As usual, Pollack has worthwhile things to say, though many people won’t like them, and thus will not listen to them. This is something I’ve been saying for months:
…we do not have a realistic military option there. Our troops are spread thin, and Iran's Revolutionary Guards could mount a far more potent military insurgency than the rebels in Iraq. Nor do strategic air strikes on nuclear targets seem like a viable alternative. One lesson Iran learned from Iraq was to widely disperse its nuclear facilities, duplicate them, hide them and harden them. Today we do not know enough about Iran's nuclear network to know if a widespread air campaign could even set it back significantly
There are other factors the Pollack doesn’t mention: the size, topography, and population of Iran would combine to make occupation virtually impossible, and while many Iranians do not much care for their current government, it is also a country with a long history of energetic nationalism. Invasion is far more likely to rally people behind their government than to convince them to rise up against it.
This, I think, is an excursion into fantasy:
One of the goals of a balanced approach should be to convince Iran to accept a robust inspection program with a legitimate threat of sanctions to back it up.
It’s a great idea, but it just won’t work. The only sanction that would mean anything would be a boycott of Iran’s oil exports, and the current supply/demand equation in the oil market makes that impractical, to say the least. It’s going to be damned near impossible to build any kind of consensus behind pulling over 4M bpd off the market, and even if we do, the sanctions would push prices and demand so high that they would only be enforceable by physical blockade.
The reality, hard though it may be, is that if the mullah’s put on a reasonable show of cooperation, they can probably get away with doing whatever they want – including what the N. Koreans have already done. |
