My aim in writing the column was not to soothsay but to alert readers to the seriousness of the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program — and to persuade them that the United States should do something to stop it. True, after all that has gone wrong in Iraq, Americans are scarcely eager for another preventive war to stop another rogue regime from owning yet more weapons of mass destruction that don’t currently exist. It’s easy to imagine the international uproar that would ensue in the event of U.S. air strikes. It’s also easy to imagine the havoc that might be wreaked by Iranian-sponsored terrorists in Iraq by way of retaliation. So it’s very tempting to hope for a purely diplomatic solution.
Yet the reality is that the chances of such an outcome are dwindling fast, precisely because other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are ruling out the use of force — and without the threat of force, diplomacy seldom works. Six days ago, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin went to Iran for an amicable meeting with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Putin says he sees “no evidence” that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons. On his return to Moscow, he explicitly repudiated what he called “a policy of threats, various sanctions or power politics.”
The new British prime minister, Gordon Brown, also seems less likely to support American preemption than his predecessor was in the case of Iraq. That leaves China, which remains an enigma on the Iranian question, and France, whose hawkish new president finds himself distracted by the worst kind of domestic crisis: a divorce.
By contrast, Washington’s most reliable ally in the Middle East, Israel, recently demonstrated the ease with which a modern air force can destroy a suspected nuclear facility. Not only was last month’s attack on a site in northeastern Syria carried out without Israeli losses, there was no retaliation on the part of Damascus. Memo from Ehud Olmert to George W. Bush: You can do this, and do it with impunity.
The big question of 2007 therefore remains: Will he do it?
Iran and Syria are two very different countries, with two very different leaders. Comparing one (Iran) with the other (Syria) in an effort to predict a minimal response to an attack is a very dangerous game. Syria is a largely secualr state with an extremely calculating (and rational) ruler. His options short of all out war were limited.
Iran by contrast is a quasi theocracy with an extremely fanatical contingent in both its general population and its military services. The same contrast could be made of their respective leaders. Ahmadinejad is a man widely believed to have a messianic complex and a religiosity bordering on fanaticism. One simply can not safely predict his reactions to an attack. But one should note that Iran is also geographically in a position to inflict significant damage on the west should they choose to do.
Remember Iran commands one side of the straits of Hormuz. It would be incredibly easy for Iran to close the Persian Gulf and quite difficult for us to force it open again without invading and occupying at least a piece of Iran. Just the laying of an extensive minefield could shut down the straits for months. What if Iran decided to send its army into Iraq directly? Given how strained our military is could we respond effectively without extreme measures (like reinstating a draft)?
I have never been a fan of armchair generals in general. But I think that journalists tend to make the worst ones, especially when they have an ideological bent that seems to blind them to inconvenient realities.