“The stupidest thing I have ever heard.”– Meir Dagan, former head of Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, on attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Stupid it may be, but it’s also the hottest trend since the iPhone. Defense
Secretary Leon Panetta said last year that if Iran proceeds toward acquiring
a nuclear arsenal, “we will take whatever steps are necessary to stop it.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the same thing.
The Republican presidential candidates (except Ron Paul) strain to outdo
each other in bellicose rhetoric. Mitt Romney says, “If you elect me as
president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.” Newt Gingrich promises,
“Iran is not going to get a nuclear weapon.” Rick Santorum is prepared to
bomb Iranian nuclear sites.
The United States and Israel are keeping their powder dry, but that could
change anytime. A report in The Washington Post said, “Panetta believes
there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or
June.”
The prevailing wisdom among policymakers, in short, bears an eerie
resemblance to the Iraq consensus of 2002. We and the Israelis allegedly
faced an intolerable peril from a rogue state with weapons of mass
destruction and a lust for aggression. Fortunately, we were told, it was
nothing that a short, sudden military attack wouldn’t solve.
But in Iraq, it turned out the solution was anything but quick or easy –
and the danger was vastly exaggerated. And in Iran? Ditto.
“The working assumption that it is possible to totally halt the Iranian
nuclear project by means of a military attack is incorrect,” Dagan recently
told The New York Times. “There is no such military capability. It is
possible to cause a delay, but even that would only be for a limited period
of time.” Another prominent Mossad veteran, Rafi Eitan, said an attack would
delay Iran’s nuclear program “not even three months.”
Americans may be led to assume we will pay no price. But Iran has
innumerable options for “asymmetric” retaliation: attacking our ships in the
Persian Gulf, sponsoring terrorism in Afghanistan or the United States and
ordering its Lebanese Hezbollah ally to rain rockets on Israel. We may find
that fighting a war with Iran is like making love to a gorilla: You don’t
stop when you’re done; you stop when the gorilla is done.
Why is everyone so eager to plunge into another war? Because of another
false fear: that a nuclear-armed Iran will use its new arsenal to obliterate
the Jewish state or bully its neighbors.
This panic requires a total disregard for everything we have learned during
the nuclear age. Since World War II, assorted enemies and rivals have
acquired nuclear stockpiles: the Soviet Union, China, Pakistan and North
Korea. All of them have learned that they are useless as offensive weapons
against other nuclear states and their allies.
The reason is simple: Any nation that carries out a nuclear attack assures
itself of cataclysmic retaliation. You can’t win a nuclear war. You can only
lose one.
Alarmists claim the past is irrelevant because the mullahs in Tehran are an
entirely different enemy: willing to accept national annihilation for the
brief pleasure of erasing Israel. But if the Iranians were bent on mass
martyrdom, they could have found a simpler way.
The incineration of Israel could be done with conventional weapons –
remember what the U.S. did to Dresden and Tokyo? — which are far easier to
acquire in bulk than nukes. For some reason, Iran has passed on this option.
China was equally terrifying back when it was developing nuclear weapons.
The dictator Mao Zedong declared, “We are prepared to sacrifice 300 million
Chinese for the victory of the world revolution.” President John F. Kennedy,
however, wisely rejected a pre-emptive attack.
North Korea provoked intense anxiety when it built the bomb. But in the
ensuing years, it has been no more or less intractable or belligerent than
before.
Alarmists insist that an Iranian bomb would set off a regional arms race,
with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey hastening to get their own. But they
already face a worrisome neighbor with a nuclear arsenal: Israel. None has
seen the need for a comparable deterrent.
The world has seen the rise of one nuclear state after another without the
outbreak of nuclear war or nuclear blackmail. Yet this one, we are told,
will change the world in ways we cannot tolerate. We’ve heard that warning
before. It’s still wrong.
By Steve Chapman
