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Iran’s Bomb
By Barry Gewen
Photographs of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the late Ayatollah Khomeini and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a religious music shop in Qom, Iran (Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times)
Was there any more stupid controversy during the recent presidential campaign than the debate over whether we should talk to Iran or not? Things haven’t improved much since then. Tehran’s efforts to obtain the bomb may be one of the two or three most momentous foreign policy issues Barack Obama faces as he settles into the White House. It’s certainly one of the most pressing (within a few months Iran may have enough enriched uranium to produce one bomb). Yet it’s as if a blanket of silence has fallen over Washington’s commentariate. Very few of these writers are talking about Iran. What’s going on? Is the issue just too scary for us to contemplate?
Max Rodenbeck, the Mideast correspondent for The Economist, has very usefully broken through the virtual silence with a valuable survey of new books on Iran in the Jan. 15 issue of The New York Review of Books. It’s a good place to begin if you want to know what choices are available to us.
Rodenbeck reminds us that the Obama camp has said it would be “unacceptable” for Iran to become a nuclear power, and that bombing its nuclear facilities is an option that remains “on the table.” He also explains why the mullahs seem so intent on going nuclear despite such warnings. Living in a neighborhood of nuclear powers who are actual or potential enemies — India, Pakistan, Israel, Russia — they feel isolated and threatened. The bomb offers them protection. And it enhances the prestige of their regime, “providing much-needed proof of Iran’s return to glory.” Even ordinary Iranians, Rodenbeck writes, “demand to know why their ancient and proud country should be denied atomic bombs, if such dangerous parvenus as Israel and Pakistan can have them.”
Taking issue with many hawks who draw nightmare scenarios of a nuclear Iran, Rodenbeck plays down the danger that Iran would use the weapon against Israel or the United States. The regime is aggressive, even irrational, Rodenbeck says, but it is not suicidal. In this, he is joined by the Middle East expert Kenneth M. Pollack.
Rodenbeck and Pollack have serious disagreements: see Rodenbeck’s New York Times review of Pollack’s new book, “A Path Out of the Desert,” along with Pollack’s reply. But they agree on many things too. They both advise against trying to bomb the Iranian facilities, and for basically the same reason: it wouldn’t work. Bombing won’t stop Iran from going nuclear, only delay the prospect for a few years. At the same time, as Pollack writes in his book, an unprovoked American attack “would outrage the vast majority of Iranians (and most of the world) and cause them to rally around the worst elements in the regime, cementing hard-line control of the country and potentially producing an even more paranoid and aggressive Iranian regime.”
Pollack does say that a nuclear Iran would be a more confident, more assertive Iran, which could create problems even if neither the United States or Israel is directly threatened. But he is more reassuring about a far larger concern: “the fear that Iran might give nuclear weapons to terrorists tends to receive too much attention. Iran has possessed chemical and biological weapons since the end of the Iran-Iraq War,” he says, but it has never provided them to any of the extremist groups it supports.
So should we sleep more easily?
Not at all.
Even if Iran is trying to become a nuclear power for defensive rather than offensive purposes, Rodenbeck notes that many experts “fear an accelerated arms race in the region, with powers such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt rushing to balance Iran’s strength with their own nuclear weapons.” Pollack is one of those experts. Iran could be the fatal tipping point toward uncontrolled nuclear proliferation, he suggests — and the more countries with nuclear weapons, the greater the chances that such arms will fall into the hands of terrorists. “This is purely statistical,” Pollack grimly observes.
Rodenbeck says that any attempt to prevent Iran from getting the bomb “is likely to prove futile.” And Pollack writes that “regime change in Iran is unlikely in the foreseeable future.” Both writers support talks between Tehran and Washington, but neither seems hopeful that talks would accomplish very much. That leaves sanctions, and it’s not clear that they would force a change either (though the Barack Obama adviser Dennis Ross makes a strong, or at least an impassioned, argument for them here.)
So if we can’t stop Iran from going nuclear, and we don’t have the power to change the regime, and negotiations and sanctions are likely to prove ineffectual, where does that leave us? Look in front of you. There’s a big rock in the road. Now look behind. That’s a hard place.
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