Too bad you don't know what Iran is up to. Get the wax out of your ears and your head out of the sand. If I'm crying anything, it's "ostrich"!Lilith wrote:"It will be a disaster of unthinkable magnitude if they obtain nuclear weapons, and if we diddle around any longer, there's no question that they will.
What will you suggest we do once they have nuclear weapons and begin to make unreasonable demands on the West? Can you suggest something that would be less risky, or for that matter only equally as risky as confronting them with force before they have them? PIZZA
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Check him out ... he's crying 'wolf' again. Pizza, we know what you are up to!
The October Surprise: War with Iran
Werner, don't you read anymore? Even the NYT runs copy on Iran's plans for regional hegemony and its intransigence in refusing to give up its nuclear objectives. We negotiated with North Korea for 10 years and you see the results. You can't negotiate with someone who doesn't want anything you can offer.Werner wrote:Pizza, you keep posting the two alternatives of aggressively (militarily) precluding Iran's - or any other force developing its threat into actuality (not very elegantly put - but you know what I mean) - or being bowled over when they're fully armed. As if there were no intermediate alternative that should have been used long ago. Even Ahmedinejad should be tied up in negotiations - or Kim - much as our leaders - and we, too - dislike them (I'd say hate but that brings up connotations that are beside the point.)
The alternative you are pointing to has been tried with disastrous results
just recently, and I see no likelihood that any move along similar lines and with the conditions our powers that be have left our forces in would succeed. So other means will have to be thought of.
I can't blame you for not wanting to answer the question.
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Corlyss_D
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Hitler would have relished having even half the power the energy thugs, including Russia, have over the West. Winning without fighting is the ultimate in warfare. The West is weaker now than it's been in 60 years because Europe has no wherewithall to resist, not even Britain. I listened to an American last week, a man, plead that there was nothing more important than peace, not even freedom. His prescription: surrender immediately; give Ahmadinejad anything he wants, including Israel. Just don't make war. Europe is gone. There's no one left but us.Werner wrote:No one today has the concentrated power that Hitler was able to assemble in his day (and that, I believe, applies to Stalin as well)- nor is the other side today as weak and impotent - extreme arguments aside - as the West was in the Thirties.
Corlyss
Contessa d'EM, a carbon-based life form
Contessa d'EM, a carbon-based life form
COMMENTARY
November 2006
Getting Serious About Iran
For Regime Change
Amir Taheri
What to do about Iran? The question has haunted successive administrations in Washington since the raid on the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the seizure of its diplomats in November 1979.
In that instance, the initial response of the Carter White House was to treat the newly installed Islamic Republic as a rebellious adolescent who, given sympathy and support, would eventually mend his ways. It took 444 days of captivity before the ordeal of the hostages ended, and then only in the face of a more muscular American approach signaled by the victory of Ronald Reagan in the November 1980 presidential election.
A few months later, however, the Khomeini regime ordered the capture of new American hostages, this time in Beirut, and in the following years pursued its virulently anti-American campaign by organizing suicide attacks on the U.S. embassy compound in that city and at a U.S. military base close by; a total of 300 Americans, including 241 Marines, were killed. Entering into secret talks with Tehran, the allegedly bellicose Reagan eventually agreed to supply weapons to the mullahs in exchange for the release of some of the hostages.
The mullahs saw all this as a confirmation of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s notorious dictum: “America cannot do a damn thing!” Emboldened, they next tried to disrupt the flow of Arab oil through the Persian Gulf by firing at Kuwaiti oil tankers in 1987. With that, the Reagan administration finally moved onto the offensive. Kuwaiti tankers were put under American flag, and a naval task force was dispatched to deal with the Iranian threat. At the next round of probing attacks, the American task force sank nearly half of the Islamic Republic’s navy and dismantled over $1 billion worth of Iranian offshore oil installations. Promptly ordering a halt to his offensive, Khomeini also announced his acceptance of a United Nations Security Council resolution ending Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq.
Khomeini’s pattern of advance and retreat suggested a dynamic for change in Iran, but one that the first Bush administration failed to understand, let alone exploit. By 1990, the Islamic Republic had revived its strategy of countering and, where possible, rolling back U.S. influence throughout the so-called “arc of crisis” spanning the region from the Indian sub-continent to North Africa. Even as it created and strengthened branches of the Hizballah (“Party of God”) movement in seventeen countries, most notably in Lebanon, Tehran backed older radical Islamist groups in Central Asia, the Transcaucasus, Afghanistan, and the Arabian Peninsula.
Next came the Clinton administration, which, at first adopting a policy of benign neglect vis-à-vis the mullahs, was shocked out of its torpor by the attack on the U.S. base at Khobar, Saudi Arabia, in which nineteen American servicemen were killed in an operation designed by Iran and carried out by Lebanese and Saudi Shiite militants. Still, President Clinton chose to play the engagement card. After more than two years of secret diplomacy, the contours of a “grand bargain” (as the mullahs saw it) began to take shape. By 1998, President Muhammad Khatami, widely regarded in the West as a “moderate,” was even talking about a “mini-Yalta accord” that would demarcate respective “zones of influence.” In an advance payment for this putative bargain, Clinton and his Secretary of State Madeleine Albright apologized publicly to the Islamic Republic for past American misdeeds, and the administration lifted some of the sanctions imposed on Iranian imports into the United States.
The “grand bargain” was not to be, however. Scheduled to be unveiled during the millennium summit at the United Nations in New York with an “accidental” encounter and handshake between Clinton and Khatami, it was scrapped at the last minute by the Islamic Republic’s “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei, who had decided there was no point in striking a bargain with a U.S. President on the point of leaving office. Clinton was left pacing the corridors of the UN, waiting in vain for his “accidental” meeting.
Initially, the administration of President George W. Bush was inclined to ignore the Islamic Republic—a creature that, if touched, would bring only grief. But the attacks of 9/11, followed by the U.S. campaign to liberate first Afghanistan and then Iraq, inevitably moved the Islamic Republic closer to the center of White House attention. By an accident of history, the mullahs actually shared Bush’s objectives in Afghanistan and Iraq, since both the Taliban and the Baath movement were sworn enemies of the Islamic Republic. For a few months, Tehran and Washington conducted bilateral talks and, in Afghanistan, even cooperated on the ground. Soon, however, it became clear that they held diametrically opposed visions of the future of the Middle East.
Bush had concluded that the terrorist attacks on the U.S. had flowed out of six decades of American support for a Middle East status quo dominated by reactionary and often despotic regimes. To ensure its own safety, America now had to help democratize the region. The Islamic Republic, by contrast, saw the elimination of its two principal regional enemies as a “gift from Allah,” and an opportunity to advance its own, contrary vision of the Middle East as the emergent core of a radical Islamist superpower under Iranian leadership.
Still, throughout its first term, the Bush administration did its best to skirt the Iran issue, despite occasional rhetorical outbursts like the President’s linkage of the Islamic Republic, Iraq, and North Korea in an “axis of evil.” When asked about the administration’s Iran policy, officials would respond that there was such a policy, only it was not on paper.
By the start of the second term, however, the Bush administration had identified the Islamic Republic as a principal obstacle to the President’s policy of democratization. By now, indeed, Tehran had become actively engaged in undermining the U.S. position in both Afghanistan and Iraq, while creating radical Shiite networks to exert pressure on such American allies as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain. Nor was that all: the Islamic Republic was gaining influence over radical Palestinian groups, including Islamic Jihad and Hamas, by supplying them with funds and weapons. Israel’s seizure of the cargo ship Karine A, caught smuggling Iranian arms to a terrorist group tied to Yasir Arafat, and the discovery of seventeen terrorist cells preparing to attack Israel from Jordan in 2002, were clear signals that, where the Palestinian issue was concerned, the Islamic Republic had moved onto the offensive.
Then came the ominous revelations of a secret Iranian program to produce enriched uranium, as a first step toward manufacturing nuclear warheads. To this, the initial and by now well-practiced Western response was to blink. At the urging of the European Union, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) pointedly refrained from penalizing the Islamic Republic for violating the terms of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (of which Iran under the Shah had been an early signatory). Instead, the EU, working through Britain, France, and Germany, offered the Islamic Republic a series of economic and political “incentives” in exchange for stopping what it should not have started in the first place. After months of diplomatic wrangling, Tehran agreed to suspend its uranium-processing and -enrichment activities—without, however, agreeing to a method of effective verification.
This past May, the U.S. joined the EU initiative in an expanded framework of talks that also included Russia and China. But Tehran declined to play. To the contrary, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the recently elected president, announced that the Islamic Republic was reneging on its suspension agreement and resuming its enrichment program on an even larger scale. Describing the West’s demands as a species of “nuclear apartheid,” Ahmadinejad vowed that Iran would now work to achieve “mastery of the full cycle of nuclear science and technology.” By September, he had ignored three deadlines for changing his mind.
To this day, Ahmadinejad has never lost an opportunity to reiterate that the Islamic Republic is as committed to fighting Western democracies as it was when it came to power almost three decades ago. Claiming that he is preparing the ground for the return of the Hidden Imam, a messiah-like figure of Shiite lore, Ahmadinejad considers a “clash of civilizations” to be both inevitable and welcome. Of course, he is ready to talk—so long as the Islamic Republic is not required to make any concessions. In a speech in Zanjan over the summer, Ahmadinejad assured his listeners that the United States would never be permitted to create “an American Middle East.” “The new Middle East,” he told the cheering crowd, “will be Islamic.”
Nor is Ahmadinejad a lone wolf. Ayatollah Ali-Akbar Meshkini, president of the Assembly of Experts and thus, after the “Supreme Guide,” the regime’s second most senior clerical figure, further clarified the extent of Tehran’s ambitions in a September speech to the assembly. The only legitimate government on earth, proclaimed the ayatollah, is the Islamic Republic, and the entire world, starting with the Muslim nations, must be put under the rule of the “Supreme Guide.”
There can be little doubt that Ahmadinejad, Meshkini, and the others have been encouraged in their belligerence by Western statesmen and pundits who insist that no realistic alternative exists to “dialogue” with the Islamic Republic, even if this appears to play into the hands of the regime. As we have seen, however, “talking to the mullahs” is a strategy thoroughly tested over the last quarter-century and repeatedly found wanting. Every U.S. administration has maintained some level of communication, often behind the scenes, with the leadership in Tehran. None of it has succeeded in influencing its fundamental tenor or curbing its radical ambitions.
The same can be said of the Europeans. Hans-Dietrich Genscher, a long-time foreign minister of West Germany, built his career on the effort to bring the Islamic Republic into the international mainstream. Genscher’s policy of “critical dialogue” (his phrase) ended up, in practice, as an exercise in joint criticism, by the mullahs and the Europeans, of the Americans. Roland Dumas, Genscher’s French counterpart, was no less enthusiastic about “constructive dialogue” (his term) with Tehran, a path followed as well by Spain’s socialist prime minister, Felipe Gonzalez and, more recently, by Jack Straw, Tony Blair’s former foreign secretary. During his tenure in office, Straw visited Tehran more frequently than Washington, only to return empty-handed.
Nor do Americans and Europeans exhaust the list of those who have achieved little or nothing, or worse, by talking to the Islamic Republic. For twelve years, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan have been engaged in talks with Tehran to determine the status of the Caspian Sea; they have gotten nowhere. Turkey has tried since 1989 to persuade Iran to stop the flow of money and arms to Turkish-Kurdish rebels and the Turkish branch of Hizballah, again to no avail. Egypt has held a decade-long dialogue with the Islamic Republic without making any headway on the issue of resuming diplomatic ties. Two decades of talks between the Islamic Republic and Kuwait over the demarcation of their continental-shelf limits in the Persian Gulf have likewise led nowhere—although, under the Shah, an accord was signed by the two neighbors as long ago as 1976. In every case, the Islamic Republic has interpreted the readiness of its adversaries to talk as a signal of weakness, and has hardened its position accordingly.
Why does the Islamic Republic behave as it does? The answer is that, as the spearhead of a revolutionary cause, it can do no other. The Islamic Republic is unlike any of the regimes in its environment, or indeed anywhere in the world. Either it will become like them—i.e., a nation-state—or it will force them to become like itself. As a normal nation-state, Iran would have few major problems with its neighbors or with others. As the embodiment of the Islamic Revolution, it is genetically programmed to clash not only with those of its neighbors who do not wish to emulate its political system but also with other powers that all too reasonably regard Khomeinism as a threat to regional stability and world peace.
For as long as the Islamic Republic continues to behave as a revolutionary cause, it will be impossible for others, including the United States, to consider it a partner, let alone a friend or ally. This does not exclude talks, or even periods of relative détente, as happened with the USSR during the cold war. But just as the Soviet Union remained an enemy of the free world right up to the end, so the Islamic Republic will remain an enemy until it once more becomes a nation-state.
How, then, should one deal with Iran in its current phase? There are several options. The most obvious is to do nothing. Among the attractions of this option is that, at least theoretically, it would deny the Islamic Republic the chance to cast itself as the grand defender of Islam against the depredations of the “infidel” camp led by the United States. It would also allow internal tensions in Iran to come to the fore, helping speed the transition from cause to state.
But the risk in the do-nothing option is clear. Interpreting it as yet another sign of weakness on the part of its adversaries, the Islamic Republic may hasten its program to “export the revolution” around the Middle East and, more importantly, develop a credible arsenal of nuclear weapons. The result would be an even bigger challenge to the regional balance of power and to the world.
An alternative to the do-nothing option is the one favored, today as yesterday, by the apostles of dialogue: namely, to reach an accommodation with the Islamic Republic on its terms, in the hope that this will somehow, in time, help to modify its behavior. Some Europeans, including France’s President Jacques Chirac, clearly back this option. What matters, they say, is to engage the Islamic Republic as a partner in some kind of international arrangement that, over an unspecified period, will end up imposing restraints on its overall behavior.
The risk here is equally obvious. Having won an initial concession from the “infidels,” the Khomeinist leadership would instantly and reflexively demand more. The Khomeinist revolution, after all, dreams of conquering the world in the name of Islam, just as Hitler aimed to do in the name of the Aryan master race and the USSR in the name of Communism. Indeed, Khatami’s idea of a “Yalta-like” accord with President Clinton was itself inspired by the mullahs’ claim to be the legitimate successors to the USSR as the global challengers to American imperialism.
Proponents of “dialogue” like to cite the “Nixon in China” moment as a model for dealing with the Islamic Republic. But they forget two facts. The first is that, during Nixon’s presidency, the initiative for normalizing relations came not from the United States but from China, which was then trying to recast itself as a nation-state among nation-states. The Islamic Republic is not in that position, or anywhere near it. In fact, precisely because it bases its legitimacy as a revolutionary power on the teachings of Islam, something it does not fully control in doctrinal terms, it cannot abandon its revolutionary pretensions as easily as did the Maoists in Beijing, who “owned” their own ideology and could alter it at will.
There remains another option: regime change. The very mention of this term drives some people up the wall, inspiring images of an American invasion, a native insurgency, suicide bombers, and worse. But military intervention and pre-emptive war are not the only means of achieving regime change.
What matters is to be intellectually clear about the issue at hand. The U.S. will not be safe as long as Iran, a key country in a region of vital importance to the world economy and to international stability, remains the embodiment of the Khomeinist cause. Nor can the U.S. allow the Khomeinist movement, itself a version of global Islamism, to achieve further political or diplomatic gains at the expense of the Western democracies.
For consider the consequences if that were to happen. The most immediate would be to strengthen the mullahs and demoralize all those inside Iran who have a different vision of their country’s future and an active desire to bring it about. In 1937 and 1938, many professional army officers in Germany, realizing that Hitler was leading their nation to disaster, had begun to discuss possible ways of getting rid of him. But the Munich “peace” accords negotiated by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain handed Hitler a diplomatic triumph and, with it, a degree of international legitimacy that, from then on, any would-be putschists could hardly ignore.
In the Middle East, this story has been repeated many times. The West helped Gamal Abdel Nasser transform the Suez fiasco into a political triumph, thereby encouraging an even bigger and, for Egypt, more disastrous, war in 1967. The 1991 ceasefire that allowed Saddam Hussein to remain in power in Baghdad, interpreted by him as a signal of American weakness, emboldened him quickly to eliminate his domestic opponents and to begin preparations for a bigger war against the “infidel.” After the first al-Qaeda attack on New York’s World Trade Center in 1993, President Clinton dispatched a string of envoys to Afghanistan to strike a bargain with Mullah Muhammad Omar and the Taliban. Not only, to quote the Taliban foreign minister, was this seen as “a sign of weakness by the Crusader-Zionists,” and one that immensely enhanced the prestige of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, but it discouraged the anti-Taliban forces, many of whom concluded there was no point in fighting a foe backed by the world’s only superpower.
That is the effect that reaching an accommodation with the Khomeinist regime will have on Iran’s own democrats and reformers. And it will have the same weakening effect on the growing democratic movement elsewhere in the Middle East. Some signs of this are already visible. For example, the fragile consensus belatedly formed around the idea of a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians is under pressure from a new “one-state” formula propagated by the “defiance front” led by Iran and including Syria, Hizballah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Libya, and the Sudan. In Lebanon, Hizballah and its allies have been encouraged by Tehran to pursue a systematic bullying of the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. In Syria, the pro-reform camp has been defeated, and the Baathist regime, a vicious menace in its own right, has entered into an unprecedented dependence on Tehran. Even major powers like Russia, China, France, and Germany calibrate their relations with the Islamic Republic with reference to how they suspect Washington will, or will not, be acting.
By contrast, in opting for regime change, the U.S. would send a strong signal to the democratic movement inside Iran, as well as throughout the Middle East, that the Bush Doctrine remains intact and that the Khomeinist movement is doomed. Such a policy would also encourage Iran’s neighbors, and other powers concerned about aggressive Khomeinism, to resist the political and diplomatic démarches of the Islamic Republic without fear of being caught out by a surprise deal between Tehran and Washington.
At home in the United States, a policy of regime change vis-à-vis the Islamic Republic would have the immense advantage of moral and political clarity. If backed by the requisite political will, it could open the way for a truly bipartisan approach toward dealing with a regime now identified as the United States’ most determined and potentially dangerous adversary in the region. For it is hard to imagine a democratic and pro-Western Middle East being built without Iran, the largest piece in any emerging jigsaw puzzle. Nor can U.S. victories in Afghanistan and Iraq be consolidated without change in Iran, or meaningful progress be made toward resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict as long as the Khomeinist regime is determined to pursue its “wipe-Israel-off-the-map” strategy.
Abroad, a U.S. policy of regime change would give heart to all those rightly worried by the alliance that Ahmadinejad is trying to build with thugs and lunatics like North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and the Castro brothers in Cuba. Even today, Tehran is the ideological capital of international terrorism, with more than 60 groups from all continents gathering there each February for a global terror-fest. A triumphant Ahmadinejad, armed with nuclear weapons, would only boost the international terrorist movement, thus further undermining the security of the United States and its allies. That alone is a powerful argument for regime change.
But—some might object—even granting the virtue of the idea, how realistic is regime change in Iran? Can it happen?
The short answer is yes. Without underestimating the power still held by the mullahs over the Iranian people, let alone their ability to wreak devastating havoc in places near and far, a number of factors suggest that, like other revolutionary regimes before them, their condition is more fragile than may at first appear.
One sign is the loss of regime legitimacy. The Islamic Republic owed its initial legitimacy to the revolution of 1979. Since then, successive Khomei-nist administrations have systematically dismantled the vast, multiform coalition that made the revolution possible. The Khomeinists have massacred their former leftist allies, driven their nationalist partners into exile, and purged even many Islamists from positions of power, leaving their own base fractured and attenuated.
The regime’s early legitimacy also derived from referendums and elections held regularly since 1979. In the past two decades, however, each new election has been more “arranged” than the last, while the authoritarian habit of approving candidates in advance has become a routine part of the exercise. Many Iranians saw last year’s presidential election, in which Ahmadinejad was declared a surprise winner, as the last straw: credited with just 12 percent of the electorate’s vote in the first round, he ended up being named the winner in the second round with an incredible 60 percent of the vote.
Still another source of the regime’s legitimacy was its message of “social justice” and its promise to improve the life of the poor. This, too, has been subverted by reality. Today, more than 40 percent of Iran’s 70 million people live below the poverty line, compared with 27 percent before the Khomeinists seized power. In 1977, Iran’s GDP per head per annum was the same as Spain’s. Today, Spain’s GDP is four times higher than Iran’s in real dollar terms. As the gap between rich and poor has widened to an unprecedented degree, the corruption of the ruling mullahs, and their ostentatious way of life, have made a mockery of slogans like “Islamic solidarity.”
A second sign is the presence of a major split within the ruling establishment itself. The list of former Khomeinists who have distanced themselves from today’s regime reads like a who’s who of the original revolutionary elite. It includes former “student” leaders who raided the U.S. embassy in 1979, former commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and dozens of former cabinet ministers and members of the Islamic Majlis (parliament). Most have adopted a passive stance vis-à-vis the regime, but a surprising number have clearly switched sides, becoming active dissidents and thereby risking imprisonment, exile, or even death. Any decline in the regime’s international stature could deepen this split within the establishment, helping to isolate the most hardline Khomeinists.
A third harbinger is that the regime’s coercive forces have become increasingly reluctant to defend it against the people. Since 2002, the regular army, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the professional police have refused to crush workers’ strikes, student demonstrations, and other manifestations of anti-regime protest. In many instances, the mullahs have been forced to deploy other, often unofficial, means, including the so-called Ansar Hizballah (“Supporters of the Party of God”) and the Baseej Mustadafeen (“Mobilization of the Dispossessed”).
A fourth sign is the emergence of alternative sources of moral authority in Iranian society. Even in religious matters, more and more Iranians look for guidance to non-official or even anti-official mullahs, including the clergy in Iraq. (Admittedly, this is partly due to the fact that the present “Supreme Guide,” Ali Khamenei, is a mid-ranking mullah who would never be accepted by senior Shiite clergy as a first among equals.)
As for non-religious matters, there was a time when the regime enjoyed the support of the overwhelming majority of Iran’s “creators of culture.” Today, not a single prominent Iranian poet, writer, filmmaker, composer, or artist endorses the Khomei- nists; most have become dissidents whose work is either censored or banned. Opposition intellectuals, clerics, trade-union leaders, feminists, and students are emerging as new sources of moral authority.
Finally, there are at least the outlines, although no more than the outlines, of a political alternative. Like nature, society abhors a vacuum. In the case of Iran, that vacuum cannot be filled by the dozen or so groups in exile, although each could have a role in shaping a broad national alternative. What is still needed is an internal political opposition that can act as the nucleus of a future government.
Unfortunately, such a nucleus cannot be created so long as the fear exists that the U.S. and its allies might reach an accommodation with the regime and leave Iranian dissidents in the lurch. And that fear has roots in reality. In the years 1999-2000, President Khatami succeeded in splitting the opposition by boasting of the terms of his forthcoming “grand bargain” with President Clinton. His message was ingeniously twofold: the deal would help solve the nation’s economic problems and open the way for less repressive measures in social life and culture, but it would include a stipulation that America would never help opponents of the Khomeinist regime. Although, as we have seen, the “grand bargain” itself came to naught, the message and its implications have hardly been forgotten.
If many of the preconditions for regime change are in place, is the time right? To this, too, the answer is yes. Again without underestimating the power in the hands of the mullahs, the truth is that Iran today, far from being the island of calm portrayed in some leading American newspapers, is more nearly like a heaving volcano, ready to explode.
In the words of Muhammad-Mahdi Pour-Fatemi, a member of the Islamic Majlis, Iran today is passing through “the deepest crisis our nation has experienced in decades.” Because of “policies that have produced nothing but grief for our nation,” Pour-Fatemi has courageously said, “the Islamic Republic today is isolated.” The fall in value of the Iranian currency—despite rising oil revenues—and the massive increase in the rate of unemployment over the past two years signal an economic crisis already heralded by double-digit inflation. In some cases, the government has been unable to pay its employees—including over 600,000 teachers—on time. In March, at the start of the new Iranian year, it was having difficulty financing over half of its projects, forcing hundreds of private contractors into bankruptcy. Meanwhile, fear of an international crisis over the nuclear issue, and the possibility of new sanctions imposed by the UN and/or the U.S., have put a damper on the economy’s only buoyant sector: real estate. According to Ayatollah Shahroudi, the regime’s chief justice, the flight of capital from the Islamic Republic, which started as a hemorrhage, has been transformed in the past two years into “a flood.”
It is not only on the economic front or in his confrontations with labor unions and women’s and student organizations that Ahmadinejad is coming under pressure. His regime also faces growing ethnic unrest that has led to bloodshed in provinces with non-Persian majorities: the Azeris in the northwest, the Kurds in the west, the Arabs in the south, and the Baluch in the southeast, among others. Over the past eighteen months, hundreds of people have been killed in clashes with the central security forces. Dozens of ethnic leaders have been executed, thousands have been put under arrest, and many more have been driven into exile in Iraq, Turkey, and Pakistan. So uncertain is the security situation in the affected areas that Ahmadinejad has been forced to cancel planned visits to eight of the nation’s thirty provinces.
Ahmadinejad is now desperate to provoke a mini-conflict with the United States to divert attention from the gathering storm inside Iran. At the same time, he is raising the “wipe-Israel-off-the-map” banner, lately all but abandoned by most Arab leaders, in the hope of winning a position of leadership for his Shiite theocracy—something otherwise unthinkable to the Sunni majority in the Islamic world. Finally, he is trying to position himself as the leader of the so-called non-aligned movement, in the hope of creating an alliance of all the anti-American and anti-democratic forces in the world, including in the West itself.
His strategy is premised on the assumption that the West has no stomach for a real fight, and that the worst that could happen to his regime is a few attacks on its nuclear sites—something that would have the advantage of diverting the focus from his domestic problems and bestowing on his regime a veneer of victimhood. Most of all, he is hoping that, once President Bush is out of office, the next American President will revert to the policies pursued by all previous U.S administrations.
In his address to the UN General Assembly in September, President Bush showed unmistakably that he understands the desire of the people of Iran for freedom and self-determination. The same vision is articulated in the Iran Freedom and Support Act, passed by the U.S. Senate on September 30 after its counterpart already passed in the House. If that is the vision, the best way to proceed toward implementing it is to remain guided always by the recognition that the Islamic Republic is toxic because its nature is to be toxic—because of its ideological DNA—and that, although its behavior can intermittently be influenced, ultimately the regime itself must be defeated and replaced.
With a clear compass, the litmus test for any particular policy toward Iran will likewise be clear: does this activity, program, or initiative help or hinder regime change? Under that general guideline, any number of specific policies can be envisioned, some of them already in place. For instance, the adoption of a regime-change strategy does not preclude American participation in diplomatic initiatives focused on particular issues, such as the current efforts to engage the Islamic Republic in the matter of its nuclear ambitions. But the crucial criterion is that process must not be allowed to become a substitute for policy. In the hope of winning concessions from the mullahs, Germany, France, and the UK, the three EU partners in the talks, have chosen to ignore the question of the sanctions already envisaged under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty for the regime’s repeated violations of its provisions; the U.S., by contrast, can and should press for their application.
Flexibility is also key. No one knows for sure how long it will take the Islamic Republic to develop or deploy a serious arsenal of nuclear weapons. Just as diplomacy need not be ruled out on this and other issues, the military option should also remain on the table. Just as tactics of containment and even of détente need not be ruled out of order when and if they seem clearly designed to hasten regime change, neither should tactics aimed at rollback.
Above all, the United States should be, as the President stated in his address to the UN, resolutely on the side of the Iranian people. Programmatically, two things are needed here: assuring Iranians in no uncertain terms that the U.S. will never endorse or grant legitimacy to the current despotic regime, and helping to expose the Islamic Republic’s repressive policies, human-rights violations, rampant corruption, and wanton subsidization of some of the worst terror groups on the face of the earth. Funding Iranian opposition groups, if needed, is one way to accomplish this. More important and ultimately perhaps more effective is for the U.S. to use its immense bully pulpit to publicize the Iranian people’s struggle for freedom.
A more robust and coordinated American posture on the economic, diplomatic, political, and moral fronts would create forceful pressure on the current leadership and inspire new courage in its opponents. There is no denying that the mechanics of regime change are a delicate and often highly chancy matter, and that the historical record offers examples of failure as well as of success. But there is also no denying that the game is worth the candle. Accelerating the collapse and replacement of this aberrant tyranny, a curse to the Iranian people and to the world, will strike a blow against anti-Western and anti-democratic forces all over the globe, safeguard America’s strategic interests in the Middle East and beyond, and add another radiant page to the almanac of American support for the cause of freedom.
Amir Taheri was the executive editor of Khayan, Iran’s largest daily newspaper, from 1972 to 1979. The author of ten books, he is a frequent contributor to publications in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. His article, “The Real Iraq,” appeared in our June issue.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/files ... aheri.html
November 2006
Getting Serious About Iran
For Regime Change
Amir Taheri
What to do about Iran? The question has haunted successive administrations in Washington since the raid on the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the seizure of its diplomats in November 1979.
In that instance, the initial response of the Carter White House was to treat the newly installed Islamic Republic as a rebellious adolescent who, given sympathy and support, would eventually mend his ways. It took 444 days of captivity before the ordeal of the hostages ended, and then only in the face of a more muscular American approach signaled by the victory of Ronald Reagan in the November 1980 presidential election.
A few months later, however, the Khomeini regime ordered the capture of new American hostages, this time in Beirut, and in the following years pursued its virulently anti-American campaign by organizing suicide attacks on the U.S. embassy compound in that city and at a U.S. military base close by; a total of 300 Americans, including 241 Marines, were killed. Entering into secret talks with Tehran, the allegedly bellicose Reagan eventually agreed to supply weapons to the mullahs in exchange for the release of some of the hostages.
The mullahs saw all this as a confirmation of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s notorious dictum: “America cannot do a damn thing!” Emboldened, they next tried to disrupt the flow of Arab oil through the Persian Gulf by firing at Kuwaiti oil tankers in 1987. With that, the Reagan administration finally moved onto the offensive. Kuwaiti tankers were put under American flag, and a naval task force was dispatched to deal with the Iranian threat. At the next round of probing attacks, the American task force sank nearly half of the Islamic Republic’s navy and dismantled over $1 billion worth of Iranian offshore oil installations. Promptly ordering a halt to his offensive, Khomeini also announced his acceptance of a United Nations Security Council resolution ending Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq.
Khomeini’s pattern of advance and retreat suggested a dynamic for change in Iran, but one that the first Bush administration failed to understand, let alone exploit. By 1990, the Islamic Republic had revived its strategy of countering and, where possible, rolling back U.S. influence throughout the so-called “arc of crisis” spanning the region from the Indian sub-continent to North Africa. Even as it created and strengthened branches of the Hizballah (“Party of God”) movement in seventeen countries, most notably in Lebanon, Tehran backed older radical Islamist groups in Central Asia, the Transcaucasus, Afghanistan, and the Arabian Peninsula.
Next came the Clinton administration, which, at first adopting a policy of benign neglect vis-à-vis the mullahs, was shocked out of its torpor by the attack on the U.S. base at Khobar, Saudi Arabia, in which nineteen American servicemen were killed in an operation designed by Iran and carried out by Lebanese and Saudi Shiite militants. Still, President Clinton chose to play the engagement card. After more than two years of secret diplomacy, the contours of a “grand bargain” (as the mullahs saw it) began to take shape. By 1998, President Muhammad Khatami, widely regarded in the West as a “moderate,” was even talking about a “mini-Yalta accord” that would demarcate respective “zones of influence.” In an advance payment for this putative bargain, Clinton and his Secretary of State Madeleine Albright apologized publicly to the Islamic Republic for past American misdeeds, and the administration lifted some of the sanctions imposed on Iranian imports into the United States.
The “grand bargain” was not to be, however. Scheduled to be unveiled during the millennium summit at the United Nations in New York with an “accidental” encounter and handshake between Clinton and Khatami, it was scrapped at the last minute by the Islamic Republic’s “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei, who had decided there was no point in striking a bargain with a U.S. President on the point of leaving office. Clinton was left pacing the corridors of the UN, waiting in vain for his “accidental” meeting.
Initially, the administration of President George W. Bush was inclined to ignore the Islamic Republic—a creature that, if touched, would bring only grief. But the attacks of 9/11, followed by the U.S. campaign to liberate first Afghanistan and then Iraq, inevitably moved the Islamic Republic closer to the center of White House attention. By an accident of history, the mullahs actually shared Bush’s objectives in Afghanistan and Iraq, since both the Taliban and the Baath movement were sworn enemies of the Islamic Republic. For a few months, Tehran and Washington conducted bilateral talks and, in Afghanistan, even cooperated on the ground. Soon, however, it became clear that they held diametrically opposed visions of the future of the Middle East.
Bush had concluded that the terrorist attacks on the U.S. had flowed out of six decades of American support for a Middle East status quo dominated by reactionary and often despotic regimes. To ensure its own safety, America now had to help democratize the region. The Islamic Republic, by contrast, saw the elimination of its two principal regional enemies as a “gift from Allah,” and an opportunity to advance its own, contrary vision of the Middle East as the emergent core of a radical Islamist superpower under Iranian leadership.
Still, throughout its first term, the Bush administration did its best to skirt the Iran issue, despite occasional rhetorical outbursts like the President’s linkage of the Islamic Republic, Iraq, and North Korea in an “axis of evil.” When asked about the administration’s Iran policy, officials would respond that there was such a policy, only it was not on paper.
By the start of the second term, however, the Bush administration had identified the Islamic Republic as a principal obstacle to the President’s policy of democratization. By now, indeed, Tehran had become actively engaged in undermining the U.S. position in both Afghanistan and Iraq, while creating radical Shiite networks to exert pressure on such American allies as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain. Nor was that all: the Islamic Republic was gaining influence over radical Palestinian groups, including Islamic Jihad and Hamas, by supplying them with funds and weapons. Israel’s seizure of the cargo ship Karine A, caught smuggling Iranian arms to a terrorist group tied to Yasir Arafat, and the discovery of seventeen terrorist cells preparing to attack Israel from Jordan in 2002, were clear signals that, where the Palestinian issue was concerned, the Islamic Republic had moved onto the offensive.
Then came the ominous revelations of a secret Iranian program to produce enriched uranium, as a first step toward manufacturing nuclear warheads. To this, the initial and by now well-practiced Western response was to blink. At the urging of the European Union, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) pointedly refrained from penalizing the Islamic Republic for violating the terms of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (of which Iran under the Shah had been an early signatory). Instead, the EU, working through Britain, France, and Germany, offered the Islamic Republic a series of economic and political “incentives” in exchange for stopping what it should not have started in the first place. After months of diplomatic wrangling, Tehran agreed to suspend its uranium-processing and -enrichment activities—without, however, agreeing to a method of effective verification.
This past May, the U.S. joined the EU initiative in an expanded framework of talks that also included Russia and China. But Tehran declined to play. To the contrary, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the recently elected president, announced that the Islamic Republic was reneging on its suspension agreement and resuming its enrichment program on an even larger scale. Describing the West’s demands as a species of “nuclear apartheid,” Ahmadinejad vowed that Iran would now work to achieve “mastery of the full cycle of nuclear science and technology.” By September, he had ignored three deadlines for changing his mind.
To this day, Ahmadinejad has never lost an opportunity to reiterate that the Islamic Republic is as committed to fighting Western democracies as it was when it came to power almost three decades ago. Claiming that he is preparing the ground for the return of the Hidden Imam, a messiah-like figure of Shiite lore, Ahmadinejad considers a “clash of civilizations” to be both inevitable and welcome. Of course, he is ready to talk—so long as the Islamic Republic is not required to make any concessions. In a speech in Zanjan over the summer, Ahmadinejad assured his listeners that the United States would never be permitted to create “an American Middle East.” “The new Middle East,” he told the cheering crowd, “will be Islamic.”
Nor is Ahmadinejad a lone wolf. Ayatollah Ali-Akbar Meshkini, president of the Assembly of Experts and thus, after the “Supreme Guide,” the regime’s second most senior clerical figure, further clarified the extent of Tehran’s ambitions in a September speech to the assembly. The only legitimate government on earth, proclaimed the ayatollah, is the Islamic Republic, and the entire world, starting with the Muslim nations, must be put under the rule of the “Supreme Guide.”
There can be little doubt that Ahmadinejad, Meshkini, and the others have been encouraged in their belligerence by Western statesmen and pundits who insist that no realistic alternative exists to “dialogue” with the Islamic Republic, even if this appears to play into the hands of the regime. As we have seen, however, “talking to the mullahs” is a strategy thoroughly tested over the last quarter-century and repeatedly found wanting. Every U.S. administration has maintained some level of communication, often behind the scenes, with the leadership in Tehran. None of it has succeeded in influencing its fundamental tenor or curbing its radical ambitions.
The same can be said of the Europeans. Hans-Dietrich Genscher, a long-time foreign minister of West Germany, built his career on the effort to bring the Islamic Republic into the international mainstream. Genscher’s policy of “critical dialogue” (his phrase) ended up, in practice, as an exercise in joint criticism, by the mullahs and the Europeans, of the Americans. Roland Dumas, Genscher’s French counterpart, was no less enthusiastic about “constructive dialogue” (his term) with Tehran, a path followed as well by Spain’s socialist prime minister, Felipe Gonzalez and, more recently, by Jack Straw, Tony Blair’s former foreign secretary. During his tenure in office, Straw visited Tehran more frequently than Washington, only to return empty-handed.
Nor do Americans and Europeans exhaust the list of those who have achieved little or nothing, or worse, by talking to the Islamic Republic. For twelve years, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan have been engaged in talks with Tehran to determine the status of the Caspian Sea; they have gotten nowhere. Turkey has tried since 1989 to persuade Iran to stop the flow of money and arms to Turkish-Kurdish rebels and the Turkish branch of Hizballah, again to no avail. Egypt has held a decade-long dialogue with the Islamic Republic without making any headway on the issue of resuming diplomatic ties. Two decades of talks between the Islamic Republic and Kuwait over the demarcation of their continental-shelf limits in the Persian Gulf have likewise led nowhere—although, under the Shah, an accord was signed by the two neighbors as long ago as 1976. In every case, the Islamic Republic has interpreted the readiness of its adversaries to talk as a signal of weakness, and has hardened its position accordingly.
Why does the Islamic Republic behave as it does? The answer is that, as the spearhead of a revolutionary cause, it can do no other. The Islamic Republic is unlike any of the regimes in its environment, or indeed anywhere in the world. Either it will become like them—i.e., a nation-state—or it will force them to become like itself. As a normal nation-state, Iran would have few major problems with its neighbors or with others. As the embodiment of the Islamic Revolution, it is genetically programmed to clash not only with those of its neighbors who do not wish to emulate its political system but also with other powers that all too reasonably regard Khomeinism as a threat to regional stability and world peace.
For as long as the Islamic Republic continues to behave as a revolutionary cause, it will be impossible for others, including the United States, to consider it a partner, let alone a friend or ally. This does not exclude talks, or even periods of relative détente, as happened with the USSR during the cold war. But just as the Soviet Union remained an enemy of the free world right up to the end, so the Islamic Republic will remain an enemy until it once more becomes a nation-state.
How, then, should one deal with Iran in its current phase? There are several options. The most obvious is to do nothing. Among the attractions of this option is that, at least theoretically, it would deny the Islamic Republic the chance to cast itself as the grand defender of Islam against the depredations of the “infidel” camp led by the United States. It would also allow internal tensions in Iran to come to the fore, helping speed the transition from cause to state.
But the risk in the do-nothing option is clear. Interpreting it as yet another sign of weakness on the part of its adversaries, the Islamic Republic may hasten its program to “export the revolution” around the Middle East and, more importantly, develop a credible arsenal of nuclear weapons. The result would be an even bigger challenge to the regional balance of power and to the world.
An alternative to the do-nothing option is the one favored, today as yesterday, by the apostles of dialogue: namely, to reach an accommodation with the Islamic Republic on its terms, in the hope that this will somehow, in time, help to modify its behavior. Some Europeans, including France’s President Jacques Chirac, clearly back this option. What matters, they say, is to engage the Islamic Republic as a partner in some kind of international arrangement that, over an unspecified period, will end up imposing restraints on its overall behavior.
The risk here is equally obvious. Having won an initial concession from the “infidels,” the Khomeinist leadership would instantly and reflexively demand more. The Khomeinist revolution, after all, dreams of conquering the world in the name of Islam, just as Hitler aimed to do in the name of the Aryan master race and the USSR in the name of Communism. Indeed, Khatami’s idea of a “Yalta-like” accord with President Clinton was itself inspired by the mullahs’ claim to be the legitimate successors to the USSR as the global challengers to American imperialism.
Proponents of “dialogue” like to cite the “Nixon in China” moment as a model for dealing with the Islamic Republic. But they forget two facts. The first is that, during Nixon’s presidency, the initiative for normalizing relations came not from the United States but from China, which was then trying to recast itself as a nation-state among nation-states. The Islamic Republic is not in that position, or anywhere near it. In fact, precisely because it bases its legitimacy as a revolutionary power on the teachings of Islam, something it does not fully control in doctrinal terms, it cannot abandon its revolutionary pretensions as easily as did the Maoists in Beijing, who “owned” their own ideology and could alter it at will.
There remains another option: regime change. The very mention of this term drives some people up the wall, inspiring images of an American invasion, a native insurgency, suicide bombers, and worse. But military intervention and pre-emptive war are not the only means of achieving regime change.
What matters is to be intellectually clear about the issue at hand. The U.S. will not be safe as long as Iran, a key country in a region of vital importance to the world economy and to international stability, remains the embodiment of the Khomeinist cause. Nor can the U.S. allow the Khomeinist movement, itself a version of global Islamism, to achieve further political or diplomatic gains at the expense of the Western democracies.
For consider the consequences if that were to happen. The most immediate would be to strengthen the mullahs and demoralize all those inside Iran who have a different vision of their country’s future and an active desire to bring it about. In 1937 and 1938, many professional army officers in Germany, realizing that Hitler was leading their nation to disaster, had begun to discuss possible ways of getting rid of him. But the Munich “peace” accords negotiated by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain handed Hitler a diplomatic triumph and, with it, a degree of international legitimacy that, from then on, any would-be putschists could hardly ignore.
In the Middle East, this story has been repeated many times. The West helped Gamal Abdel Nasser transform the Suez fiasco into a political triumph, thereby encouraging an even bigger and, for Egypt, more disastrous, war in 1967. The 1991 ceasefire that allowed Saddam Hussein to remain in power in Baghdad, interpreted by him as a signal of American weakness, emboldened him quickly to eliminate his domestic opponents and to begin preparations for a bigger war against the “infidel.” After the first al-Qaeda attack on New York’s World Trade Center in 1993, President Clinton dispatched a string of envoys to Afghanistan to strike a bargain with Mullah Muhammad Omar and the Taliban. Not only, to quote the Taliban foreign minister, was this seen as “a sign of weakness by the Crusader-Zionists,” and one that immensely enhanced the prestige of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, but it discouraged the anti-Taliban forces, many of whom concluded there was no point in fighting a foe backed by the world’s only superpower.
That is the effect that reaching an accommodation with the Khomeinist regime will have on Iran’s own democrats and reformers. And it will have the same weakening effect on the growing democratic movement elsewhere in the Middle East. Some signs of this are already visible. For example, the fragile consensus belatedly formed around the idea of a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians is under pressure from a new “one-state” formula propagated by the “defiance front” led by Iran and including Syria, Hizballah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Libya, and the Sudan. In Lebanon, Hizballah and its allies have been encouraged by Tehran to pursue a systematic bullying of the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. In Syria, the pro-reform camp has been defeated, and the Baathist regime, a vicious menace in its own right, has entered into an unprecedented dependence on Tehran. Even major powers like Russia, China, France, and Germany calibrate their relations with the Islamic Republic with reference to how they suspect Washington will, or will not, be acting.
By contrast, in opting for regime change, the U.S. would send a strong signal to the democratic movement inside Iran, as well as throughout the Middle East, that the Bush Doctrine remains intact and that the Khomeinist movement is doomed. Such a policy would also encourage Iran’s neighbors, and other powers concerned about aggressive Khomeinism, to resist the political and diplomatic démarches of the Islamic Republic without fear of being caught out by a surprise deal between Tehran and Washington.
At home in the United States, a policy of regime change vis-à-vis the Islamic Republic would have the immense advantage of moral and political clarity. If backed by the requisite political will, it could open the way for a truly bipartisan approach toward dealing with a regime now identified as the United States’ most determined and potentially dangerous adversary in the region. For it is hard to imagine a democratic and pro-Western Middle East being built without Iran, the largest piece in any emerging jigsaw puzzle. Nor can U.S. victories in Afghanistan and Iraq be consolidated without change in Iran, or meaningful progress be made toward resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict as long as the Khomeinist regime is determined to pursue its “wipe-Israel-off-the-map” strategy.
Abroad, a U.S. policy of regime change would give heart to all those rightly worried by the alliance that Ahmadinejad is trying to build with thugs and lunatics like North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and the Castro brothers in Cuba. Even today, Tehran is the ideological capital of international terrorism, with more than 60 groups from all continents gathering there each February for a global terror-fest. A triumphant Ahmadinejad, armed with nuclear weapons, would only boost the international terrorist movement, thus further undermining the security of the United States and its allies. That alone is a powerful argument for regime change.
But—some might object—even granting the virtue of the idea, how realistic is regime change in Iran? Can it happen?
The short answer is yes. Without underestimating the power still held by the mullahs over the Iranian people, let alone their ability to wreak devastating havoc in places near and far, a number of factors suggest that, like other revolutionary regimes before them, their condition is more fragile than may at first appear.
One sign is the loss of regime legitimacy. The Islamic Republic owed its initial legitimacy to the revolution of 1979. Since then, successive Khomei-nist administrations have systematically dismantled the vast, multiform coalition that made the revolution possible. The Khomeinists have massacred their former leftist allies, driven their nationalist partners into exile, and purged even many Islamists from positions of power, leaving their own base fractured and attenuated.
The regime’s early legitimacy also derived from referendums and elections held regularly since 1979. In the past two decades, however, each new election has been more “arranged” than the last, while the authoritarian habit of approving candidates in advance has become a routine part of the exercise. Many Iranians saw last year’s presidential election, in which Ahmadinejad was declared a surprise winner, as the last straw: credited with just 12 percent of the electorate’s vote in the first round, he ended up being named the winner in the second round with an incredible 60 percent of the vote.
Still another source of the regime’s legitimacy was its message of “social justice” and its promise to improve the life of the poor. This, too, has been subverted by reality. Today, more than 40 percent of Iran’s 70 million people live below the poverty line, compared with 27 percent before the Khomeinists seized power. In 1977, Iran’s GDP per head per annum was the same as Spain’s. Today, Spain’s GDP is four times higher than Iran’s in real dollar terms. As the gap between rich and poor has widened to an unprecedented degree, the corruption of the ruling mullahs, and their ostentatious way of life, have made a mockery of slogans like “Islamic solidarity.”
A second sign is the presence of a major split within the ruling establishment itself. The list of former Khomeinists who have distanced themselves from today’s regime reads like a who’s who of the original revolutionary elite. It includes former “student” leaders who raided the U.S. embassy in 1979, former commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and dozens of former cabinet ministers and members of the Islamic Majlis (parliament). Most have adopted a passive stance vis-à-vis the regime, but a surprising number have clearly switched sides, becoming active dissidents and thereby risking imprisonment, exile, or even death. Any decline in the regime’s international stature could deepen this split within the establishment, helping to isolate the most hardline Khomeinists.
A third harbinger is that the regime’s coercive forces have become increasingly reluctant to defend it against the people. Since 2002, the regular army, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the professional police have refused to crush workers’ strikes, student demonstrations, and other manifestations of anti-regime protest. In many instances, the mullahs have been forced to deploy other, often unofficial, means, including the so-called Ansar Hizballah (“Supporters of the Party of God”) and the Baseej Mustadafeen (“Mobilization of the Dispossessed”).
A fourth sign is the emergence of alternative sources of moral authority in Iranian society. Even in religious matters, more and more Iranians look for guidance to non-official or even anti-official mullahs, including the clergy in Iraq. (Admittedly, this is partly due to the fact that the present “Supreme Guide,” Ali Khamenei, is a mid-ranking mullah who would never be accepted by senior Shiite clergy as a first among equals.)
As for non-religious matters, there was a time when the regime enjoyed the support of the overwhelming majority of Iran’s “creators of culture.” Today, not a single prominent Iranian poet, writer, filmmaker, composer, or artist endorses the Khomei- nists; most have become dissidents whose work is either censored or banned. Opposition intellectuals, clerics, trade-union leaders, feminists, and students are emerging as new sources of moral authority.
Finally, there are at least the outlines, although no more than the outlines, of a political alternative. Like nature, society abhors a vacuum. In the case of Iran, that vacuum cannot be filled by the dozen or so groups in exile, although each could have a role in shaping a broad national alternative. What is still needed is an internal political opposition that can act as the nucleus of a future government.
Unfortunately, such a nucleus cannot be created so long as the fear exists that the U.S. and its allies might reach an accommodation with the regime and leave Iranian dissidents in the lurch. And that fear has roots in reality. In the years 1999-2000, President Khatami succeeded in splitting the opposition by boasting of the terms of his forthcoming “grand bargain” with President Clinton. His message was ingeniously twofold: the deal would help solve the nation’s economic problems and open the way for less repressive measures in social life and culture, but it would include a stipulation that America would never help opponents of the Khomeinist regime. Although, as we have seen, the “grand bargain” itself came to naught, the message and its implications have hardly been forgotten.
If many of the preconditions for regime change are in place, is the time right? To this, too, the answer is yes. Again without underestimating the power in the hands of the mullahs, the truth is that Iran today, far from being the island of calm portrayed in some leading American newspapers, is more nearly like a heaving volcano, ready to explode.
In the words of Muhammad-Mahdi Pour-Fatemi, a member of the Islamic Majlis, Iran today is passing through “the deepest crisis our nation has experienced in decades.” Because of “policies that have produced nothing but grief for our nation,” Pour-Fatemi has courageously said, “the Islamic Republic today is isolated.” The fall in value of the Iranian currency—despite rising oil revenues—and the massive increase in the rate of unemployment over the past two years signal an economic crisis already heralded by double-digit inflation. In some cases, the government has been unable to pay its employees—including over 600,000 teachers—on time. In March, at the start of the new Iranian year, it was having difficulty financing over half of its projects, forcing hundreds of private contractors into bankruptcy. Meanwhile, fear of an international crisis over the nuclear issue, and the possibility of new sanctions imposed by the UN and/or the U.S., have put a damper on the economy’s only buoyant sector: real estate. According to Ayatollah Shahroudi, the regime’s chief justice, the flight of capital from the Islamic Republic, which started as a hemorrhage, has been transformed in the past two years into “a flood.”
It is not only on the economic front or in his confrontations with labor unions and women’s and student organizations that Ahmadinejad is coming under pressure. His regime also faces growing ethnic unrest that has led to bloodshed in provinces with non-Persian majorities: the Azeris in the northwest, the Kurds in the west, the Arabs in the south, and the Baluch in the southeast, among others. Over the past eighteen months, hundreds of people have been killed in clashes with the central security forces. Dozens of ethnic leaders have been executed, thousands have been put under arrest, and many more have been driven into exile in Iraq, Turkey, and Pakistan. So uncertain is the security situation in the affected areas that Ahmadinejad has been forced to cancel planned visits to eight of the nation’s thirty provinces.
Ahmadinejad is now desperate to provoke a mini-conflict with the United States to divert attention from the gathering storm inside Iran. At the same time, he is raising the “wipe-Israel-off-the-map” banner, lately all but abandoned by most Arab leaders, in the hope of winning a position of leadership for his Shiite theocracy—something otherwise unthinkable to the Sunni majority in the Islamic world. Finally, he is trying to position himself as the leader of the so-called non-aligned movement, in the hope of creating an alliance of all the anti-American and anti-democratic forces in the world, including in the West itself.
His strategy is premised on the assumption that the West has no stomach for a real fight, and that the worst that could happen to his regime is a few attacks on its nuclear sites—something that would have the advantage of diverting the focus from his domestic problems and bestowing on his regime a veneer of victimhood. Most of all, he is hoping that, once President Bush is out of office, the next American President will revert to the policies pursued by all previous U.S administrations.
In his address to the UN General Assembly in September, President Bush showed unmistakably that he understands the desire of the people of Iran for freedom and self-determination. The same vision is articulated in the Iran Freedom and Support Act, passed by the U.S. Senate on September 30 after its counterpart already passed in the House. If that is the vision, the best way to proceed toward implementing it is to remain guided always by the recognition that the Islamic Republic is toxic because its nature is to be toxic—because of its ideological DNA—and that, although its behavior can intermittently be influenced, ultimately the regime itself must be defeated and replaced.
With a clear compass, the litmus test for any particular policy toward Iran will likewise be clear: does this activity, program, or initiative help or hinder regime change? Under that general guideline, any number of specific policies can be envisioned, some of them already in place. For instance, the adoption of a regime-change strategy does not preclude American participation in diplomatic initiatives focused on particular issues, such as the current efforts to engage the Islamic Republic in the matter of its nuclear ambitions. But the crucial criterion is that process must not be allowed to become a substitute for policy. In the hope of winning concessions from the mullahs, Germany, France, and the UK, the three EU partners in the talks, have chosen to ignore the question of the sanctions already envisaged under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty for the regime’s repeated violations of its provisions; the U.S., by contrast, can and should press for their application.
Flexibility is also key. No one knows for sure how long it will take the Islamic Republic to develop or deploy a serious arsenal of nuclear weapons. Just as diplomacy need not be ruled out on this and other issues, the military option should also remain on the table. Just as tactics of containment and even of détente need not be ruled out of order when and if they seem clearly designed to hasten regime change, neither should tactics aimed at rollback.
Above all, the United States should be, as the President stated in his address to the UN, resolutely on the side of the Iranian people. Programmatically, two things are needed here: assuring Iranians in no uncertain terms that the U.S. will never endorse or grant legitimacy to the current despotic regime, and helping to expose the Islamic Republic’s repressive policies, human-rights violations, rampant corruption, and wanton subsidization of some of the worst terror groups on the face of the earth. Funding Iranian opposition groups, if needed, is one way to accomplish this. More important and ultimately perhaps more effective is for the U.S. to use its immense bully pulpit to publicize the Iranian people’s struggle for freedom.
A more robust and coordinated American posture on the economic, diplomatic, political, and moral fronts would create forceful pressure on the current leadership and inspire new courage in its opponents. There is no denying that the mechanics of regime change are a delicate and often highly chancy matter, and that the historical record offers examples of failure as well as of success. But there is also no denying that the game is worth the candle. Accelerating the collapse and replacement of this aberrant tyranny, a curse to the Iranian people and to the world, will strike a blow against anti-Western and anti-democratic forces all over the globe, safeguard America’s strategic interests in the Middle East and beyond, and add another radiant page to the almanac of American support for the cause of freedom.
Amir Taheri was the executive editor of Khayan, Iran’s largest daily newspaper, from 1972 to 1979. The author of ten books, he is a frequent contributor to publications in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. His article, “The Real Iraq,” appeared in our June issue.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/files ... aheri.html
COMMENTARY
November 2006
Getting Serious About Iran
A Military Option
Arthur Herman
As the impasse over Iran’s nuclear-weapons program grows inexorably into a crisis, a kind of consensus has taken root in the minds of America’s foreign-policy elite. This is that military action against Iran is a sure formula for disaster. The essence of the position was expressed in a cover story in Time magazine this past September. Entitled “What War with Iran Would Look Like (And How to Avoid It),” the essay focused on what the editors saw as the certain consequences of armed American intervention in that country: wildly spiking oil prices, increased terrorist attacks, economic panic around the world, and the end to any dream of pro-American democratic governments emerging in the Middle East. And that would be in the case of successful action. In fact, Time predicted, given our overstretched resources and an indubitably fierce Iranian resistance, we would almost certainly lose.
Thus, in the eyes of Time’s experts as of many other observers, military action against Iran is “unthinkable.” What then can be done in the face of the mullahs’ implacable drive to acquire nuclear weapons? Here a variety of responses can be discerned. At one end are those who assure us, in the soothing title of a New York Times op-ed by Barry Posen of MIT, that “We Can Live with a Nuclear Iran.” (Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria is similarly sanguine.) Others, like Senator Joseph Biden, insist that we have at least ten years before we have to worry about Iran’s getting a working bomb. According to Ashton Carter, who served as an assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, we at least have enough time to explore every possible diplomatic avenue before contemplating any direct military response.
Taking a more openly appeasing line, critics of the Bush administration like Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations and Chatham House’s Ali Ansari urge us to enter into extended engagement or “dialogue” with Iran, with an eye toward persuading the mullahs to end or at least to modify their nuclear program. This is essentially the tack that has been followed by European and European Union diplomats for the past three years, with notably little success.
Finally there is the tougher solution preferred by the Bush administration: economic sanctions imposed by the UN. The problem here is that the more effective such sanctions are designed to be—proposed measures include freezing Iranian assets abroad and suspending all business and financial ties—the more reluctant have been France, Russia, and China (our partners on the Security Council) to go along. Sanctions that do pass muster with these governments, whose aggregate business dealings with Iran far outstrip those of the United States, are precisely the ones with little or no bite. And even watered-down sanctions, as U.S. Ambassador John Bolton admitted in a recent interview, are “by no means a done deal.”
To a greater or lesser extent, all of these recommendations fly in the face of reality. Despite Iran’s richly developed repertoire of denials, deceptions, and dissimulations, there is ample evidence that it has no intention whatsoever of relinquishing its aim of becoming a nuclear power. Moreover, this aim may be achievable not within a decade (as Senator Biden fancies) but within the next two to three years. In September, the House Intelligence Committee reported that Iran may have already succeeded in enriching uranium; some intelligence analysts believe that it may already have access to fissionable nuclear material, courtesy of North Korea. If that is so, no diplomacy in the world is going to prevent it from acquiring a bomb.
But neither are nuclear weapons the only threat posed by the Islamic Republic. While the international community has been preoccupied with this issue, the regime in Tehran has been taking steady steps to achieve hegemony over one of the world’s most sensitive and economically critical regions, and control over the world’s most precious resource. It is doing so, moreover, entirely through conventional means.
To put it briefly, the Islamic Republic has its hand on the throttle of the world’s economic engine: the stretch of ocean at the mouth of the Persian Gulf known as the Straits of Hormuz, which are only 21 miles wide at their narrowest point. Through this waterway, every day, pass roughly 40 percent of the world’s crude oil, including two-thirds of the oil from Saudi Arabia. By 2025, according to Energy Department estimates, fully 60 percent of the world’s oil exports will be moved through this vital chokepoint.
The Straits border on Iran and Oman, with the two lanes of traffic that are used specifically by oil tankers being theoretically protected by international agreement. Since 9/11, a multinational force comprising ships from the U.S., Japan, six European countries, and Pakistan have patrolled outside the Straits, in Omani waters, to make sure they stay open. But this is largely a token force. Meanwhile, the world’s access to Saudi, Qatari, Kuwaiti, and Iraqi oil and gas, as well as other petroleum products from the United Arab Emirates, depends on free passage through the Hormuz Straits.
The Tehran regime has made no secret of its desire to gain control of the Straits as part of its larger strategy of turning the Gulf into an Iranian lake. Indeed, in a preemptive move, it has begun to threaten a cut-off of tanker traffic if the UN should be foolish enough to impose sanctions in connection with the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. “We have the power to halt oil supply,” a senior Iranian official warned the European Union last January, “down to the last drop.”
In April of this year, as if to drive the point home, Iranian armed forces staged elaborate war games in the Gulf, test-firing a series of new anti-ship missiles capable of devastating any tanker or unwary warship. In the boast of one Iranian admiral, April’s “Holy Prophet war games” showed what could be expected by anyone daring to violate Iran’s interests in the Gulf. A further demonstration of resolve occurred in August, when Iran fired on and then occupied a Rumanian-owned oil platform ostensibly in a dispute over ownership rights; in truth, the action was intended to show Western companies—including Halliburton, which had won a contract for constructing facilities in the Gulf—exactly which power is in charge there.
A 30-page document said to issue from the Strategic Studies Center of the Iranian Navy (NDAJA), and drawn up in September or October of last year, features a contingency plan for closing the Hormuz Straits through a combination of anti-ship missiles, coastal artillery, and submarine attacks. The plan calls for the use of Chinese-made mines, Chinese-built missile boats, and more than 1,000 explosive-packed suicide motor boats to decimate any U.S. invasion force before it can so much as enter the Gulf. Iran’s missile units, manned by the regime’s Revolutionary Guards, would be under instruction to take out more than 100 targets around the Gulf rim, including Saudi production and export centers.
The authenticity of the NDAJA document has been vouched for by at least two defectors from Iranian intelligence. Of course, it may not be authentic at all. And military contingency plans are just that—contingency plans; the file cabinets of defense ministries around the world are full of them. Nor do all analysts agree that the Straits of Hormuz can be effectively mined in the first place. Nevertheless, even the threat of mines or suicide boats would likely be enough to induce Lloyds of London to suspend insurance of ships passing through the Straits, causing tanker traffic to cease, oil markets to rise precipitously, and Asian and European economies to reel.
Something like this very nearly happened in 1987 during the Iran-Iraq war, when only direct U.S. intervention kept the Straits open and the world’s oil flowing. For the United States is hardly the only country with a stake in keeping the Gulf and Straits free of Iranian control. Every country in Western Europe and Asia, including those that complain most bitterly about American policy in the Middle East, depends on the steady maintenance of the global economic order that runs on Middle Eastern oil.
But—and herein lies a fruitful irony—so does Iran itself. Almost 90 percent of the mullahs’ oil assets are located either in or near the Gulf. So is the nuclear reactor that Russia is building for Iran at Bushehr. Virtually every Iranian well or production platform depends on access to the Gulf if Iran’s oil is to reach buyers. Hence, the same Straits by means of which Iran intends to lever itself into a position of global power present the West with its own point of leverage to reduce Iran’s power—and to keep it reduced for at least as long as the country’s political institutions remain unprepared to enter the modern world.
Which brings us back to the military option. That there is plentiful warrant for the exercise of this option—in Iran’s serial defiance of UN resolutions, in its declared genocidal intentions toward Israel, another member of the United Nations, and in the fact of its harboring, supporting, and training of international terrorists—could not be clearer. Unfortunately, though, current debate has become stuck on the issue of possible air strikes against Iran’s nuclear program, and whether such strikes can or cannot halt that program’s further development. Optimists argue they can; pessimists, including those highlighted in Time’s cover story, throw up a myriad of objections.
The most common such objection is that the ayatollahs, having learned the lesson of 25 years ago when Israel took out Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor at Osirak, have dispersed the most vital elements of their uranium-enrichment project among perhaps 30 hardened and well-protected sites. According to Time’s military sources, air sorties would thus have to reach roughly 1,500 “aim points,” contending with sophisticated air-defense systems along the way. As against this, others, including the strategic analyst Edward Luttwak in Commentary (“Three Reasons Not to Bomb Iran—Yet,” May 2006), argue convincingly that it is hardly necessary to hit all or even the majority of Iran’s sites in order to set back its nuclear program by several years.
But, as I have tried to show, the most immediate menace Iran poses is not nuclear but conventional in nature. How might it be dealt with militarily, and is it conceivable that both perils could be dealt with at once? What follows is one possible scenario for military action.
The first step would be to make it clear that the United States will tolerate no action by any state that endangers the international flow of commerce in the Straits of Hormuz. Signaling our determination to back up this statement with force would be a deployment in the Gulf of Oman of minesweepers, a carrier strike group’s guided-missile destroyers, an Aegis-class cruiser, and anti-submarine assets, with the rest of the carrier group remaining in the Indian Ocean. The U.S. Navy could also deploy UAV’s (unmanned air vehicles) and submarines to keep watch above and below against any Iranian missile threat to our flotilla.
Our next step would be to declare a halt to all shipments of Iranian oil while guaranteeing the safety of tankers carrying non-Iranian oil and the platforms of other Gulf states. We would then guarantee this guarantee by launching a comprehensive air campaign aimed at destroying Iran’s air-defense system, its air-force bases and communications systems, and finally its missile sites along the Gulf coast. At that point the attack could move to include Iran’s nuclear facilities—not only the “hard” sites but also infrastructure like bridges and tunnels in order to prevent the shifting of critical materials from one to site to another.
Above all, the air attack would concentrate on Iran’s gasoline refineries. It is still insufficiently appreciated that Iran, a huge oil exporter, imports nearly 40 percent of its gasoline from foreign sources, including the Gulf states. With its refineries gone and its storage facilities destroyed, Iran’s cars, trucks, buses, planes, tanks, and other military hardware would run dry in a matter of weeks or even days. This alone would render impossible any major countermoves by the Iranian army. (For its part, the Iranian navy is aging and decrepit, and its biggest asset, three Russian-made Kilo-class submarines, should and could be destroyed before leaving port.)
The scenario would not end here. With the systematic reduction of Iran’s capacity to respond, an amphibious force of Marines and special-operations forces could seize key Iranian oil assets in the Gulf, the most important of which is a series of 100 offshore wells and platforms built on Iran’s continental shelf. North and South Pars offshore fields, which represent the future of Iran’s oil and natural-gas industry, could also be seized, while Kargh Island at the far western edge of the Persian Gulf, whose terminus pumps the oil from Iran’s most mature and copiously producing fields (Ahwaz, Marun, and Gachsaran, among others), could be rendered virtually useless. By the time the campaign was over, the United States military would be in a position to control the flow of Iranian oil at the flick of a switch.
An operational fantasy? Not in the least. The United States did all this once before, in the incident I have already alluded to. In 1986-88, as the Iran-Iraq war threatened to spill over into the Gulf and interrupt vital oil traffic, the United States Navy stepped in, organizing convoys and re-flagging ships to protect them against vengeful Iranian attacks. When the Iranians tried to seize the offensive, U.S. vessels sank one Iranian frigate, crippled another, and destroyed several patrol boats. Teams of SEALS also shelled and seized Iranian oil platforms. The entire operation, the largest naval engagement since World War II, not only secured the Gulf; it also compelled Iraq and Iran to wind down their almost decade-long war. Although we made mistakes, including most grievously the accidental shooting-down of a civilian Iranian airliner, killing everyone on board, the world economic order was saved—the most important international obligation the United States faced then and faces today.
But the so-called “tanker war” did not go far enough. In the ensuing decades, the regime in Tehran has single-mindedly pursued its goal of achieving great-power status through the acquisition of nuclear weapons, control of the Persian Gulf, and the spread of its ideology of global jihad. Any effective counter-strategy today must therefore be predicated not only on seizing the state’s oil assets but on refusing to relinquish them unless and until there is credible evidence of regime change in Tehran or—what is all but inconceivable—a major change of direction by the reigning theocracy. In the meantime, and as punishment for its serial violations of UN resolutions and of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran’s oil resources would be impounded and revenues from their production would be placed in escrow.
Obviously, no plan is foolproof. The tactical risks associated with a comprehensive war strategy of this sort are numerous. But they are outweighed by its key advantages.
First, it would accomplish much more than air strikes alone on Iran’s elusive nuclear sites. Whereas such action might retard the uranium-enrichment program by some years, this one in effect would put Iran’s theocracy out of business by depriving it of the very weapon that the critics of air strikes most fear. It would do so, moreover, with minimal means. This would be a naval and air war, not a land campaign. Requiring no draw-down of U.S. forces in Iraq, it would involve one or two carrier strike groups, an airborne brigade, and a Marine brigade. Since the entire operation would take place offshore, there would be no need to engage the Iranian army. It and the Revolutionary Guards would be left stranded, out of action and out of gas.
In fact, there is little Iran could do in the face of relentless military pressure at its most vulnerable point. Today, not only are key elements of the Iranian military in worse shape than in the 1980’s, but even the oil weapon is less formidable than imagined. Currently Iran exports an estimated 2.5 million barrels of oil a day. Yet according to a recent report in Forbes, quoting the oil-industry analyst Michael Lynch, new sources of oil around the world will have boosted total production by 2 million barrels a day in this year alone, and next year by three million barrels a day. In short, other producers (including Iranian platforms in American hands) can take up some if not all of the slack. The real loser would be Iran itself. Pumping crude oil is its only industry, making up 85 percent of its exports and providing 65 percent of the state budget. With its wells held hostage, the country’s economy could enter free fall.
To be sure, none of these considerations is likely to impress those who object in principle to any decisive action against Iran’s mullahs. To some, the scenario I have proposed will seem just another instance of rampant American imperialism or “gunboat diplomacy.” To others, a war of this kind will surely appear calculated further to inflame anti-Americanism in the Middle East, arousing the fury of the dreaded “Arab street.” Still others will point with alarm to the predictably angry reaction of Iran’s two great patrons, Russia and China. And many will worry that decisive U.S. action will boomerang politically, by alienating Iran’s democrats and dissidents and thus jeopardizing the hoped-for eventuality of a pro-Western government emerging in Tehran.
Let me address these concerns in turn. In the colonial era, gunboats were used to intimidate helpless peoples, not countries bent on intimidation themselves and actively underwriting global terrorism. Nor does America’s immediate self-interest, “imperial” or otherwise, enter the picture; it is Europeans and Asians, not Americans, who rely on Iranian oil and natural gas. By safeguarding that supply, and keeping the Hormuz Straits open to other shippers, we can prevent a world-wide crisis of the sort that might well be triggered by Tehran itself in the face of economic sanctions or air strikes against its nuclear sites. Predictably, those complaining the loudest about American “imperialism” would be its most direct beneficiaries.
As for anti-Americanism in general, the specter of the Arab street has proved itself to be a chimera. If the forcible removal of an Arab dictator (Saddam Hussein) failed to produce the incendiary reaction predicted by many experts, war on a non-Arab regime is hardly likely to do so. To the contrary, it is by dragging out the crisis, and by appearing weak in the face of Tehran’s blustering and deception, that we help to consolidate the formation of a radical Shiite Crescent in the heart of the Middle East. By finally removing the head of the radical Islamic monster, the military campaign contemplated here would perform a service both for neighboring Sunni regimes and for moderate Shiites in search of political breathing room, even as groups like Hizballah in Lebanon and Moqtada al-Sadr’s militia in Iraq would begin to find themselves politically and militarily orphaned and incapable of concerted action.
Then there are Moscow and Beijing. What these two regimes want out of Iran is a return on their investments there—and, in China’s case, oil. No doubt their first choice would be to have everything stay the way it is; but clearly their second choice is to prevent Iran itself from becoming the dominant player in the region. By ensuring a continuous flow of oil from the Gulf, and leaving untouched Russian and Chinese investments in the development of Iran’s Caspian Sea fields, an aggressive military strategy could actually work to those countries’ advantage.
Would U.S. action permanently traumatize Iranian national pride and alienate its democrats for generations to come? This is the worry of analysts like Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, who on these same grounds also opposes air strikes on Iran’s nuclear installations. If anything, however, the current American policy—namely, pursuing economic sanctions—would seem likelier to produce that long-term damaging effect than would a short, sharp war to neutralize and perhaps even to topple a hated regime.
That the regime in Tehran is indeed hated, and also radically unstable, is a point on which both advocates and opponents of American action can agree. In this connection, it is important to bear in mind that Iran is rent by ethnic divisions and rivalries almost as fierce as those that divide Iraq or such former Soviet republics as Georgia and Russia itself. Almost half of Iran’s population is made up of Kurds, Baluchis, Azeris, Arabs, and Turkomans. Unlike the Persians, who are Shiites, most of these minorities are Sunni. Thus, Iran is a country ripe for constitutional overhaul, if not re-federation. Unless the current regime and its backers are willing to change course, decisive military action could open the way for an entirely new Iran.
The key word is “decisive.” What has cost us prestige in the Middle East and around the world is not our 2003 invasion of Iraq but our lack of a clear record of success in its aftermath. Governments in and around the Persian Gulf region are waiting for someone to deal effectively and summarily with the Iranian menace. Saudis, Jordanians, Egyptians, and others—all feel the pinch of an encroaching power. The longer we wait, the harder it will be to stop the Iranian advance.
In 1936, the French army could have halted Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland with a single division of troops, but chose to do nothing. In 1938, Britain and France could have joined forces with the well-armed and highly motivated Czech army to administer a crushing defeat to the German Wehrmacht and probably topple Hitler in the bargain. Instead they handed him the Sudetenland, setting in motion the process that in 1939 led to the most destructive war in world history. Do we intend to dither until suicide bombers blow up a supertanker off the Omani coast, or a mushroom cloud appears over Tel Aviv, before we decide it is finally time to get serious about Iran?
Arthur Herman, a new contributor, has taught history at George Mason University and Georgetown University. He is the author of, among other books, The Idea of Decline in Western History, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, and, most recently, To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World (2004), nominated in 2005 for the Mountbatten Prize in naval history. Mr. Herman thanks Chet Nagle and J.R. Dunn for help and advice in the writing of this essay.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/files ... erman.html
November 2006
Getting Serious About Iran
A Military Option
Arthur Herman
As the impasse over Iran’s nuclear-weapons program grows inexorably into a crisis, a kind of consensus has taken root in the minds of America’s foreign-policy elite. This is that military action against Iran is a sure formula for disaster. The essence of the position was expressed in a cover story in Time magazine this past September. Entitled “What War with Iran Would Look Like (And How to Avoid It),” the essay focused on what the editors saw as the certain consequences of armed American intervention in that country: wildly spiking oil prices, increased terrorist attacks, economic panic around the world, and the end to any dream of pro-American democratic governments emerging in the Middle East. And that would be in the case of successful action. In fact, Time predicted, given our overstretched resources and an indubitably fierce Iranian resistance, we would almost certainly lose.
Thus, in the eyes of Time’s experts as of many other observers, military action against Iran is “unthinkable.” What then can be done in the face of the mullahs’ implacable drive to acquire nuclear weapons? Here a variety of responses can be discerned. At one end are those who assure us, in the soothing title of a New York Times op-ed by Barry Posen of MIT, that “We Can Live with a Nuclear Iran.” (Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria is similarly sanguine.) Others, like Senator Joseph Biden, insist that we have at least ten years before we have to worry about Iran’s getting a working bomb. According to Ashton Carter, who served as an assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, we at least have enough time to explore every possible diplomatic avenue before contemplating any direct military response.
Taking a more openly appeasing line, critics of the Bush administration like Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations and Chatham House’s Ali Ansari urge us to enter into extended engagement or “dialogue” with Iran, with an eye toward persuading the mullahs to end or at least to modify their nuclear program. This is essentially the tack that has been followed by European and European Union diplomats for the past three years, with notably little success.
Finally there is the tougher solution preferred by the Bush administration: economic sanctions imposed by the UN. The problem here is that the more effective such sanctions are designed to be—proposed measures include freezing Iranian assets abroad and suspending all business and financial ties—the more reluctant have been France, Russia, and China (our partners on the Security Council) to go along. Sanctions that do pass muster with these governments, whose aggregate business dealings with Iran far outstrip those of the United States, are precisely the ones with little or no bite. And even watered-down sanctions, as U.S. Ambassador John Bolton admitted in a recent interview, are “by no means a done deal.”
To a greater or lesser extent, all of these recommendations fly in the face of reality. Despite Iran’s richly developed repertoire of denials, deceptions, and dissimulations, there is ample evidence that it has no intention whatsoever of relinquishing its aim of becoming a nuclear power. Moreover, this aim may be achievable not within a decade (as Senator Biden fancies) but within the next two to three years. In September, the House Intelligence Committee reported that Iran may have already succeeded in enriching uranium; some intelligence analysts believe that it may already have access to fissionable nuclear material, courtesy of North Korea. If that is so, no diplomacy in the world is going to prevent it from acquiring a bomb.
But neither are nuclear weapons the only threat posed by the Islamic Republic. While the international community has been preoccupied with this issue, the regime in Tehran has been taking steady steps to achieve hegemony over one of the world’s most sensitive and economically critical regions, and control over the world’s most precious resource. It is doing so, moreover, entirely through conventional means.
To put it briefly, the Islamic Republic has its hand on the throttle of the world’s economic engine: the stretch of ocean at the mouth of the Persian Gulf known as the Straits of Hormuz, which are only 21 miles wide at their narrowest point. Through this waterway, every day, pass roughly 40 percent of the world’s crude oil, including two-thirds of the oil from Saudi Arabia. By 2025, according to Energy Department estimates, fully 60 percent of the world’s oil exports will be moved through this vital chokepoint.
The Straits border on Iran and Oman, with the two lanes of traffic that are used specifically by oil tankers being theoretically protected by international agreement. Since 9/11, a multinational force comprising ships from the U.S., Japan, six European countries, and Pakistan have patrolled outside the Straits, in Omani waters, to make sure they stay open. But this is largely a token force. Meanwhile, the world’s access to Saudi, Qatari, Kuwaiti, and Iraqi oil and gas, as well as other petroleum products from the United Arab Emirates, depends on free passage through the Hormuz Straits.
The Tehran regime has made no secret of its desire to gain control of the Straits as part of its larger strategy of turning the Gulf into an Iranian lake. Indeed, in a preemptive move, it has begun to threaten a cut-off of tanker traffic if the UN should be foolish enough to impose sanctions in connection with the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. “We have the power to halt oil supply,” a senior Iranian official warned the European Union last January, “down to the last drop.”
In April of this year, as if to drive the point home, Iranian armed forces staged elaborate war games in the Gulf, test-firing a series of new anti-ship missiles capable of devastating any tanker or unwary warship. In the boast of one Iranian admiral, April’s “Holy Prophet war games” showed what could be expected by anyone daring to violate Iran’s interests in the Gulf. A further demonstration of resolve occurred in August, when Iran fired on and then occupied a Rumanian-owned oil platform ostensibly in a dispute over ownership rights; in truth, the action was intended to show Western companies—including Halliburton, which had won a contract for constructing facilities in the Gulf—exactly which power is in charge there.
A 30-page document said to issue from the Strategic Studies Center of the Iranian Navy (NDAJA), and drawn up in September or October of last year, features a contingency plan for closing the Hormuz Straits through a combination of anti-ship missiles, coastal artillery, and submarine attacks. The plan calls for the use of Chinese-made mines, Chinese-built missile boats, and more than 1,000 explosive-packed suicide motor boats to decimate any U.S. invasion force before it can so much as enter the Gulf. Iran’s missile units, manned by the regime’s Revolutionary Guards, would be under instruction to take out more than 100 targets around the Gulf rim, including Saudi production and export centers.
The authenticity of the NDAJA document has been vouched for by at least two defectors from Iranian intelligence. Of course, it may not be authentic at all. And military contingency plans are just that—contingency plans; the file cabinets of defense ministries around the world are full of them. Nor do all analysts agree that the Straits of Hormuz can be effectively mined in the first place. Nevertheless, even the threat of mines or suicide boats would likely be enough to induce Lloyds of London to suspend insurance of ships passing through the Straits, causing tanker traffic to cease, oil markets to rise precipitously, and Asian and European economies to reel.
Something like this very nearly happened in 1987 during the Iran-Iraq war, when only direct U.S. intervention kept the Straits open and the world’s oil flowing. For the United States is hardly the only country with a stake in keeping the Gulf and Straits free of Iranian control. Every country in Western Europe and Asia, including those that complain most bitterly about American policy in the Middle East, depends on the steady maintenance of the global economic order that runs on Middle Eastern oil.
But—and herein lies a fruitful irony—so does Iran itself. Almost 90 percent of the mullahs’ oil assets are located either in or near the Gulf. So is the nuclear reactor that Russia is building for Iran at Bushehr. Virtually every Iranian well or production platform depends on access to the Gulf if Iran’s oil is to reach buyers. Hence, the same Straits by means of which Iran intends to lever itself into a position of global power present the West with its own point of leverage to reduce Iran’s power—and to keep it reduced for at least as long as the country’s political institutions remain unprepared to enter the modern world.
Which brings us back to the military option. That there is plentiful warrant for the exercise of this option—in Iran’s serial defiance of UN resolutions, in its declared genocidal intentions toward Israel, another member of the United Nations, and in the fact of its harboring, supporting, and training of international terrorists—could not be clearer. Unfortunately, though, current debate has become stuck on the issue of possible air strikes against Iran’s nuclear program, and whether such strikes can or cannot halt that program’s further development. Optimists argue they can; pessimists, including those highlighted in Time’s cover story, throw up a myriad of objections.
The most common such objection is that the ayatollahs, having learned the lesson of 25 years ago when Israel took out Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor at Osirak, have dispersed the most vital elements of their uranium-enrichment project among perhaps 30 hardened and well-protected sites. According to Time’s military sources, air sorties would thus have to reach roughly 1,500 “aim points,” contending with sophisticated air-defense systems along the way. As against this, others, including the strategic analyst Edward Luttwak in Commentary (“Three Reasons Not to Bomb Iran—Yet,” May 2006), argue convincingly that it is hardly necessary to hit all or even the majority of Iran’s sites in order to set back its nuclear program by several years.
But, as I have tried to show, the most immediate menace Iran poses is not nuclear but conventional in nature. How might it be dealt with militarily, and is it conceivable that both perils could be dealt with at once? What follows is one possible scenario for military action.
The first step would be to make it clear that the United States will tolerate no action by any state that endangers the international flow of commerce in the Straits of Hormuz. Signaling our determination to back up this statement with force would be a deployment in the Gulf of Oman of minesweepers, a carrier strike group’s guided-missile destroyers, an Aegis-class cruiser, and anti-submarine assets, with the rest of the carrier group remaining in the Indian Ocean. The U.S. Navy could also deploy UAV’s (unmanned air vehicles) and submarines to keep watch above and below against any Iranian missile threat to our flotilla.
Our next step would be to declare a halt to all shipments of Iranian oil while guaranteeing the safety of tankers carrying non-Iranian oil and the platforms of other Gulf states. We would then guarantee this guarantee by launching a comprehensive air campaign aimed at destroying Iran’s air-defense system, its air-force bases and communications systems, and finally its missile sites along the Gulf coast. At that point the attack could move to include Iran’s nuclear facilities—not only the “hard” sites but also infrastructure like bridges and tunnels in order to prevent the shifting of critical materials from one to site to another.
Above all, the air attack would concentrate on Iran’s gasoline refineries. It is still insufficiently appreciated that Iran, a huge oil exporter, imports nearly 40 percent of its gasoline from foreign sources, including the Gulf states. With its refineries gone and its storage facilities destroyed, Iran’s cars, trucks, buses, planes, tanks, and other military hardware would run dry in a matter of weeks or even days. This alone would render impossible any major countermoves by the Iranian army. (For its part, the Iranian navy is aging and decrepit, and its biggest asset, three Russian-made Kilo-class submarines, should and could be destroyed before leaving port.)
The scenario would not end here. With the systematic reduction of Iran’s capacity to respond, an amphibious force of Marines and special-operations forces could seize key Iranian oil assets in the Gulf, the most important of which is a series of 100 offshore wells and platforms built on Iran’s continental shelf. North and South Pars offshore fields, which represent the future of Iran’s oil and natural-gas industry, could also be seized, while Kargh Island at the far western edge of the Persian Gulf, whose terminus pumps the oil from Iran’s most mature and copiously producing fields (Ahwaz, Marun, and Gachsaran, among others), could be rendered virtually useless. By the time the campaign was over, the United States military would be in a position to control the flow of Iranian oil at the flick of a switch.
An operational fantasy? Not in the least. The United States did all this once before, in the incident I have already alluded to. In 1986-88, as the Iran-Iraq war threatened to spill over into the Gulf and interrupt vital oil traffic, the United States Navy stepped in, organizing convoys and re-flagging ships to protect them against vengeful Iranian attacks. When the Iranians tried to seize the offensive, U.S. vessels sank one Iranian frigate, crippled another, and destroyed several patrol boats. Teams of SEALS also shelled and seized Iranian oil platforms. The entire operation, the largest naval engagement since World War II, not only secured the Gulf; it also compelled Iraq and Iran to wind down their almost decade-long war. Although we made mistakes, including most grievously the accidental shooting-down of a civilian Iranian airliner, killing everyone on board, the world economic order was saved—the most important international obligation the United States faced then and faces today.
But the so-called “tanker war” did not go far enough. In the ensuing decades, the regime in Tehran has single-mindedly pursued its goal of achieving great-power status through the acquisition of nuclear weapons, control of the Persian Gulf, and the spread of its ideology of global jihad. Any effective counter-strategy today must therefore be predicated not only on seizing the state’s oil assets but on refusing to relinquish them unless and until there is credible evidence of regime change in Tehran or—what is all but inconceivable—a major change of direction by the reigning theocracy. In the meantime, and as punishment for its serial violations of UN resolutions and of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran’s oil resources would be impounded and revenues from their production would be placed in escrow.
Obviously, no plan is foolproof. The tactical risks associated with a comprehensive war strategy of this sort are numerous. But they are outweighed by its key advantages.
First, it would accomplish much more than air strikes alone on Iran’s elusive nuclear sites. Whereas such action might retard the uranium-enrichment program by some years, this one in effect would put Iran’s theocracy out of business by depriving it of the very weapon that the critics of air strikes most fear. It would do so, moreover, with minimal means. This would be a naval and air war, not a land campaign. Requiring no draw-down of U.S. forces in Iraq, it would involve one or two carrier strike groups, an airborne brigade, and a Marine brigade. Since the entire operation would take place offshore, there would be no need to engage the Iranian army. It and the Revolutionary Guards would be left stranded, out of action and out of gas.
In fact, there is little Iran could do in the face of relentless military pressure at its most vulnerable point. Today, not only are key elements of the Iranian military in worse shape than in the 1980’s, but even the oil weapon is less formidable than imagined. Currently Iran exports an estimated 2.5 million barrels of oil a day. Yet according to a recent report in Forbes, quoting the oil-industry analyst Michael Lynch, new sources of oil around the world will have boosted total production by 2 million barrels a day in this year alone, and next year by three million barrels a day. In short, other producers (including Iranian platforms in American hands) can take up some if not all of the slack. The real loser would be Iran itself. Pumping crude oil is its only industry, making up 85 percent of its exports and providing 65 percent of the state budget. With its wells held hostage, the country’s economy could enter free fall.
To be sure, none of these considerations is likely to impress those who object in principle to any decisive action against Iran’s mullahs. To some, the scenario I have proposed will seem just another instance of rampant American imperialism or “gunboat diplomacy.” To others, a war of this kind will surely appear calculated further to inflame anti-Americanism in the Middle East, arousing the fury of the dreaded “Arab street.” Still others will point with alarm to the predictably angry reaction of Iran’s two great patrons, Russia and China. And many will worry that decisive U.S. action will boomerang politically, by alienating Iran’s democrats and dissidents and thus jeopardizing the hoped-for eventuality of a pro-Western government emerging in Tehran.
Let me address these concerns in turn. In the colonial era, gunboats were used to intimidate helpless peoples, not countries bent on intimidation themselves and actively underwriting global terrorism. Nor does America’s immediate self-interest, “imperial” or otherwise, enter the picture; it is Europeans and Asians, not Americans, who rely on Iranian oil and natural gas. By safeguarding that supply, and keeping the Hormuz Straits open to other shippers, we can prevent a world-wide crisis of the sort that might well be triggered by Tehran itself in the face of economic sanctions or air strikes against its nuclear sites. Predictably, those complaining the loudest about American “imperialism” would be its most direct beneficiaries.
As for anti-Americanism in general, the specter of the Arab street has proved itself to be a chimera. If the forcible removal of an Arab dictator (Saddam Hussein) failed to produce the incendiary reaction predicted by many experts, war on a non-Arab regime is hardly likely to do so. To the contrary, it is by dragging out the crisis, and by appearing weak in the face of Tehran’s blustering and deception, that we help to consolidate the formation of a radical Shiite Crescent in the heart of the Middle East. By finally removing the head of the radical Islamic monster, the military campaign contemplated here would perform a service both for neighboring Sunni regimes and for moderate Shiites in search of political breathing room, even as groups like Hizballah in Lebanon and Moqtada al-Sadr’s militia in Iraq would begin to find themselves politically and militarily orphaned and incapable of concerted action.
Then there are Moscow and Beijing. What these two regimes want out of Iran is a return on their investments there—and, in China’s case, oil. No doubt their first choice would be to have everything stay the way it is; but clearly their second choice is to prevent Iran itself from becoming the dominant player in the region. By ensuring a continuous flow of oil from the Gulf, and leaving untouched Russian and Chinese investments in the development of Iran’s Caspian Sea fields, an aggressive military strategy could actually work to those countries’ advantage.
Would U.S. action permanently traumatize Iranian national pride and alienate its democrats for generations to come? This is the worry of analysts like Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, who on these same grounds also opposes air strikes on Iran’s nuclear installations. If anything, however, the current American policy—namely, pursuing economic sanctions—would seem likelier to produce that long-term damaging effect than would a short, sharp war to neutralize and perhaps even to topple a hated regime.
That the regime in Tehran is indeed hated, and also radically unstable, is a point on which both advocates and opponents of American action can agree. In this connection, it is important to bear in mind that Iran is rent by ethnic divisions and rivalries almost as fierce as those that divide Iraq or such former Soviet republics as Georgia and Russia itself. Almost half of Iran’s population is made up of Kurds, Baluchis, Azeris, Arabs, and Turkomans. Unlike the Persians, who are Shiites, most of these minorities are Sunni. Thus, Iran is a country ripe for constitutional overhaul, if not re-federation. Unless the current regime and its backers are willing to change course, decisive military action could open the way for an entirely new Iran.
The key word is “decisive.” What has cost us prestige in the Middle East and around the world is not our 2003 invasion of Iraq but our lack of a clear record of success in its aftermath. Governments in and around the Persian Gulf region are waiting for someone to deal effectively and summarily with the Iranian menace. Saudis, Jordanians, Egyptians, and others—all feel the pinch of an encroaching power. The longer we wait, the harder it will be to stop the Iranian advance.
In 1936, the French army could have halted Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland with a single division of troops, but chose to do nothing. In 1938, Britain and France could have joined forces with the well-armed and highly motivated Czech army to administer a crushing defeat to the German Wehrmacht and probably topple Hitler in the bargain. Instead they handed him the Sudetenland, setting in motion the process that in 1939 led to the most destructive war in world history. Do we intend to dither until suicide bombers blow up a supertanker off the Omani coast, or a mushroom cloud appears over Tel Aviv, before we decide it is finally time to get serious about Iran?
Arthur Herman, a new contributor, has taught history at George Mason University and Georgetown University. He is the author of, among other books, The Idea of Decline in Western History, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, and, most recently, To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World (2004), nominated in 2005 for the Mountbatten Prize in naval history. Mr. Herman thanks Chet Nagle and J.R. Dunn for help and advice in the writing of this essay.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/files ... erman.html
"In 1936, the French army could have halted Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland with a single division of troops, but chose to do nothing. In 1938, Britain and France could have joined forces with the well-armed and highly motivated Czech army to administer a crushing defeat to the German Wehrmacht and probably topple Hitler in the bargain. Instead they handed him the Sudetenland, setting in motion the process that in 1939 led to the most destructive war in world history. Do we intend to dither until suicide bombers blow up a supertanker off the Omani coast, or a mushroom cloud appears over Tel Aviv, before we decide it is finally time to get serious about Iran?"
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A downright silly analogy to say the least. Why don't you post a whole encylopedia?
What a waste.
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A downright silly analogy to say the least. Why don't you post a whole encylopedia?
What a waste.
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Ted
Pizza Posted:
Took the words right out of my mouthCOMMENTARY
November 2006
Getting Serious About Iran
A Military Option
Arthur Herman
As the impasse over Iran’s nuclear-weapons program grows inexorably into a crisis, a kind of consensus has taken root in the minds of America’s foreign-policy elite. This is that military action against Iran is a sure formula for disaster. The essence of the position was expressed in a cover story in Time magazine this past September. Entitled “What War with Iran Would Look Like (And How to Avoid It),” the essay focused on what the editors saw as the certain consequences of armed American intervention in that country: wildly spiking oil prices, increased terrorist attacks, economic panic around the world, and the end to any dream of pro-American democratic governments emerging in the Middle East. And that would be in the case of successful action. In fact, Time predicted, given our overstretched resources and an indubitably fierce Iranian resistance, we would almost certainly lose.
Thus, in the eyes of Time’s experts as of many other observers, military action against Iran is “unthinkable.” What then can be done in the face of the mullahs’ implacable drive to acquire nuclear weapons? Here a variety of responses can be discerned. At one end are those who assure us, in the soothing title of a New York Times op-ed by Barry Posen of MIT, that “We Can Live with a Nuclear Iran.” (Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria is similarly sanguine.) Others, like Senator Joseph Biden, insist that we have at least ten years before we have to worry about Iran’s getting a working bomb. According to Ashton Carter, who served as an assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, we at least have enough time to explore every possible diplomatic avenue before contemplating any direct military response.
Taking a more openly appeasing line, critics of the Bush administration like Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations and Chatham House’s Ali Ansari urge us to enter into extended engagement or “dialogue” with Iran, with an eye toward persuading the mullahs to end or at least to modify their nuclear program. This is essentially the tack that has been followed by European and European Union diplomats for the past three years, with notably little success.
Finally there is the tougher solution preferred by the Bush administration: economic sanctions imposed by the UN. The problem here is that the more effective such sanctions are designed to be—proposed measures include freezing Iranian assets abroad and suspending all business and financial ties—the more reluctant have been France, Russia, and China (our partners on the Security Council) to go along. Sanctions that do pass muster with these governments, whose aggregate business dealings with Iran far outstrip those of the United States, are precisely the ones with little or no bite. And even watered-down sanctions, as U.S. Ambassador John Bolton admitted in a recent interview, are “by no means a done deal.”
To a greater or lesser extent, all of these recommendations fly in the face of reality. Despite Iran’s richly developed repertoire of denials, deceptions, and dissimulations, there is ample evidence that it has no intention whatsoever of relinquishing its aim of becoming a nuclear power. Moreover, this aim may be achievable not within a decade (as Senator Biden fancies) but within the next two to three years. In September, the House Intelligence Committee reported that Iran may have already succeeded in enriching uranium; some intelligence analysts believe that it may already have access to fissionable nuclear material, courtesy of North Korea. If that is so, no diplomacy in the world is going to prevent it from acquiring a bomb.
But neither are nuclear weapons the only threat posed by the Islamic Republic. While the international community has been preoccupied with this issue, the regime in Tehran has been taking steady steps to achieve hegemony over one of the world’s most sensitive and economically critical regions, and control over the world’s most precious resource. It is doing so, moreover, entirely through conventional means.
To put it briefly, the Islamic Republic has its hand on the throttle of the world’s economic engine: the stretch of ocean at the mouth of the Persian Gulf known as the Straits of Hormuz, which are only 21 miles wide at their narrowest point. Through this waterway, every day, pass roughly 40 percent of the world’s crude oil, including two-thirds of the oil from Saudi Arabia. By 2025, according to Energy Department estimates, fully 60 percent of the world’s oil exports will be moved through this vital chokepoint.
The Straits border on Iran and Oman, with the two lanes of traffic that are used specifically by oil tankers being theoretically protected by international agreement. Since 9/11, a multinational force comprising ships from the U.S., Japan, six European countries, and Pakistan have patrolled outside the Straits, in Omani waters, to make sure they stay open. But this is largely a token force. Meanwhile, the world’s access to Saudi, Qatari, Kuwaiti, and Iraqi oil and gas, as well as other petroleum products from the United Arab Emirates, depends on free passage through the Hormuz Straits.
The Tehran regime has made no secret of its desire to gain control of the Straits as part of its larger strategy of turning the Gulf into an Iranian lake. Indeed, in a preemptive move, it has begun to threaten a cut-off of tanker traffic if the UN should be foolish enough to impose sanctions in connection with the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. “We have the power to halt oil supply,” a senior Iranian official warned the European Union last January, “down to the last drop.”
In April of this year, as if to drive the point home, Iranian armed forces staged elaborate war games in the Gulf, test-firing a series of new anti-ship missiles capable of devastating any tanker or unwary warship. In the boast of one Iranian admiral, April’s “Holy Prophet war games” showed what could be expected by anyone daring to violate Iran’s interests in the Gulf. A further demonstration of resolve occurred in August, when Iran fired on and then occupied a Rumanian-owned oil platform ostensibly in a dispute over ownership rights; in truth, the action was intended to show Western companies—including Halliburton, which had won a contract for constructing facilities in the Gulf—exactly which power is in charge there.
A 30-page document said to issue from the Strategic Studies Center of the Iranian Navy (NDAJA), and drawn up in September or October of last year, features a contingency plan for closing the Hormuz Straits through a combination of anti-ship missiles, coastal artillery, and submarine attacks. The plan calls for the use of Chinese-made mines, Chinese-built missile boats, and more than 1,000 explosive-packed suicide motor boats to decimate any U.S. invasion force before it can so much as enter the Gulf. Iran’s missile units, manned by the regime’s Revolutionary Guards, would be under instruction to take out more than 100 targets around the Gulf rim, including Saudi production and export centers.
The authenticity of the NDAJA document has been vouched for by at least two defectors from Iranian intelligence. Of course, it may not be authentic at all. And military contingency plans are just that—contingency plans; the file cabinets of defense ministries around the world are full of them. Nor do all analysts agree that the Straits of Hormuz can be effectively mined in the first place. Nevertheless, even the threat of mines or suicide boats would likely be enough to induce Lloyds of London to suspend insurance of ships passing through the Straits, causing tanker traffic to cease, oil markets to rise precipitously, and Asian and European economies to reel.
Something like this very nearly happened in 1987 during the Iran-Iraq war, when only direct U.S. intervention kept the Straits open and the world’s oil flowing. For the United States is hardly the only country with a stake in keeping the Gulf and Straits free of Iranian control. Every country in Western Europe and Asia, including those that complain most bitterly about American policy in the Middle East, depends on the steady maintenance of the global economic order that runs on Middle Eastern oil.
But—and herein lies a fruitful irony—so does Iran itself. Almost 90 percent of the mullahs’ oil assets are located either in or near the Gulf. So is the nuclear reactor that Russia is building for Iran at Bushehr. Virtually every Iranian well or production platform depends on access to the Gulf if Iran’s oil is to reach buyers. Hence, the same Straits by means of which Iran intends to lever itself into a position of global power present the West with its own point of leverage to reduce Iran’s power—and to keep it reduced for at least as long as the country’s political institutions remain unprepared to enter the modern world.
Which brings us back to the military option. That there is plentiful warrant for the exercise of this option—in Iran’s serial defiance of UN resolutions, in its declared genocidal intentions toward Israel, another member of the United Nations, and in the fact of its harboring, supporting, and training of international terrorists—could not be clearer. Unfortunately, though, current debate has become stuck on the issue of possible air strikes against Iran’s nuclear program, and whether such strikes can or cannot halt that program’s further development. Optimists argue they can; pessimists, including those highlighted in Time’s cover story, throw up a myriad of objections.
The most common such objection is that the ayatollahs, having learned the lesson of 25 years ago when Israel took out Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor at Osirak, have dispersed the most vital elements of their uranium-enrichment project among perhaps 30 hardened and well-protected sites. According to Time’s military sources, air sorties would thus have to reach roughly 1,500 “aim points,” contending with sophisticated air-defense systems along the way. As against this, others, including the strategic analyst Edward Luttwak in Commentary (“Three Reasons Not to Bomb Iran—Yet,” May 2006), argue convincingly that it is hardly necessary to hit all or even the majority of Iran’s sites in order to set back its nuclear program by several years.
But, as I have tried to show, the most immediate menace Iran poses is not nuclear but conventional in nature. How might it be dealt with militarily, and is it conceivable that both perils could be dealt with at once? What follows is one possible scenario for military action.
The first step would be to make it clear that the United States will tolerate no action by any state that endangers the international flow of commerce in the Straits of Hormuz. Signaling our determination to back up this statement with force would be a deployment in the Gulf of Oman of minesweepers, a carrier strike group’s guided-missile destroyers, an Aegis-class cruiser, and anti-submarine assets, with the rest of the carrier group remaining in the Indian Ocean. The U.S. Navy could also deploy UAV’s (unmanned air vehicles) and submarines to keep watch above and below against any Iranian missile threat to our flotilla.
Our next step would be to declare a halt to all shipments of Iranian oil while guaranteeing the safety of tankers carrying non-Iranian oil and the platforms of other Gulf states. We would then guarantee this guarantee by launching a comprehensive air campaign aimed at destroying Iran’s air-defense system, its air-force bases and communications systems, and finally its missile sites along the Gulf coast. At that point the attack could move to include Iran’s nuclear facilities—not only the “hard” sites but also infrastructure like bridges and tunnels in order to prevent the shifting of critical materials from one to site to another.
Above all, the air attack would concentrate on Iran’s gasoline refineries. It is still insufficiently appreciated that Iran, a huge oil exporter, imports nearly 40 percent of its gasoline from foreign sources, including the Gulf states. With its refineries gone and its storage facilities destroyed, Iran’s cars, trucks, buses, planes, tanks, and other military hardware would run dry in a matter of weeks or even days. This alone would render impossible any major countermoves by the Iranian army. (For its part, the Iranian navy is aging and decrepit, and its biggest asset, three Russian-made Kilo-class submarines, should and could be destroyed before leaving port.)
The scenario would not end here. With the systematic reduction of Iran’s capacity to respond, an amphibious force of Marines and special-operations forces could seize key Iranian oil assets in the Gulf, the most important of which is a series of 100 offshore wells and platforms built on Iran’s continental shelf. North and South Pars offshore fields, which represent the future of Iran’s oil and natural-gas industry, could also be seized, while Kargh Island at the far western edge of the Persian Gulf, whose terminus pumps the oil from Iran’s most mature and copiously producing fields (Ahwaz, Marun, and Gachsaran, among others), could be rendered virtually useless. By the time the campaign was over, the United States military would be in a position to control the flow of Iranian oil at the flick of a switch.
An operational fantasy? Not in the least. The United States did all this once before, in the incident I have already alluded to. In 1986-88, as the Iran-Iraq war threatened to spill over into the Gulf and interrupt vital oil traffic, the United States Navy stepped in, organizing convoys and re-flagging ships to protect them against vengeful Iranian attacks. When the Iranians tried to seize the offensive, U.S. vessels sank one Iranian frigate, crippled another, and destroyed several patrol boats. Teams of SEALS also shelled and seized Iranian oil platforms. The entire operation, the largest naval engagement since World War II, not only secured the Gulf; it also compelled Iraq and Iran to wind down their almost decade-long war. Although we made mistakes, including most grievously the accidental shooting-down of a civilian Iranian airliner, killing everyone on board, the world economic order was saved—the most important international obligation the United States faced then and faces today.
But the so-called “tanker war” did not go far enough. In the ensuing decades, the regime in Tehran has single-mindedly pursued its goal of achieving great-power status through the acquisition of nuclear weapons, control of the Persian Gulf, and the spread of its ideology of global jihad. Any effective counter-strategy today must therefore be predicated not only on seizing the state’s oil assets but on refusing to relinquish them unless and until there is credible evidence of regime change in Tehran or—what is all but inconceivable—a major change of direction by the reigning theocracy. In the meantime, and as punishment for its serial violations of UN resolutions and of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran’s oil resources would be impounded and revenues from their production would be placed in escrow.
Obviously, no plan is foolproof. The tactical risks associated with a comprehensive war strategy of this sort are numerous. But they are outweighed by its key advantages.
First, it would accomplish much more than air strikes alone on Iran’s elusive nuclear sites. Whereas such action might retard the uranium-enrichment program by some years, this one in effect would put Iran’s theocracy out of business by depriving it of the very weapon that the critics of air strikes most fear. It would do so, moreover, with minimal means. This would be a naval and air war, not a land campaign. Requiring no draw-down of U.S. forces in Iraq, it would involve one or two carrier strike groups, an airborne brigade, and a Marine brigade. Since the entire operation would take place offshore, there would be no need to engage the Iranian army. It and the Revolutionary Guards would be left stranded, out of action and out of gas.
In fact, there is little Iran could do in the face of relentless military pressure at its most vulnerable point. Today, not only are key elements of the Iranian military in worse shape than in the 1980’s, but even the oil weapon is less formidable than imagined. Currently Iran exports an estimated 2.5 million barrels of oil a day. Yet according to a recent report in Forbes, quoting the oil-industry analyst Michael Lynch, new sources of oil around the world will have boosted total production by 2 million barrels a day in this year alone, and next year by three million barrels a day. In short, other producers (including Iranian platforms in American hands) can take up some if not all of the slack. The real loser would be Iran itself. Pumping crude oil is its only industry, making up 85 percent of its exports and providing 65 percent of the state budget. With its wells held hostage, the country’s economy could enter free fall.
To be sure, none of these considerations is likely to impress those who object in principle to any decisive action against Iran’s mullahs. To some, the scenario I have proposed will seem just another instance of rampant American imperialism or “gunboat diplomacy.” To others, a war of this kind will surely appear calculated further to inflame anti-Americanism in the Middle East, arousing the fury of the dreaded “Arab street.” Still others will point with alarm to the predictably angry reaction of Iran’s two great patrons, Russia and China. And many will worry that decisive U.S. action will boomerang politically, by alienating Iran’s democrats and dissidents and thus jeopardizing the hoped-for eventuality of a pro-Western government emerging in Tehran.
Let me address these concerns in turn. In the colonial era, gunboats were used to intimidate helpless peoples, not countries bent on intimidation themselves and actively underwriting global terrorism. Nor does America’s immediate self-interest, “imperial” or otherwise, enter the picture; it is Europeans and Asians, not Americans, who rely on Iranian oil and natural gas. By safeguarding that supply, and keeping the Hormuz Straits open to other shippers, we can prevent a world-wide crisis of the sort that might well be triggered by Tehran itself in the face of economic sanctions or air strikes against its nuclear sites. Predictably, those complaining the loudest about American “imperialism” would be its most direct beneficiaries.
As for anti-Americanism in general, the specter of the Arab street has proved itself to be a chimera. If the forcible removal of an Arab dictator (Saddam Hussein) failed to produce the incendiary reaction predicted by many experts, war on a non-Arab regime is hardly likely to do so. To the contrary, it is by dragging out the crisis, and by appearing weak in the face of Tehran’s blustering and deception, that we help to consolidate the formation of a radical Shiite Crescent in the heart of the Middle East. By finally removing the head of the radical Islamic monster, the military campaign contemplated here would perform a service both for neighboring Sunni regimes and for moderate Shiites in search of political breathing room, even as groups like Hizballah in Lebanon and Moqtada al-Sadr’s militia in Iraq would begin to find themselves politically and militarily orphaned and incapable of concerted action.
Then there are Moscow and Beijing. What these two regimes want out of Iran is a return on their investments there—and, in China’s case, oil. No doubt their first choice would be to have everything stay the way it is; but clearly their second choice is to prevent Iran itself from becoming the dominant player in the region. By ensuring a continuous flow of oil from the Gulf, and leaving untouched Russian and Chinese investments in the development of Iran’s Caspian Sea fields, an aggressive military strategy could actually work to those countries’ advantage.
Would U.S. action permanently traumatize Iranian national pride and alienate its democrats for generations to come? This is the worry of analysts like Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, who on these same grounds also opposes air strikes on Iran’s nuclear installations. If anything, however, the current American policy—namely, pursuing economic sanctions—would seem likelier to produce that long-term damaging effect than would a short, sharp war to neutralize and perhaps even to topple a hated regime.
That the regime in Tehran is indeed hated, and also radically unstable, is a point on which both advocates and opponents of American action can agree. In this connection, it is important to bear in mind that Iran is rent by ethnic divisions and rivalries almost as fierce as those that divide Iraq or such former Soviet republics as Georgia and Russia itself. Almost half of Iran’s population is made up of Kurds, Baluchis, Azeris, Arabs, and Turkomans. Unlike the Persians, who are Shiites, most of these minorities are Sunni. Thus, Iran is a country ripe for constitutional overhaul, if not re-federation. Unless the current regime and its backers are willing to change course, decisive military action could open the way for an entirely new Iran.
The key word is “decisive.” What has cost us prestige in the Middle East and around the world is not our 2003 invasion of Iraq but our lack of a clear record of success in its aftermath. Governments in and around the Persian Gulf region are waiting for someone to deal effectively and summarily with the Iranian menace. Saudis, Jordanians, Egyptians, and others—all feel the pinch of an encroaching power. The longer we wait, the harder it will be to stop the Iranian advance.
In 1936, the French army could have halted Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland with a single division of troops, but chose to do nothing. In 1938, Britain and France could have joined forces with the well-armed and highly motivated Czech army to administer a crushing defeat to the German Wehrmacht and probably topple Hitler in the bargain. Instead they handed him the Sudetenland, setting in motion the process that in 1939 led to the most destructive war in world history. Do we intend to dither until suicide bombers blow up a supertanker off the Omani coast, or a mushroom cloud appears over Tel Aviv, before we decide it is finally time to get serious about Iran?
Arthur Herman, a new contributor, has taught history at George Mason University and Georgetown University. He is the author of, among other books, The Idea of Decline in Western History, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, and, most recently, To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World (2004), nominated in 2005 for the Mountbatten Prize in naval history. Mr. Herman thanks Chet Nagle and J.R. Dunn for help and advice in the writing of this essay.
Because anything containing more than a line or two is beyond your grasp.Lilith wrote:"In 1936, the French army could have halted Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland with a single division of troops, but chose to do nothing. In 1938, Britain and France could have joined forces with the well-armed and highly motivated Czech army to administer a crushing defeat to the German Wehrmacht and probably topple Hitler in the bargain. Instead they handed him the Sudetenland, setting in motion the process that in 1939 led to the most destructive war in world history. Do we intend to dither until suicide bombers blow up a supertanker off the Omani coast, or a mushroom cloud appears over Tel Aviv, before we decide it is finally time to get serious about Iran?"
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A downright silly analogy to say the least. Why don't you post a whole encylopedia?
How about "A stitch in time saves nine!" Got it now?
"How about "A stitch in time saves nine!" "
Well finally something in your own words -even if it is only a well worn cliche that you come up with. At least you spared us a 6,000 word essay by one of your right wing lunatics. Maybe you should get the Post of the Day for your brevity ???
By the way, the analogy is still silly ... very juvenile. Why don't you try posting some adult material?
Well finally something in your own words -even if it is only a well worn cliche that you come up with. At least you spared us a 6,000 word essay by one of your right wing lunatics. Maybe you should get the Post of the Day for your brevity ???
By the way, the analogy is still silly ... very juvenile. Why don't you try posting some adult material?
The cliche was meant to help you understand the analogy you missed. Even at that level I see you're having a problem grasping the meaning. You haven't once addressed the subject itself; you merely attacked the author, whom you know nothing about, with an absurd and typically reflexive stereotypical label. It might help if you took the time and trouble to read the entire article, perhaps with a dictionary at your side instead of merely skimming and reading the last paragraph. Of course, a basic knowledge of modern world history is necessary to gain an understanding of what he's discussing.Lilith wrote:"How about "A stitch in time saves nine!" "
Well finally something in your own words -even if it is only a well worn cliche that you come up with. At least you spared us a 6,000 word essay by one of your right wing lunatics. Maybe you should get the Post of the Day for your brevity ???
By the way, the analogy is still silly ... very juvenile. Why don't you try posting some adult material?
Sorry if you have trouble digesting a carefully reasoned article. If the cliche doesn't help you, there isn't much that will.
The author, of whose background you are ignorant, and whom you labeled a "right wing lunatic" wrote a serious article on a subject of momentous concern, published in a respected journal that offers diverse views of controversial subjects, as any discerning person can easily see. Your comments, none of which have any substance, and which completely fail to address any of the arguments on either side, continue to underscore the degree to which you are out of your depth in this discussion.
"continue to underscore the degree to which you are out of your depth in this discussion." Pizza
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Strange that you, as a self professed learned sage, should then take so much time arguing with me. If I am out of my depth, why do you spend so much effort in trying to counter my statements?
I'll answer that - because you are basically a bag of wind that blows in from right field. And you just hate it when I keep pointing it out.
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Strange that you, as a self professed learned sage, should then take so much time arguing with me. If I am out of my depth, why do you spend so much effort in trying to counter my statements?
I'll answer that - because you are basically a bag of wind that blows in from right field. And you just hate it when I keep pointing it out.
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living_stradivarius
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I wasn't arguing with you. I was trying to explain something to you which you apparently couldn't understand. You still can't.Lilith wrote:"continue to underscore the degree to which you are out of your depth in this discussion." Pizza
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Strange that you, as a self professed learned sage, should then take so much time arguing with me. If I am out of my depth, why do you spend so much effort in trying to counter my statements?
I'll answer that - because you are basically a bag of wind that blows in from right field. And you just hate it when I keep pointing it out.
You have no argument to counter. You don't even refer to anyone else's argument that could support your position, whatever that may be. It's unlikely that you have a serious position, as that would require some knowledge of the issues. That's the main problem with your presence on this thread. There's no substance to your comments. So far you've offered nothing but your usual ad hominem nonsense. If you think I take that seriously, you're not only ignorant but delusional as well.
"propose a course of action" can you, Living Strad?
Can I?
Can Lillith?
Can Pizza? can Corlyss? Well, they'll try, but actually they are subject to what's published, like we are. I've read Corlyss' quote of the man she heard utter the essence of pacifist, appeasing mantra. There are people like that - not too many, I suppose - and I guess she's entitled to speculate on Hitler's assessment of the present situation.
I did read the two Commentary items Pizza posted, - please, Pizza, have mercy on my eyes! - all of the Arthur Herman piece and most of the Amir Tahen one. They can't be dismissed - they're logical and cogent presentations of how these analysts see things, and the situation they describe is dire. It may very well be true that one can't avoid the steps Herman suggests - in any case, the prospect is for a long and painful series of events. I would feel much more positive about the whole thing if we had an administration inoffice that had proven itself able to devise a capable strategy and competent in carrying it out.
But we're stuck with what we've got and will have to tough it out, hoping for the best. Here's to the Thirties!
Can I?
Can Lillith?
Can Pizza? can Corlyss? Well, they'll try, but actually they are subject to what's published, like we are. I've read Corlyss' quote of the man she heard utter the essence of pacifist, appeasing mantra. There are people like that - not too many, I suppose - and I guess she's entitled to speculate on Hitler's assessment of the present situation.
I did read the two Commentary items Pizza posted, - please, Pizza, have mercy on my eyes! - all of the Arthur Herman piece and most of the Amir Tahen one. They can't be dismissed - they're logical and cogent presentations of how these analysts see things, and the situation they describe is dire. It may very well be true that one can't avoid the steps Herman suggests - in any case, the prospect is for a long and painful series of events. I would feel much more positive about the whole thing if we had an administration inoffice that had proven itself able to devise a capable strategy and competent in carrying it out.
But we're stuck with what we've got and will have to tough it out, hoping for the best. Here's to the Thirties!
Werner Isler
I remember reading about the Roosevelt administration's response to many of the crises it faced in the '30s and '40s, and the fact that in some situations they literally "made it up as they went along", without having a well-defined strategy in place. Some analysts called it "flexibility" but in reality it was a hit or miss sort of approach. Luckily, some of the time it "hit". The law of averages will help to some extent. I expect that every administration facing difficult times such as these will have to adjust to unforeseen situations and events pretty much like a quarterback calling new signals at the line of scrimmage.Werner wrote:I did read the two Commentary items Pizza posted, - please, Pizza, have mercy on my eyes! - all of the Arthur Herman piece and most of the Amir Tahen one. They can't be dismissed - they're logical and cogent presentations of how these analysts see things, and the situation they describe is dire. It may very well be true that one can't avoid the steps Herman suggests - in any case, the prospect is for a long and painful series of events. I would feel much more positive about the whole thing if we had an administration inoffice that had proven itself able to devise a capable strategy and competent in carrying it out.
But we're stuck with what we've got and will have to tough it out, hoping for the best. Here's to the Thirties!
"I was trying to explain something to you" Pizza
Oh Pizza, aren't you wonderful. You like to explain things to people, don't you. It makes you feel so.......well.....superior, correct?
Why don't you explain why you have been so wrong for the last 4-5 years on Iraq? Now, if you could explain that, then maybe we might listen to your views on Iran.
Oh Pizza, aren't you wonderful. You like to explain things to people, don't you. It makes you feel so.......well.....superior, correct?
Why don't you explain why you have been so wrong for the last 4-5 years on Iraq? Now, if you could explain that, then maybe we might listen to your views on Iran.
An editorial in the Jerusalem Post suggests breaking diplomatic relations with Iran as a means of pressuring it.
The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition
Choose honor
THE JERUSALEM POST Oct. 23, 2006
"Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonor. They chose dishonor. They will have war."
Winston Churchill to Neville Chamberlain at the House of Commons, after the 1938 Munich agreement
On Friday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said at a rally, "This regime [Israel], thanks to God, has lost the reason for its existence... You should believe that this regime is disappearing."
While this may seem to be primarily a concern for Israel, it is not; we, as Ariel Sharon put it, will not be Czechoslovakia. The question is not whether Iran must be confronted, but who will do it, when, and what cost.
Though it may be difficult to recall so quaint a concept as honor, the word captures what is at stake as the leader of a terrorist nation openly threatens to destroy another state and the free world does nothing.
Yesterday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called on the international community not to "bury its head in the sand."
"It is inconceivable that... [the president of] a member of the United Nations continues to be received throughout the world as a legitimate leader while he stands up and says that another UN member state should be wiped off the map," Olmert told a business conference. "We shall never repeat the mistakes of 60 years ago of... ignoring what was being heard then when it was still possible to save lives."
It is a measure of the dangerous state of world affairs that an Israeli leader needs to make such a statement, let alone that such a call would fall on deaf ears.
In 2000, when Austria elected a government that included the party of Joerg Haider, who had exhibited signs of neo-Nazism, the 14 other members of the European Union unanimously imposed diplomatic sanctions on Vienna. The sanctions, the first ever by the EU against a member state, including a freezing of ambassadorial and other intergovernmental contacts, and the rejection of any Austrian candidates nominated for posting in EU offices.
Then-German foreign minister Joschka Fischer explained that Europe must demonstrate that it is a "community of shared values" and distance itself from what EU parliament president Nicole Fontaine called the "insulting, anti-foreigner and racist utterances of Joerg Haider." EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana weighed in, saying that the EU had to deliver "clear signals" rejecting what Haider stood for.
The EU acted vigorously then, as was justified. It would have been wrong to allow a party whose leader flirted with neo-Nazism to rise to power without comment or reaction. But Haider and his party did not advocate a return to fascist dictatorship, nor the eradication of another state.
The Iranian regime is oppressing its own people, fomenting terrorism throughout the region, and threatening a new genocide against the Jewish people. Its leaders view Israel as an alien Western implant. Iran's threats against Israel, therefore, are nothing more or less than threats against the West as a whole.
Adolf Hitler escalated his provocations against Jews and Western democracies simultaneously and incrementally; Iran is testing the waters as well. Each ignored blow delivered to the West's honor will be duly noted and lead to the next.
Ahmadinejad's helpfully explains this. Speaking to the US and Europe at the same rally, he said, "You imposed a group of terrorists... on the region. It is in your own interest to distance yourself from these criminals... This is an ultimatum. Don't complain tomorrow... Nations will take revenge."
It is painfully obvious that if Western nations took Ahmadinejad's advice and abandoned Israel, Iran would only become more belligerent, just like Hitler did when Europeans abandoned Czechoslovakia. Neither Hitler nor Ahmadinejad cared or care about their initial target, but rather about what the limp Western reaction says about their prospects for further expanding their power through even bolder acts of aggression.
Now, in conjunction with but regardless of the need to force Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions, the nations of the world must break relations with a regime that is openly justifying Israel's destruction - a call for genocide against the Jewish people. This must be done not just for Israel's sake, but to choose honor and prevent war.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite? ... %2FPrinter
The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition
Choose honor
THE JERUSALEM POST Oct. 23, 2006
"Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonor. They chose dishonor. They will have war."
Winston Churchill to Neville Chamberlain at the House of Commons, after the 1938 Munich agreement
On Friday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said at a rally, "This regime [Israel], thanks to God, has lost the reason for its existence... You should believe that this regime is disappearing."
While this may seem to be primarily a concern for Israel, it is not; we, as Ariel Sharon put it, will not be Czechoslovakia. The question is not whether Iran must be confronted, but who will do it, when, and what cost.
Though it may be difficult to recall so quaint a concept as honor, the word captures what is at stake as the leader of a terrorist nation openly threatens to destroy another state and the free world does nothing.
Yesterday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called on the international community not to "bury its head in the sand."
"It is inconceivable that... [the president of] a member of the United Nations continues to be received throughout the world as a legitimate leader while he stands up and says that another UN member state should be wiped off the map," Olmert told a business conference. "We shall never repeat the mistakes of 60 years ago of... ignoring what was being heard then when it was still possible to save lives."
It is a measure of the dangerous state of world affairs that an Israeli leader needs to make such a statement, let alone that such a call would fall on deaf ears.
In 2000, when Austria elected a government that included the party of Joerg Haider, who had exhibited signs of neo-Nazism, the 14 other members of the European Union unanimously imposed diplomatic sanctions on Vienna. The sanctions, the first ever by the EU against a member state, including a freezing of ambassadorial and other intergovernmental contacts, and the rejection of any Austrian candidates nominated for posting in EU offices.
Then-German foreign minister Joschka Fischer explained that Europe must demonstrate that it is a "community of shared values" and distance itself from what EU parliament president Nicole Fontaine called the "insulting, anti-foreigner and racist utterances of Joerg Haider." EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana weighed in, saying that the EU had to deliver "clear signals" rejecting what Haider stood for.
The EU acted vigorously then, as was justified. It would have been wrong to allow a party whose leader flirted with neo-Nazism to rise to power without comment or reaction. But Haider and his party did not advocate a return to fascist dictatorship, nor the eradication of another state.
The Iranian regime is oppressing its own people, fomenting terrorism throughout the region, and threatening a new genocide against the Jewish people. Its leaders view Israel as an alien Western implant. Iran's threats against Israel, therefore, are nothing more or less than threats against the West as a whole.
Adolf Hitler escalated his provocations against Jews and Western democracies simultaneously and incrementally; Iran is testing the waters as well. Each ignored blow delivered to the West's honor will be duly noted and lead to the next.
Ahmadinejad's helpfully explains this. Speaking to the US and Europe at the same rally, he said, "You imposed a group of terrorists... on the region. It is in your own interest to distance yourself from these criminals... This is an ultimatum. Don't complain tomorrow... Nations will take revenge."
It is painfully obvious that if Western nations took Ahmadinejad's advice and abandoned Israel, Iran would only become more belligerent, just like Hitler did when Europeans abandoned Czechoslovakia. Neither Hitler nor Ahmadinejad cared or care about their initial target, but rather about what the limp Western reaction says about their prospects for further expanding their power through even bolder acts of aggression.
Now, in conjunction with but regardless of the need to force Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions, the nations of the world must break relations with a regime that is openly justifying Israel's destruction - a call for genocide against the Jewish people. This must be done not just for Israel's sake, but to choose honor and prevent war.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite? ... %2FPrinter
Nope. I was just trying to be as gentle as possible with an ignoramus who enjoys shooting her mouth off in order to hijack a discussion and deflect attention from serious arguments she can't understand.Lilith wrote:"I was trying to explain something to you" Pizza
Oh Pizza, aren't you wonderful. You like to explain things to people, don't you. It makes you feel so.......well.....superior, correct?
'Twas nothing more than that.
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living_stradivarius
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I understand your need to change the subject from Iran to Iraq. However, you should try to be more careful with facts; the Iraqi invasion occurred in '03. Both your history and your math need a little help.Lilith wrote:Oh, but you ignored the key question ????
"Why don't you explain why you have been so wrong for the last 4-5 years on Iraq? Now, if you could explain that, then maybe we might listen to your views on Iran."
Who other than defeatist left-wing loonies such as yourself consider the matter closed? When the fat lady sings, we'll see who is wrong and who has it right.
So much for your latest exercise in irrelevance.
You still have nothing of substance to offer on the matter of Iran? Tsk tsk!
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