Friday, December 10, 2004
This James Fallows article is a fascinating look at the options for Iran by way of a wargame held with some very knowledgeable people - David Kay, Ken Pollack, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Sam Gardiner and others - playing various roles. The outcome of their game does not draw a very sanguine picture for a military option in Iran. I offer it as an important data-point.
One option they never seem to discuss is the feasibility of covert, regime-destabilizing action - like that which toppled Mossadeq all those years ago and which many Iranians seem to be open to, now. I suppose the answer is implicit in the finding that too-bold moves against Iran may be reciprocated and thus the options are muted even for bold covert activity. Pollack particularly (not just here, but when I saw him interviewed elsewhere on the subject) seems to feel that the Iranians could be making things much worse for us in Iran, and that so far they have been keeping things fairly stable. Is that right? I have no way of knowing. I know the Iraqis chastised Iran yet again for interfering and causing trouble - but there's interfering and there's interfering. I'm going to avoid being one of those bloggers who makes pat statements about subjects he can't possibly be expert at.
Sadly, The Atlantic requires a subscription to read it all - or even a significant portion - but perhaps a little Googling can come up with somewhere it is posted in full, or perhaps they will make it available at some future point. I've quoted just a touch here.
The Atlantic Online | December 2004 | Will Iran Be Next? by James Fallows
Kay agreed. "They may decide that a bloody defeat for the United States, even if it means chaos in Iraq, is something they actually would prefer. Iranians are a terribly strategic political culture … They might well accelerate their destabilization operation, in the belief that their best reply to us is to ensure that we have to go to helicopters and evacuate the Green Zone."
More views were heard—Gerecht commented, for example, on the impossibility of knowing the real intentions of the Iranian government—before Gardiner called a halt to this first phase of the exercise. He asked for a vote on one specific recommendation to the President: Should the United States encourage or discourage Israel in its threat to strike? The Secretary of Defense, the DCI, the White House chief of staff, and Secretary of State Pollack urged strong pressure on Israel to back off. "The threat of Israeli military action both harms us and harms our ability to get others to take courses of action that might indeed affect the Iranians," Kay said. "Every time a European hears that the Israelis are planning an Osirak-type action, it makes it harder to get their cooperation." Secretary of State Gerecht thought a successful attack was probably beyond Israel's technical capability, but that the United States should not publicly criticize or disagree with its best ally in the Middle East...
In a more perfect world, I would sorely love to re-play this war-game with the assumption that Iraq had never been invaded - status-quo say three years ago - then see where their conclusions take them. Even better, I'd like to take them back in time and erase the lessons of Iraq. There's a lot of implicit blaming of difficulty on the invasion of Iraq here (I may be inferring more than there is, though.), and I'm not sure the picture would look any better were Saddam still around. In fact, I think it would be a lot worse, with even fewer options available and far fewer lessons learned.
I read the Atlantic piece you cited over Thanksgiving, I think, and I've just started Kenneth Pollack's book in Iran, The Persian Puzzle. Both are extremely interesting.
It seems to me that an invasion of Iran was never a meaningful option -- surely not over the prospect of Tehran obtaining nuclear weapons. It is too big, it is has mountains on every border that is not the sea, and it has a lot of people who are clearly willini to sustain massive casualties to deal with invaders. See the Iranian response to the Iran-Iraq war. If, however, some for of military coercion is part of the opportunity set, it seems to me that the Iraq war probably puts us in a better position over the long run. Sure, today we need to fear Iranian subversion among the Shiites in Iraq, but if things end up going reasonably well there over the next few years from the standpoint of our interests, as I still think they will, we will have put our soldiers on every border with Iran. That will raise the credibility of threats we might make.
The better question is the extent to which we need to fear an Iranian nuclear weapon. In Saddam's case, the prospect of a nuke was intolerable if for no other reason than that had a long track record of crazy irrationality in his foreign policy. Even his final response to Hans Blix revealed that Saddam was just bad at making critical foreign policy decisions. The mullahs, on the other hand, may be radical but they are not insane. They are playing a very deep and successful foreign policy game, even if it is a bit paranoid. As radical as this may sound, they are almost certainly more "trustworthy" with nukes than Saddam.
God, I hope I'm right...
I'm with you on pretty much all of that. I think when you go back and weigh the options of the "next step" after Afghanistan, Iraq was still the logical choice - given and A, B, C between Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia (Want to trigger a real war against Islam? Invade there first.)
I'm probably going to pick up the Pollack book. His "Threatening Storm" was indispensible. (And, as an aside, I think he's been a bit overly critical of the Administration in a partisan manner since the invasion.)
I really do worry about the nukes in Iranian hands. One thing we do know - they *are* a terror nexus.
Faster please!