orient itself. But if Israeli leaders are not careful, they may wind up unprepared for what comes next.
Weakening Hamas’s monopoly on violence in Gaza may be tempting, but now is a particularly risky time to do it. Hamas’s organizational flux (among other factors) has drastically cut ideas of militarily engaging Israel. The smaller Islamist factions are taking Hamas’s place as the main instigators not only because of Hamas’s internal distractions, but because they sense a wider space in which to operate.
Lastly, anything that further cements ties between Hamas and Egypt increases the chance that Israel will find itself facing a unified front of Fatah, Hamas, Egypt, and Jordan. That scenario is unlikely to occur in the absolute, but even steps in that direction will create diplomatic headaches for Israel down the road.
WSJ struggles to find an angle on Obama and Iran
Posted online within a few hours of each other:
I’m dizzy.
Unraveling the Iranian elections: Another step down for Ahmadinejad
If there’s one thing Ray Takeyh made clear in his excellent 2009 book Guardians of the Revolution: Iran in the Age of the Ayatollahs, it was that Iranian politics is a series of paradoxes. The 2012 Iranian legislative election is no different.
As Walter Russell Mead says, this election is basically a “contest among conservatives.” There are at least three main conservative blocs vying for seats, and determining their allegiances is a little more complicated than outside observers might expect. In light of Supreme Leader Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad’s very public power struggle, a number of Western media outlets have simplified the election to a battle between Ahmadinejad supporters and Khamenei supporters. This actually understates the division among conservatives.
The primary conservative bloc is the United Front of Principlists, whose ranks are more traditional in their outlook and tend to be more pragmatic in their political views. They are the ones commonly characterized as being pro-Khamenei, and they tend to be aligned with the mainstream clergy.
Their main competition is the Stability Front, the supposedly pro-Ahmadinejad faction. They were Ahmadinejad’s base of support earlier in his presidency, composed of a few radical clerics and a fair number of IRGC members. They are quite hostile to the West and are very nationalistic.
The paradox comes from the fact that common perceptions of Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have flipped in the last few years. It used to be that Khamenei was considered the pragmatist, the consensus-builder, the careful thinker, and Ahmadinejad was the incorrigibly anti-West fire-breather. Lately, however, Khamenei has criticized Ahmadinejad’s reliance on Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, a pragmatist, as his chief of staff. (Khamenei even forced Mashaei to resign as Vice President last year.) Ahmadinejad now seeks outreach to the West, while Khamenei views these efforts as dangerous.
Mashaei’s Monotheism and Justice Party is really the only group running in the elections that offers unequivocal support of Ahmadinejad — and its support is minimal. The United Front has frequently criticized his handling of the economy, while the Stability Front seeks to diminish Mashaei’s influence and force Ahmadinejad into more hardline foreign policies. The Stability Front offers some support for Ahmadinejad, but the President has strayed from their agenda in his power struggle with the Supreme Leader.
This means Ahmadinejad will have less free rein than ever. Even if the Stability Front does well, he will be made weaker. Khamenei has orchestrated a political scene that allows him to divide and conquer at will.
Whatever limited effect the election will have on Iran’s nuclear policy is uncertain. The only thing we know for sure is that the reformists will be absent from the discussion.
Time for realpolitik to return to Israel
Israel’s early generations of leaders were gifted with a strong pragmatic instinct that stood out in a region where self-deluded demagogues made one foolish move after another. Lately, however, Israel’s political elite has been abandoning sensible thought for a strange combination of alarmism and bravado. A look at Bibi Netanyahu’s approach to each of the major challenges and opportunities in front of him reveals a continuing paralysis coupled with a mentality of denial and wishful thinking.
To take one important issue, Israel is treating the Arab Spring all wrong. Israeli leaders are right to note the potential downside to a new Arab political environment. However, this should not be their public face; they need to engage positively with the Arab world, even if it is not reciprocated immediately. That means Netanyahu should stop referring to the events as moving the Middle East “backward.” Such a verbal champion of democracy should know better than to condescend Arabs by calling their desire for a representative government “illiberal.” This is hypocrisy.
What’s worse, Israel’s own claim to democracy is getting muddied by fascistic elements who bear no respect for the rule of law. The “price tag” campaign of sabotage — borderline terrorism — against Palestinians has now also become an insurgency against the state itself. In the year 2011, more acts of terror were committed by Jews than by Palestinians in the West Bank. Although Netanyahu and his defense minister may grasp the necessity of disrupting the movement, they desperately must confront an even grimmer reality: that 70% of the country’s national-religious and ultra-Orthodox approve to some degree of the attacks, as well as 46% of the country as a whole. That kind of attitude is unhealthy for a liberal society.
Meanwhile, there is a deeply uncomfortable realization that must set into Israeli minds: The Palestinian future will include Hamas. The Palestinian Authority has failed to realize its political aims time and time again, and at the same time Hamas is gaining friends in the Middle East. Add the rise of Islamists in Egypt and Syria’s downward spiral, and geopolitics has encouraged Hamas’s movement into the mainstream. Hamas leaders are not ready to signal a true strategic departure toward non-violence, but a number of forces are subtly changing the group’s cost-benefit calculus toward moderation.
Israel, rather than hiding from these developments, must grab the bull by the horns. Specifically, it should test Hamas’s intentions by using the other Arab states as intermediaries. Although these Arab states are mostly focused inward on feeding their populations, I am certain that an Israeli request to meet secretly with Hamas leaders would command attention. If Israel felt uncomfortable linking Hamas too closely with Egypt, countries like Qatar or Tunisia might be able to serve as substitutes.
According to some recent reports, Hamas leaders are quietly contemplating a switch to non-violence. If that is the case, then a back channel with a trustworthy Arab government would be the perfect way to learn about it — both for Hamas and for Israel. Hamas seeks regional legitimacy, while it would behoove Israel to establish positive relations with the new governments of the region.
It is not clear that Hamas is ready to become a responsible actor yet. That is why Israel should keep these conversations out of sight for now. But it is also not clear that there will ever be a better time to “trap” Hamas in a non-belligerent mindset. That is why sitting back as Hamas determines its future without any Israeli input is strategic folly for Netanyahu. That Israel would have to imagine negotiating with Hamas does not seem fair at all. But most of the hard decisions Israel has made in its history were not made because they were fair, but because they were prudent.
The next step in our Iran policy
Talk of attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities is springing up again, on the heels of two major developments: one is an an IAEA report on the progress of the nuclear program, and the other is a column by Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea outlining the debate in Israel’s security establishment over whether to attack.
This has forced the question in Washington: What is the next step once our current prevention strategy runs its course? I am still skeptical that the military option will be exercised anytime soon, despite all the recent chatter. One thing we learned as a result of the debate in Israel is that a number of crucial political and military figures are opposed to an attack at this stage. These include IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, the heads of the Mossad and Shabak (Israel’s internal security service), influential members of Knesset Moshe Ya’alon and Shaul Mofaz (who have both served as defense minister and IDF Chief of Staff), Intelligence Minister Dan Meridor, and even Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. Also importantly, President Barack Obama is opposed.
One answer which I have previously rejected may be a better option due to changed circumstances. That option is the “naming and shaming” route, to aggressively wage a “PR war” against Iran’s systemic human rights abuses and illegal clandestine operations.
These circumstances have changed somewhat. With the quantum of credibility that the Obama Administration has received on human rights as a result of the Arab Spring, Iranian allegations of American hypocrisy sound less credible. (Note to realists and conservatives: This is what is known as soft power.)
Russia and China will still refuse to endorse the language of Europe and the U.S., but they must now be more cautious not to tread on Arab popular sentiment. For the first time, their insistence on “non-interference” could draw political costs. Arab rulers have discovered that they cannot make policy completely independent of Arab public opinion. Soon, other countries will, too.
This is why it would have been strategic folly to have backed Mubarak to a bitter end. And it is why Saudi Arabia’s backing of the repression in Bahrain was foolish. Building resonance with an angry Arab public is undermined by such short-sighted duplicity. (It has also had the effect of pushing some Bahraini Shia to align closer with Iran than they did before.)
Going the quasi-humanitarian route on Iran is not guaranteed to work, but it is an option that U.S. could not have exercised as easily a year ago. It also helps maximize our gains in the war of narratives with Iran, putting us in better position to influence affairs throughout the region. As long as we do not initiate military action (in the foreseeable future), those gains could mean a whole lot for American foreign policy.
A convenient guide to Paul Pillar’s commentary on Iran
It is with increasing frustration that I see Paul Pillar continually rant against those who consider Iran a dangerous country. I am stunned how frequently he writes about the topic, all without addressing the most important development in Iranian politics — the consolidation of political power behind Supreme Leader Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards. His posts resemble each other so much that I have decided to keep a checklist. Here’s how he scores in his latest post:
- Warning that this “just like Iraq” ✔
- Blaming domestic pro-Israel voices ✔
- Assumption that war is inevitable without his preferred solutions ✔
- Hysterical accusations and word choice ✔
- Blaming Iran’s behavior on U.S. policy (a usual feature)
- Analysis of Iranian institutions, policy, culture, leadership, etc., as is relevant to the discussion
I eagerly wait being able to check off that last one!
A moral narrative to progressivism to counter the immorality of Ayn Rand
In 1979, Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of the UK. Her election was a triumph for British Tories, the modern heirs to the classical conservatism of Edmund Burke. Though Thatcher is compared to Ronald Reagan, and modern American conservatives try at all costs to invoke Reagan’s legacy, the truth is that Thatcher and the Tea Party are worlds apart. Ironically, it is liberalism (or progressivism, depending on your preferred nomenclature) that can more easily emulate a Tory way of solving America’s myriad challenges.
The chief difference between Thatcher and the Tea Party is their rationale for small-government capitalism. Tea Partiers perceive their political opposition in sinister terms, for instance thinking President Obama is actually a Manchurian candidate from Kenya. In one poll, 41% of self-identified Tea Partiers thought the President was not a U.S. citizen. In another, 92% of them thought he was leading the country towards socialism. Slogans like “don’t tread on me” betray a fiercely individualistic — crossing into mean-spirited — worldview.
By contrast, Toryism seeks to maintain personal freedom within a larger moral culture. Thatcher remarked in a 1977 speech:
[C]apital and labour together can realise that their interests are the same. We need a free economy not only for the renewed material prosperity it will bring, but because it is indispensable to individual freedom, human dignity and to a more just, more honest society.
We want a society where people are free to make choices, to make mistakes, to be generous and compassionate. This is what we mean by a moral society; not a society where the State is responsible for everything, and no one is responsible for the State.
This talk of a “moral society” is absent from the Tea Party language. Theirs is more evocative of Ayn Rand, who has been a major intellectual force behind Tea Party elites. Rand, for instance, speaks more frequently in the apocalyptic terms we come to expect from the teabaggers:
Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.
Charming.
What it leads to is a political discourse insistent on maintaining principle instead of bargaining for results. Again, the influence of Rand is apparent:
Observe, in politics, that the term extremism has become a synonym of “evil,” regardless of the content of the issue (the evil is not what you are extreme about, but that you are “extreme”—i.e., consistent).
Rand’s Objectivist philosophy emphasizes the idea of objective truth — which conveniently is known only to her and her followers. Believing they know the objective truth, why should they settle for anything less? (Rand would never admit this, but this makes Objectivism frighteningly similar to Marxism.)
By contrast, Thatcher understood that the health of a democracy means respecting the decisions and beliefs of an opponent. (In fact, this is one of the crucial components of classical conservatism that Tea Partiers overlook.) When Maggie came into office as the education minister in 1970, she maintained some of Labor’s previous policies out of respect for the democratic process.
This is where the American left comes in. Since the right has punted the question of what makes a moral society — preferring instead to compose policy based loosely on the idea of “Get off my lawn!” — there is a vacuum in the moral culture of the nation. Progressives have rightly focused politics back onto economic inequality with the idea of 99% vs. 1%, but it is framed in a way that sounds more vengeful than visionary.
To reclaim the moral high ground, progressives should transform their legitimate grievances into a vision: a system that works for all, and one that is guided not just by short-term profit gains. It can only be realized by addressing the issues that Occupy Wall Street protestors have raised, but not in such stark terms. Ayn Rand’s acolytes believe the value of a human is directly tied to their net worth. Progressives now need to replace that with a value system that evaluates people’s worth based on their contribution to society’s benefit. It shouldn’t shame the principle of self-interest, but it should ask what social gains can be realized by thinking systemically.
Iran’s nuke program see-sawing back in our favor?
Extrapolating the course of Iran’s progress in constructing an atomic weapon is pretty hard to do. A year ago, everyone in the counter-proliferation world was buzzing about the potentially game-changing effects of the Stuxnet virus, with speculation that Iran’s nuclear program was all but kaput. Then, just months later, came reports that Stuxnet merely caused a mild hassle, and that Iran was chugging along. Now the news is swinging slightly back to the positive:
At Iran’s largest nuclear complex, near the city of Natanz, fast-spinning machines called centrifuges churn out enriched uranium. But the average output is steadily declining as the equipment breaks down, according to an analysis of data collected by U.N. nuclear officials.
Iran has vowed to replace the older machines with models that are faster and more efficient. Yet new centrifuges recently introduced at Natanz contain parts made from an inferior type of metal that is weaker and more prone to failure, according to a report by the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington nonprofit group widely regarded for its analysis of nuclear programs.
“Without question, they have been set back,” said David Albright, president of the institute and a former inspector for the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. Although the problems are not fatal for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, they have “hurt Iran’s ability to break out quickly” into the ranks of the world’s nuclear powers, Albright said.
Albright’s actual report at ISIS takes a less optimistic tone, but any good news is still good news.
