Published April 26th, 2006 by Future Atlas
Iran: bear-poking as strategy
Max Boot gave his advice on Iran on “All Things Considered” on NPR this evening.
He said that it was basically inevitable that Iran would end up with nuclear weapons, so the US should bomb, in hopes of delaying the process.
The logic behind this is obscure, as it would ensure that we would face an angrier, nuclear-armed Iran. As Steve Clemons writes in The Washington Note:
There are many options between war and appeasement. One of these involves a calculation of whether Iran will eventually acquire nukes if it really, really wants them. If one believes that despite the course of action Sy Hersh has written about that Iran will one day end up with nukes — then a pissed-off, hostile-to-America, democratically legitimate, nuclear weapons nation is the worst outcome.
Clemons’ point about democratic legitimacy is worth noting. Asked to identify “the biggest surprise for the United States” of a democratic Iran, Daniel Byman wrote in the June 2005 Atlantic Monthly that “A peaceful and democratic Iran would still want a nuke (though the right carrots might dissuade it from pursuing one).”
That is more hopeful than Boot’s outlook — and many suggest that pursuing such a bombing campaign would undermine the already weak opposition and block any opening for change.