by Bret Stephens
And yet the argument persists that for all its dangers and difficulties, containment is our only realistic option for dealing with the inevitability of a nuclear Iran. Better to start fine-tuning the concept now, the advocates say, than to try to make it up on the fly later.
In one sense, this analysis is right: should Iran acquire nuclear weapons, the U.S. will have little choice but to attempt to manage the consequences and contain the fallout. Yet containment would be a strategy resting on the rubble of a decade's worth of failed diplomacy. That unsturdy foundation alone—a compound of indecision, cravenness, and squandered credibility—is one reason why the policy would be likely to fail.
Another reason is that the tools the U.S. would have at its disposal to enforce a containment policy would have to be salvaged from a collapsed edifice. Yes, we would have allies. But they would be weaker, more hesitant to side with us, and more tempted to accommodate the cunning and willful regime next door. Yes, we would have our military might. But it would be confronted by a much more formidable adversary. Yes, Iran would still have all its own internal divisions and dissensions to deal with. But as Lindsay and Takeyh themselves acknowledge, the acquisition of a bomb would "revive [Iran's] own political fortunes." Yes, we would have a compelling national interest to contain Iran. But American leaders would also have to contend with a perennial political temptation to abandon the field.
Finally, it cannot be stressed enough that a nuclear Iran would be unlike any nuclear power the world has known. It would be dangerous and unpredictable in moments of strength as well as in those of weakness. While it could well be that the regime would not consider using its arsenal if it believed it could get its way through other means, the calculus could change if it felt threatened from within. Indeed, the closer the regime got to its deathbed, the more tempted it would be to bring its enemies along with it. The mullahs will not go gentle into that good night.
Thus to the extent that American policymakers indulge the notion that containment is a difficult but ultimately workable policy option, they also lull themselves into thinking that a failure to prevent Iran from going nuclear is anything but "unacceptable." In doing so, of course, they only further undercut whatever feeble will is left within the administration to confront Iran, now and in the future.
This essay deals with policy options and scenarios that still lie over the horizon. But a few final words ought to be devoted to what is within America's power to do now. Iran does not yet have nuclear weapons. It may yet be prevented from getting them. Recognizing that a nuclear Iran would be catastrophic to U.S. interests (to say nothing of Israel's) is the first step on the road to prevention. Recognizing that neither diplomacy nor, in all likelihood, sanctions can stop Iran's nuclear bids is the second step. The serious options that remain are military strikes or efforts to support regime change.
Advocates of the latter strategy often insist that nothing would harm their efforts more than military strikes. Maybe. But the recent apparent fizzling of the Green movement that arose after the stolen 2009 election offers little hope that it can mount a successful challenge to the regime before Iran crosses the nuclear threshold. It took the Solidarity movement in Poland 10 years to come to power. That is much longer than the world can afford to wait in Iran.
Regime-change advocates must also reckon that while military strikes on Iran could set their efforts back, so too would the regime's acquisition of a nuclear weapon. A regime that has little to fear by way of external challenges to its power will have even greater scope to repress its own people. And a regime that can use its nuclear status to burnish its prestige and advance its interests abroad will also be able to make use of those assets for domestic political purposes.
It is also far from clear that military strikes would be the death knell to the reform movement that opponents claim. Whatever fits of nationalist, anti-Western fervor such strikes might induce among Iranians at large, they are likely to be short-lived. Defeat does not ultimately make for good politics. In 1982, the unpopular and repressive regime of Leopoldo Galtieri in Argentina also bought itself popular support by invading the Falklands. Yet Galtieri was ousted just days after the British took Port Stanley. Much the same went on in the Balkans, where Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic profited politically from his brutal policies in Kosovo and his defiance of NATO. Yet he, too, did not last long in office after losing the battle he had staked so much on.
As for the argument that military strikes would merely delay Iran's nuclear programs, one can only ask: what's wrong with delay? Israel's 1981 strike on Iraq's Osirak reactor was also, in its way, a delaying tactic, since Saddam Hussein moved aggressively to reconstitute his program under deeper cover. Yet had it not been for the raid on Osirak, the Iraq that invaded Kuwait in 1990 might well have been a nuclear power. In that case, no U.S. government would have dared risk a war with it for the sake of Kuwait's liberation. As for Iran, a delay of several years to its nuclear programs would be no small thing if the regime fell to its internal opponents within that period. Far from being the end of the reform movement, military strikes could be their salvation. One must also ask what would prevent the U.S. from striking again in the event that Iran did attempt to reconstitute its program.
None of this is to say that strikes on Iran would not have unforeseen, unintended, and unhappy consequences. All military actions do. But the serious question that confronts policymakers today is whether the foreseeable consequences of an Iran with nuclear weapons are not considerably worse. They would be. And because they are foreseeable, they are preventable. Through action. Not through the inaction that, in this case, goes by the name of containment.
Bret Stephens is a deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page and the author of the paper's Global View, a weekly column.
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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