Iran and Such

Rumors of an impending invasion of Iran are a wild overstatement of what the administration is considering. These rumors stem from a New Yorker article written by Seymour Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib story, that US special operations teams were scouting Iran looking for targets for a potential air strike should negotiations with the EU to close a nuclear power plant collapse. The simple truth is that we do not have the means to occupy a nation with nearly three times the land mass and population as Iraq.

In columns I wrote nearly a year ago I supported such air strikes against Iran. I argued that nations with significant military threats and minimal means of defense have no reason to negotiate away their only deterrence, weapons of mass destruction. Negotiating away even small percentages of our overwhelmingly redundant and oftentimes obsolete array of nuclear weapons can take years to complete even when the tradeoff has been fewer nuclear weapons aimed against us. Consequently, the only way you could take care of proliferation threats is to attack them in their nascent stages, the way Israel attacked Saddam’s Osirak nuclear complex in 1981.

The reason I am more reluctant today to support such a direct attack on Iran’s nuclear facility is because Iran is much more of a position to retaliate than Iraq was in 2003 or Iran was in the same year, when the degree of the nuclear threat became more lucid. Launching a military strike on Iran would be a declaration of war which would be fought both in our own cities and in Iraq. Iran holds many of the cards in Iraq and would no doubt go out of its way to provide the weapons, cash, and intelligence to insurgents. The Shi’ite city of Basra would quickly become the next Fallujah, conveniently blocking major access to the rest of Iraq from logistical bases in Kuwait.

A bigger danger is Hezbollah, the “Party of God” that was founded by the Iranians to spread the Islamic Revolution. Deputy of State Richard Armitage has been quoted as saying that it might well be that al Qaeda is the “B-team” of terrorism and Hezbollah is the “A-team.” They were in large part responsible for America’s withdrawal from Lebanon in the 1980’s, killing 241 Marines in their barracks in 1983. The consequences would be devastating were Hezbollah deployed in America.

We must approach this delicate situation with the respect that it deserves. We must abandon our view that only America and its allies have the right to a nuclear defense, though we should act vigilantly to stop proliferation. We must realize that the more we threaten, the more likely nations will want to deter. We must also accept the danger we will be putting ourselves into should we choose to launch air strikes against Iran.