Part II:
on ballots have stranded the reformers at sea without fresh water. While many in the West hope that the counterrevolutionary winds will grow stronger with public demonstrations and cast aside the conservative clerics, such a desirable course of events may await the longer run. In the short to medium terms, there are greater prospects for hard-line clerics ousting the more pragmatic clerics in the regime power struggle.
Military Options for Disrupting
Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program
American diplomatic support for robust IAEA inspections is reducing widespread European and Middle Eastern criticism that the United States acts unilaterally or hegemonically in the international arena. Such criticism reached shrill heights during the lead-up to the war against Saddam’s Iraq. The United States needs to work to heal those wounds to garner political support from Europe and the greater Middle East region to complement diplomacy with military force in a concerted policy to derail Iran’s train ride toward nuclear weapons.
Military options could be employed to physically disrupt, delay, and destroy key components of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Such military options would be geared toward causing the Tehran regime pain and inflicting costs for Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. They could be aimed at changing Tehran’s strategic calculus, so that Iran views nuclear weapons not as something that enhances the security of the regime, but as a liability that increases prospects for conflict with the United States and threatens the clerical regime’s hold on power.
Obviously military options would entail less risk if exercised before Iran acquires nuclear weapons. American policymakers would have to be concerned that if military options are employed after Iran acquires nuclear weapons, the Iranians could retaliate for US conventional military strikes by targeting American forces in the region with nuclear weapons or by using clandestine means to attack American civilians, perhaps via the Iranian intelligence services or collaborating transnational actors, especially Hezbollah. While such risks may not ultimately preclude the decision to use force, Iranian possession of nuclear weapons would make the decision a heavy burden.
American military superiority over Iran gives Washington a wide spectrum of military options for coercing Tehran. These options range from limited strikes against Iran’s political, military, internal security, and WMD-related infrastructure. For example, the United States could target Iran’s nuclear power infrastructure—to include the Bushehr nuclear power plant as well as any future nuclear power plants, heavy-water facilities, future plutonium reprocessing plants, and uranium production and enrichment plants—with
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cruise missiles or combat aircraft strikes. An American air campaign mounted from regional support hubs in the small Gulf Arab states could make short work of Iran’s air force and air defense forces to gain air superiority for attacks against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Such strikes could serve the practical purposes of disrupting Iran’s means for developing nuclear weapons as well as constituting a symbolic, political demonstration of American resolve to use whatever means are available to block Iran’s nuclear weapons aspirations.
The United States would be operating with a less-than-perfect intelligence picture of Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure, however. The Iranians cannot have escaped learning the importance of diversifying and building redundancies into their nuclear weapons program components in light of Israel’s preemptive strike on Iraq’s nuclear power facility. They managed to hide Iranian uranium reprocessing developments from the outside world for some time and have undoubtedly tightened security to stem further exposures of their nuclear weapons program. In the aftermath of any American air strikes against their nuclear infrastructure, Iran undoubtedly also would redouble its efforts to conceal and build redundancies into its nuclear weapons infrastructure to make follow-on American attacks more difficult.
American aircraft and cruise missiles also could target Iran’s key political, security, and military infrastructures to harm the power of the regime in Tehran. Strikes could target government buildings and even the homes of clerics; facilities and compounds used by internal security and policy forces; assets of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Basij forces; major army units and garrisons; and WMD delivery vehicles, such as aircraft and ballistic missiles, as well as their production facilities. Targeting internal security organs would be particularly useful because that might allow the disgruntled populace more freedom to demonstrate against the regime and substantially increase the pressure on clerics to forgo their nuclear weapons aspirations.
The threat of a US invasion of Iran should not be taken off the table, because it could be used to bolster the strength of coercive diplomacy to compel the Iranians to desist on nuclear weapons and to accept robust and intrusive international inspections to help ensure their compliance with the NPT. The most imprudent step a statesman can make is to let his adversary know what he is not prepared to do; that profoundly undermines his political leverage to achieve interests without resort to force. President Clinton made this critical mistake in the 1999 Kosovo war, in which he declared that US ground forces would not be used against Serbia.
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
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fewer citizens. Iraq is twice the size of Idaho and populated with about 25 million people, while Iran is nearly four times the size of Iraq with approximately 67 million people.26 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.
American decisionmakers have to weigh political ends against military means as a basis for formulating strategy. The United States now has a significant portion of its total ground forces committed to Iraq and would be hard-pressed to mount a comparable or larger operation simultaneously against Iran. The United States also needs to keep its forces ready to meet contingencies elsewhere in the world, particularly in Asia where potential clashes could emerge on the Korean Peninsula or over Taiwan. The weighing of these concerns, however, would best be done in the minds of policymakers and not shared aloud in the public domain for the ears of Iran’s clerics.
The domestic Iranian political fallout from American military operations could cut two ways. On one hand, US operations could undermine the regime politically as many Iranians would see them as more evidence that the nature of the regime works to prolong Iran’s isolation from the world community and its economic stagnation and political retardation. On the other hand, the clerics would seize on the strikes as evidence of a hegemonic American campaign to conquer the Middle East and its oil, and use that perception as justification for repressive domestic security measures to hold onto power. In the final analysis, the United States could have to just wait and see which of these competing forces would prove to be stronger as it vigilantly monitored Iran’s efforts to reconstitute its infrastructure and made follow-on strikes over a period of years to perpetually “kick the can down the road” and delay Tehran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.
As has been the case in the war against Iraq, the United States would have to ride out the international political fallout from any military actions
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against Iran. At first glance, Russia, China, North Korea, and Pakistan probably would politically protest “American unilateralism” out of concern over economic losses as a result of attacks on Iranian facilities that those countries are supporting. But then again, from a more cynical view, those states might work to economically exploit the situation and seek additional contracts to rebuild all that the Americans had destroyed. Military operations too would come with a tide of regional outcries against the United States. Many would accuse the United States of the all-too-familiar refrain that Washington holds a double-standard in the region by ignoring Israeli nuclear weapons while taking military actions against Muslim states such as Iraq and Iran, which were seeking to arm themselves to balance Israeli and American nuclear power. As hard as it is for American observers to appreciate, many in the region—officers, diplomats, officials, as well as the general public—harbor the view that a nuclear-armed Iran could be useful to counterbalance Israeli as well as American nuclear power.
Running Risks with Iranian Nuclear Weapons
And what if these diplomatic and military options were unsuccessful? What could Iran do with nuclear weapons? Would Iranian nuclear weapons pose a profound security challenge for the United States? Or would an Iranian nuclear weapons inventory be manageable for Washington? Could the United States accept Iranian nuclear weapons capabilities, much as Washington has accepted those possessed by Israel, Pakistan, India, and perhaps North Korea?
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.27 Jeffrey Goldberg reports in The New Yorker, “Hezbollah has an annual budget of more than a hundred million dollars, which is supplied by the Iranian government directly and by a complex system of finance cells scattered around the world.”28
Some observers argue that the revolutionary steam has run out of Iran’s regime and that Iranian sponsorship of terrorist operations against US interests has diminished. Iran’s complicity and support for the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers, the American military housing complex in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 American servicemen, belies arguments that Iran’s government has tempered its opposition to the United States, however. Former FBI Director Louis Freeh has publicly and directly linked Iran to the Khobar
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Towers attack: “Over the course of our investigation the evidence became clear that while the attack was staged by Saudi Hezbollah members, the entire operation was planned, funded and coordinated by Iran’s security services, the IRGC and MOIS [Ministry of Intelligence and Security], acting on orders from the highest levels of the regime in Tehran.”29 More recently, Iran has shown an interest in maintaining links to al Qaeda by harboring its operatives, some of whom had fled neighboring Afghanistan and Pakistan in the midst of the October 2001 American military campaign in Afghanistan.30
Some observers are inclined to give the Iranian regime the benefit of the doubt regarding allegations of complicity in the Khobar Towers bombing by arguing that “rogue elements” or conservative hardliners in the regime, not President Khatami and like-minded supporters in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and parliament, supported the operations. Conclusive evidence to bolster this argument is elusive, but even if it were found to be the case, such a fact would be of little solace to American policymakers and the public coming to terms with the potential dangers posed by Iranian possession of nuclear weapons. Policymakers would have to be concerned that hardliners in the future could control or direct transfers of nuclear weapons even if it were not the consensus policy of the regime. 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.
Tehran might calculate that a nuclear deterrent would give it more leeway for supporting militants in the Middle East, including Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas. The Iranians, even without nuclear weapons, are moving in this policy direction. As Daniel Byman observes in an article in Foreign Affairs, “Since the outbreak of the al Aqsa intifada in October 2000, Hezbollah has provided guerrilla training, bomb-building expertise, propaganda, and tactical tips to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other anti-Israeli groups.”31
Tehran might judge that even if its hand were revealed in supporting terrorist operations via these groups against American interests and partners among the Gulf Arab states, Iranian nuclear weapons would deter military reprisals against Iran. American and Israeli contemplation of retaliatory strikes against Iran would be substantially riskier if Iran had the means to retaliate with nuclear weapons. The Iranian clerics are not well schooled in the ins and outs of the elaborate Western strategic literature formulated during the Cold War. The clerics probably would be more influenced by their Islamic ideological worldviews than by a rational calculation of national interests. As George Perkovich argues, “Political leaders like Khamene’i and Rafsanjani see nuclear weapons as an almost magical source of national power and autonomy. These men are political clerics, not international strategists or technologists.
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They intuit that the bomb will keep all outside powers, including Israel and the US, from thinking they can dictate to Iran or invade it.”32 In short, a nuclear-armed Tehran might fear the prospect of American and Israeli nuclear retaliation less than Western strategists would hope.
The Iranians could elect to rely more heavily on integrating nuclear weapons into their war-fighting strategies. They undoubtedly have ingrained into their political and military thinking the premise to never again be caught in a prolonged war of attrition as was the case in the Iran-Iraq War that Tehran ultimately lost. The Iranians might come to view nuclear weapons as useful, or even essential, battlefield instruments for destroying the armed forces of an adversary, particularly those of Iraq. As Gary Sick points out, Iran’s past use of unconventional hit-and-run speedboat attacks in the Persian Gulf during its war with Iran demonstrate Tehran’s willingness to “use unconventional, even terrorist, methods to pursue a political and military strategy, even if that meant confronting the United States.”33 Along these lines, Tehran might be tempted to harness the threat of nuclear weapons for leverage in the political-military struggle against the United States for power and influence in the Persian Gulf.
Iranian nuclear weapons would give Tehran greater political and military prestige that could translate into leverage over the Arab Gulf states. As Kenneth Pollack warns, “Tehran appears to want nuclear weapons principally to deter an American attack. Once it gets them, however, its strategic calculus might change and it might be emboldened to pursue a more aggressive foreign policy.”34 The Arab Gulf states would be more vulnerable to Iranian political pressure to reduce security cooperation with the United States, particularly in the event of a regional contingency. Finally, an Iranian nuclear bomb also would increase the already high incentives for Arab states to procure nuclear weapons |
