"The central flaw of American foreign policy these last few years has been the triumph of hope, wishful thinking, and self-delusion over realism and practicality. Realism about Iran starts with throwing out any plans to bomb." - James Fallows
Neil of The Blue Voice team just sent me a link to this article: The Nuclear Power Beside Iraq by James Fallows Atlantic Monthly May 2006. He recalls a set of "war game" scenarios for Iran that the magazine presented in 2004 that indicated that there were no good military options for the United States in countering Iran's nuclear program, whatever its real aims are. Revisiting the question now, he writes:
That was the situation nearly two years ago. Everything that has changed since then increases the pressure on the United States to choose the "military option" of a pre-emptive strike—and makes that option more ruinously self-defeating.
The biggest change has been in what Soviet strategists used to call the "correlation of forces." Every tool at Iran’s disposal is now more powerful, and every complication for the United States worse, than when our war-gamers determined that a pre-emptive strike could not succeed. Iran has used the passing time to disperse, diversify, conceal, and protect its nuclear centers. Instead of a dozen or so potential sites that would have to be destroyed, it now has at least twice that many. The Shiite dominance of Iraq’s new government and military has consolidated, and the ties between the Shiites of Iran and those of Iraq have grown more intense. Early this year, the Iraqi Shiite warlord Muqtada al-Sadr suggested that he would turn his Mahdi Army against Americans if they attacked Iran.
I'm not sure why he tags "correlation of forces" as a Soviet term in particular. It seems like a perfectly good term to me, and this kind of context is the right place to use it. Vocablulary trivia aside, his brief article is a good reminder of what a reckless move it would be for the US to attack Iran right now. He doesn't address the justice or legality of such an act in this particular article.
There seems to be a lot of wondering aloud lately about whether the lastest war talk is a bluff:
Perhaps the American and Israeli hard-liners know all this, and are merely bluffing. If so, they have made an elementary strategic error. The target of their bluff is the Iranian government, and the most effective warnings would be discreet and back-channel. Iranian intelligence should be picking up secret signals that the United States is planning an attack. By giving public warnings, the United States and Israel "create 'excess demand' for military action," as our war-game leader Sam Gardiner recently put it, and constrain their own negotiating choices. The inconvenient truth of American foreign policy is that the last five years have left us with a series of choices - and all of them are bad.
Although his caution is sensible as far as military action goes, Fallows does seem to accept some pieces of the conventional wisdom about the alleged Iranian threat with perhaps insufficient skepticism. For instance:
A year and a half ago, Iran’s nuclear ambition constituted a threat but not yet a world crisis. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had not yet been elected president of the country, nor begun his declarations that the Holocaust never occurred and that modern Israel must be "wiped from the map."
As I've mentioned here before, I don't speak Farsi. But Juan Cole does. And he's a serious and careful guy about these sorts of things. So it means something that he thinks Ahmadinejad's wiping-Israel-off-the-map statement that has become part of the standard script on Iran was actually a bad translation. See his Fishing for a Pretext to Squeeze Iran Truthdig.com 03/13/06. Fallows also writes:
About Iran's intention to build a bomb, there is no serious disagreement among Russia, China, France, and the United States. Iran has dropped its pretense of benign intent. It refused the compromise that Russia formally proposed late in 2005 (though a new round of negotiations was announced early in March).
I'm assuming that Iran is at least trying to keep it's options on nuclear weapons open.
But it doesn't seem accurate to mean to say that "Iran has dropped its pretense of benign intent". Iran has declared its intention to proceed to develop the capacity to enrich uranium, which could be used for a weapons program. But as far as I'm aware, they are still saying that they do not intend to violate the terms of the Nonproliferation Treaty. Cole in the article just linked also quotes a number of policy statements by Iranian officials denying the intent to acquire nuclear weapons. Now, countries certainly lie about things like this. But so far as I'm aware, Iran still does maintain at least a "pretense of benign intent".
