Questioning Iran's Nuclear Assumptions

By H.D.S. GREENWAY
Published: October 5, 2009
Courtesy Of The New York Times

“Confront Tehran now,” demands Paul Wolfowitz. “There are only two choices left on Iran,” warns the former State Department counselor Eliot Cohen. Opinion pages are shouting the alarm. And it’s not only voices from the black lagoon of the Bush-Cheney era. We seem to be painting ourselves into a corner of worst-case scenarios when it comes to Iran.

I would like to see some of the assumptions questioned more thoroughly. Why would a nuclear Iran necessarily set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East? The conventional wisdom is that the Sunni Arab powers fear the power of Shiite Persia, and would immediately reach for their own bomb should Iran produce one.

But Israel’s Arab neighbors did not rush to get their own bomb when Israel was building up a nuclear arsenal.

It’s because the Arabs don’t fear Israel, I am told. That was not always so. In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when it looked for a moment as if the Syrians and Egyptians might overrun Israel’s defenses, trundling out the bomb was actively discussed in Jerusalem.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has hinted at extending a U.S. nuclear umbrella over America’s Middle East allies, much in the way we do with Japan. Wouldn’t that tend to dampen an Arab rush for weapons of mass destruction to counter Iran?

Toward the end of his life, Israel’s old hero, the one-eyed Moshe Dayan, told me that he didn’t know why Israel kept the pretense of its mantra — “Israel will not be the first country in the Middle East to introduce nuclear weapons.” It had already introduced nuclear weapons, and it would be better to say, according to Dayan, we are ready to meet you on the field of battle “with so many tanks and planes,” but if we are about to lose the state we will go nuclear.

I thought at the time that everybody in the Middle East knew that, so it wasn’t necessary to announce it, which leads me to my second point.

Why is it assumed that Iran would not be deterred by Israel’s nuclear strength? The answer I most often hear is that Iranians are fanatics and wouldn’t hesitate to commit national suicide if they could get at Israel’s throat.

There is no evidence that Iran is anything other than a very calculating and rational society. Deterrence worked against the Soviet Union. Only a wild fringe advocated a pre-emptive attack on Russia during the Cold War.

And why do we think Iran would give a bomb to terrorists if it had one? Nations sometimes use terrorists for their purposes, albeit they call them freedom fighters. But why would Iran give Hezbollah an atomic bomb anymore than the United States would have similarly armed the Contras in Nicaragua? Such groups are too undisciplined.

I agree with both Wolfowitz and Cohen that sanctions are not going to dissuade Iran from having a bomb. Iran, with American armies on its eastern and western frontiers, with no friends and constantly threatened, thinks it needs at least the “breakout” ability to make one. As Zulfikar Ali Bhutto once said of Pakistan, his people would “eat grass” rather than remain exposed without a nuclear weapon. When you come down to it, Pakistan’s bomb is probably more worrisome and in danger of falling into terrorist hands than anything Iran is likely to produce.

There is still a chance that we could persuade Iran that it is in Tehran’s interest not to put in the last wire — to complete a weapon. We cannot prevent Iran from having bomb-making knowledge, as George W. Bush promised to do. And the revelation of a new nuclear site in an Iranian mountain only illustrates the hopelessness of trying to bomb them out of a nuclear weapon.

Only by engaging with Iran as a country, not just as a nuclear proliferation problem; by recognizing and addressing Iran’s concerns, and identifying where we can agree, as in Afghanistan, is there hope for success, and that won’t be easy.

Iran is a country in transition, with popular forces challenging the old orthodoxies. Regime change will come when Iranians reach that conclusion, and our trying to actively hasten it can only delay it.