"A country that builds underground nuclear facilities, develops intercontinental ballistic missiles, manufactures thousands of centrifuges, and that absorbs crippling sanctions, is doing all that in order to advance…medical research.
So you see, when that Iranian ICBM is flying through the air to a location near you, you’ve got nothing to worry about. It’s only carrying medical isotopes.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then what is it?
That’s right, it’s a duck. But this duck is a nuclear duck. And it’s time the world started calling a duck a duck.
Fortunately, President Obama and most world leaders understand that the claim that Iran’s goal is not to develop nuclear weapons is simply ridiculous.
Yet incredibly, some are prepared to accept an idea only slightly less preposterous: that we should accept a world in which the Ayatollahs have atomic bombs.
Sure, they say, Iran is cruel, but it’s not crazy. It’s detestable but it’s deterrable.
My friends,
Responsible leaders should not bet the security of their countries on the belief that the world’s most dangerous regimes won’t use the world’s most dangerous weapons."
- Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, Speech to AIPAC, 5 March 2012.
There is a widespread assumption that, whatever the motives behind the Iranian nuclear program, it actually canbe stopped. This flies in the face of over sixty years of history. Moreover, it flies in the face of common sense.
Before going further, I should note that I'm making these arguments based on the presumption that Tehran is attempting to produce and test a deliverable weapon in the near future, although this is far from certain. It is just as likely - and probably more so - that it is looking for weapons capability, not unlike that of Japan.
The fact is that nukes are horrible strategic weapons if your purposes are offensive. If your strategic goal is territorial expansion, which is the case for most belligerents, nuclear weapons leave no habitable ground to occupy. Moreover, their use invites a devastating response that would utterly annihilate the country that launches them first.
More importantly, recent weapons proliferation lowers the likelihood of "nuclear blackmail." If you assume that the United States and Israel wouldn't respond to Iranian nuclear blackmail, there's no guarantee that other potential rivals of Tehran, such as Pakistan or India, would follow suit.
Nuclear capability, on the other hand, is a superior defensiveoption. Everyone thinks long and hard before launching large-scale military action against a nuclear nation, so much so that it has never actually happened.
But the fact is that no country has ever been stopped from acquiring nuclear weapons once it has been determined that their possession is their strategic interest.
Many point to the 1981 Israeli attack on Saddam Hussein's reactor at Osirak as an example of a preventative strike working, but they're wrong. At the end of the 1991 Gulf War, IAEA inspectors found that Iraq was no more than a year from a successful weapons test.
Argentina and Brazil suspended their programs due to their costs and changing strategic circumstances. The need for the South African program - which was almost certainly aided by Israel - was predicated on Apartheid. Once Apartheid disappeared, so did the potential for conflict between South Africa and its neighbours and their Soviet sponsor. But most serious analysts believe that Johannesburg maintains a nuclear capability.
We live in a world today where North Korea - whose people subsist off of tree bark and whose smart people have been dispatched to either the gulag or the grave - can obtain nuclear capability. If they can do it, pretty much anyonecan.
But Netanyahu is simply fear-mongering when he suggests that there will be an "Iranian ICBM." North Korea's program is far further along than Tehran's, and they haven't been able to launch an intercontinental vehicle that hasn't exploded on the launch pad, or shortly thereafter.
Of all of the world’s nuclear powers, only a very few have managed to develop full intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities. China – upon whose missile designs the North Koreans, Pakistanis and Iranians are believed to rely - is thought to be only capable of hitting the west coast of North America. Israel only has intermediate capability. The only country currently believed to be making progress on full ICBM capability is India.
If Netanyahu doesn’t know this, he isn’t qualified to be prime minister of a nuclear power. And if he does know it, then he shows no compunction about lying in front of the entire world.
Much has been said about the sanity of the Tehran regime. Indeed, it has been described a “suicidal death cult.” This is commonly known as an assertion without evidence. If anything. the Ayatollahs have been impressive in knowing how far to push without provoking a ruinous war, and no further. Kenneth Pollack lay this out in some detail in his 2005 book, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America.
At some point there needs to be a separation between the rhetoric of a country’s leadership – which is often designed for purely domestic political purposes – and its actions. If Iran wanted to attain paradise through the destruction of Israel, it has had the capability of doing so with chemical weapons for several decades now. More importantly, Ayatollah Khomeini was more than willing to accept delivery of Israeli (by way of the United States, although the first shipment had the Star of David on them) anti-tank weapons during the Iran-Contra affair, which coincidentally was at the height of Tehran’s anti-Israeli rhetoric and reckless adventurism.
Netanyahu, along with virtually everyone in the United States, consciously chooses to ignore the historically close relations between Israel and Iran. For a long time, Tehran under the Shah was the only Muslim capital to recognize Israel. Iran, along with Saudi Arabia, was a part of America’s “two pillars” security strategy in the Middle East, with nary a word of complaint from Jerusalem.
That, combined with the delivery of weapons during Iran-Contra, poses the very real possibility that Iran is angling for the best deal with Israel that it can arrange for itself. It should be remembered that both the Israelis and the Iranians both have good reason to fear and despise their Arab neighbours than they do one another. Islam itself was introduced into Persia at the end of an Arab spear, something that the Persians themselves aren’t ready to forget. And in the purported 2003 Foreign Ministry letter to Washington, Iran offered to recognize Israel within the 1967 borders.
It’s possible, however unproven, that Iran’s support of Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad is designed to regain the influence it lost with the fracturing of relations Israel and the U.S following the revolution. If nothing else, Israel’s humiliating 2006 war with Hezbollah demonstrated the weakness of their influence on their own border.
But let’s assume that the preceding four paragraphs are all unmitigated nonsense. The fact remains that, despite having had ample opportunities over the last thirty-three years, the Mullahs still haven’t provoked a ruinous war with the United States or Israel. It can safely be assumed that if they were to do so with a nuclear capability, it would be nothing less than apocalyptic for them.
In modern history, there has been only one nation that can properly be described as suicidal: Nazi Germany. And Germany didn’t instigate the Second World War with the idea that it would be destroyed. Hitler only embarked on national suicide after Stalingrad, when he knew the war was lost and refused to sue for peace. On the other hand, Germany’s endless atrocities in the East almost guaranteed that they would be given no quarter by the properly vengeful Soviets even if Hitler begged for it.
Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong were every bit the genocidal monsters that Adolf Hitler was, yet both developed nuclear capability. Those acquisitions were both deemed unacceptable by the United States before it determined that could accept them just fine. This is because American policymakers, beginning with George Kennan, determined that any grand ambitions those powers harbored could be contained.
The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China could have sponsored terrorism against the United States, just as they did throughout the Third World. But they didn’t because they knew that the consequences would destroy their ambitions and very possibly their chances of national survival.
That’s important to remember when you consider that international communism was once commonly described as a messianic death cult, just as Iran is today.
Moreover, it could be strongly argued that the Soviets and Chinese obtaining nuclear weapons directly led to American rapprochements with both. Washington recognized neither country for decades after their respective revolutions. After they attained nuclear capability and war was no longer an option, both developed much better relations with the United States than was possible before.
As it happens, not everyone is Hitler. In the last twenty-five years, dime-store thugs like Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein have been compared to Hitler. There is hardly a country in the Middle East that the Israeli leadership hasn’t equated with Nazi Germany. What no one seems able to understand is that when everyone becomes Hitler, Hitler loses all historical relevance. It strikes me as the height of perversity that Israel and those that declare their love for it would minimize Hitler and his apocalyptic impact on the Jewish people in such a way. Hitler remains such a frightening lesson for humanity precisely because of how monstrously unique he was.
More importantly, when any security challenge is presented as a confrontation with a reinvigorated Nazism, the only reasonable conclusion is that nothing short of an Armageddon is acceptable in defeating it. Nazi Germany was not to be denied until Nazi Germany was physically destroyed and over half its people condemned to bolshevism. Say what you will about even the most fervent believers in the Twelfth Imam, but even they haven’t culturally romanticized the concept of their doom the way the German people did Gotterdammerung well before the rise of the Third Reich.
Even if the Iranians are the living embodiment of Nazi theology in the world today, there is still no reason to believe that they cannot be contained.
Firstly, there is nothing in their 4,000 year history – nor in their 33 year post-revolutionary history – that suggests that they’re inclined toward national suicide. And they have had no shortage of opportunities. They could have passed chemical or biological weapons to terrorists for use against Israel or the United States, and they could have done so well before September 11, 2001.
The idea that any state would pass WMD to terrorist elements in the absence of severe provocation is silly beyond words. Given that they are motivated by religion or ideology more than states are, terrorists are difficult to control at the best of times.
Then there’s the matter of blowback. As I write this, serious WMDs are only capable of being produced by states. As soon as once is unleashed, it is only a matter of time before it traced back to the state that produced it. And that state can face furious retribution, if not complete annihilation.
The only way that any state, even the most irrational of actors, would pass along a weapon like that is if it was already facing foreign invasion with the objective of regime change. At that point, it would have nothing to lose and could at least get retribution from beyond the grave.
If anything, Iran is far more temperamentally conservative today than it was thirty years ago, when the regime was assassinating its opposition in Europe, particularly France, without any consideration for the consequences. But Paris reached an accommodation with the mullahs and the havoc stopped, which suggests that it’s a rational actor.
Secondly, the regime is fighting a losing battle from within. At the time of the 1979 revolution, the Iranian population was older and more rural than it is today. The repression of the Shah and SAVAK, particularly in the countryside, fed much of the energy behind it.
As we saw in the 2009 Green Movement, the population is younger, more cosmopolitan and more open to Western ideals. They’re also frustrated with the stagnant economy (prior to recent international sanctions) and the growing influence of “state capitalism” by the Revolutionary Guards Corps.
The demographics suggest that the hardliner Mullahs are not long for this world. That is unless there is some kind of foreign intervention that unites the Iranian people against the outside world.
In this, Iranians and Israelis are not dissimilar. Israel conducts policy the way it does because the outside world ignored the plight of the Jews before the Jewish state was established. Iran is xenophobic because foreign powers, from the Mongols, to the Arabs, to the British, Soviets and Americans imposed their will upon their national aspirations at every available opportunity.
A containment policy – which the Obama administration has inexplicably abandoned before it has even been tried – would allow the regime to implode, just as the Soviet Union’s did.
But intervention will retard that demographic revolution, probably by decades. The Iranian people may increasingly hate the mullahs, but they remain haunted by the ghost of Mohammad Moseddegh. In ways that most countries haven’t, Iran has already seen its internal progress stymied by foreigners. And the likelihood that they want to see it again is approximately close to zero.
Given the current confluence of events, the West is heading towards a war with Iran. The results of that war are going to as disastrous as they are predictable.
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