Based on recent rumblings from the Bush administration, Iran seems to be the leading candidate for the next Bushian war of liberation in fulfillment of our "calling from beyond the stars" of which Bush spoke at the Republican convention last week.
Richard Russell, a professor of National Security Affairs at the National Defense University, takes a look at the potential danger to the US posed by Iran's nuclear program in US Army War College quarterly journal Parameters: Iran in Iraq's Shadow: Dealing with Tehran's Nuclear Weapons Bid by Richard L. Russell Parameters August 2004 (*.pdf file; .htm format here).
Parameters is not the Weekly Standard; one can expect a higher level of seriousness to it. But when the average reader who, like me and 99%+ of the American public are not nuclear scientists, reads a statement like the following from Russell, how do we know what to make of it?
Perhaps most alarming are the recent international exposures of Iran’s emerging uranium enrichment capabilities. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in February 2002 discovered that Iran is building a sophisticated uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz, about 200 miles south of Tehran. The IAEA found that 160 centrifuges were installed at a pilot plant at Natanz and 5,000 more centrifuges are to be completed at a neighboring production facility by 2005. After completion of the plant, Iran will be capable of producing enough enriched uranium for several nuclear bombs per year.
In a June 2003 visit to Iran, moreover, the IAEA discovered traces of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium on centrifuges at the Natanz plant and the Kalaye Electric Company, raising the international concern that Iran’s centrifuges are intended to support a nuclear weapons program.This is why a responsible press, which fumbled so badly in the buildup to the Iraq War, is a vital part of democracy. The public needs the mainstream media to go way beyond the "he said/she said" kind of reporting and really look at these issues and bring genuine expert opinion to the reading public in a form that we can make some sense of.
Given just the paragraph I've quoted above, most people will get only several nuclear bombs a year by 2005. But is this a conservative estimate? An absolute-worst-case estimate? A totally off-the-wall estimate? Without a responsible press and a seriously alert Congress - neither of which we had in the buildup to the Iraq War - a new round of exaggerated and/or false claims by the Bush administration on the danger from Iran will have the same kind of weight in the public debate that they did in the Iraq War.
Helen Cobban is taking a "been there, done that" attitude toward the latest round of dire warnings on the Iranian nuclear program Iranian Nukes: Are We Scared Yet? 09/01/04
I've been living in the US since 1982, and working on Middle East-related security issues for much of that time. Ever since I got here, there have been periodic scares that Iran--and also, formerly, Iraq-- was "on the brink" of acquiring nuclear weapons. Or, with an amazingly deceptive level of pseudo-scientism, people would sit around and debate for ages on whether the Iranians were "two to three years away"-- or, was it "one to two years away"-- from acquiring them.
Okay, let me count. I've been here 22 years. It ain't happened yet.
(Ever hear of the little boy who cried "wolf"?)
But seriously, has much changed recently from all those preceding "Iran on the brink" scares of earlier years? Not really. I used to follow all the technical stuff really closely. Heck, I used to be a member of something called the Washington Council on Non-Proliferation and we'd have regular meetings about all these kinds of things. I honestly can't tell you if all the current scare about "yellow-cake" (yellow-cake!) is qualitatively different from all the technical things people used to talk about then: cascades of centrifuges, etc etc etc.
Assuming that the current round of concern is more justified that past alarms, Russell reminds us:
A grave concern is that Iran could transfer nuclear weapons to non-state actors, because for the past 20 years Tehran has consistently used non-state actors as instruments of statecraft to advance Iranian political interests and objectives. Indeed, the prospects for the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-state actors is greater in the case of Iran than it was for Saddam’s regime, because Tehran has been much more active than Baghdad had been in the sponsorship of terrorist operations, particularly those orchestrated by Hezbollah, against the United States.
To ask the obvious question: then why did we invade Iraq first?
But Russell also desribes succinctly why the strategy of preventive war by the US as a way to deal with nuclear proliferation is so risky:
The Israelis, Pakistanis, Indians, and apparently the North Koreans successfully acquired nuclear weapons by cloaking their research, development, procurement, and deployment efforts with cover stories that their efforts were all geared to civilian nuclear energy programs, not to be harnessed for military applications. Tehran could not have failed to notice that once these states acquired nuclear weapons mated with aircraft and missile delivery systems, they escaped—so far, at least—military preemptive and preventive action by rival states. In marked contrast, the Iraqis suffered as the result of Israeli and American preventive military actions, in part because Baghdad was not fast enough in acquiring nuclear weapons. The Israeli strike on an Iraqi nuclear research plant in 1981 and the American wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003 might have been deterred had Iraq managed to acquire nuclear weapons.
Assuming we have an increasing level of public "chatter" about the dire danger of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons and the need for yet another American war of liberation to save us from the warning shot that may come in the form of a mushroom cloud, a day of horror like none we have ever known, or perhaps some new variation for the new war, it's worth keeping in mind that wars also have costs and risks.
And one of the biggest risks in the Bush administration's policy of preventive war is that it tells countries like Iran, "If you havenuclear weapons, the US won't risk invading you. If you don't, you may get taken over."
Here's an example from Russell of the smoking-gun-as-a-mushroom-cloud argument: "If an American city were to suffer from the detonation of a Hezbollah-planted Iranian nuclear weapon, it would be largely irrelevant whether or not it came about via rogue or mainstream elements of the Tehran government."
This also struck me as an interesting point in Russell's article, though not a new revelation:
Years ago Tehran received a direct taste of that from the American re-flagging operations in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq War, when the US Navy readily destroyed much of Iran’s conventional naval capabilities, leaving Iran to harass shipping with irregular hit-and-run gunboat attacks.
How many people remember that the United States Navy engaged in direct military operations against Iran - operations that "destroyed much of Iran's conventional naval capabilities" - in support of Saddam's Hussein's Iraq in the war between the two countries? Not that there's anything inherently wrong, much less unprecedented, in a country switching sides in foreign conflicts over a period of two decades. It might have helped a lot if the mainstream media had dug into the implications of prior relationship between the United States and the two countries in the year before we invaded Iraq.
Because, not without good reason, the United States in the 1980s considered it in the American interest to use Saddam Hussein's Iraq - horrible tyranny, poison gas and all - as a regional counterweight to Iran. As Russell notes:
Iraq’s 1990-91 war pushed into the far background the premier security concern of the United States and the Arab Gulf states in the 1980s—that Iran would emerge as the winner of the war with Iraq to become the dominant power capable of directly threatening Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Russell rehearses someof the various US military options. They're worth checking out for a glimpse at some of what may be involved in the Bush administration's next war of liberation.
But if we still had a real press corps in America, warnings like this in Russell's article would be prominently featured already in coverage of speculations about the threat of Iran's nuclear program:
Nevertheless, the US military presence in the greater Middle East that brackets Iran would be insufficient to stage the type of massive ground campaign that would be required to occupy Iran’s major cities. Iraq is a comparatively easy occupational task in comparison to Iran; it is smaller and has fewer citizens. Iraq is twice the size of Idaho and populated with about 25 mil-lion people, while Iran is nearly four times the size of Iraq with approximately 67 million people. The American and British forces in neighboring Iraq are likely to be fully preoccupied with Iraq’s internal security for the coming years, and without significant augmentation they would be unavailable for a cross-border invasion of Iran. US forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan are much smaller and more suited for special operations that would augment, rather than spearhead, the massive ground force campaign that would be necessitated by Iran’s sheer geographic size. (my emphasis)
When we start hearing about how easy it will be to take over Iran, it will be worth repeating: massive ground force campaign, occupying Iraq is easy by comparison. And also, for those who fantasize that Bush will be bringing home the troops from Iraq soon, "The American and British forces in neighboring Iraq are likely to be fully preoccupied with Iraq’s internal security for the coming years."
Yep, this "calling from beyond the stars" can get to be a pretty burdensome business.
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