Iran
The Economist held a debate earlier this week about taking military action against Iran’s nuclear program.
In favor of military action was General Chuck F. Wald, a director at Deloitte. Dr. Emily Landau, a senior research associate at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, opposed the option.
For military action
General Wald offered these forecasts:
Getting rid of Ahmadinejad or the current regime may not greatly change the trajectory of Iran’s nuclear program, as some seem to assume.
As Iran vacillates — or appears to — on the uranium stockpile deal, the opposition is accusing Ahmadinejad of giving away too much to the West.
The WaPo reports that
The strongest criticism has come from Mir Hossein Mousavi, the leading opposition presidential candidate in Iran’s June 12 election. Even though the two-term government of his political partner, former president Mohammad Khatami, tried several times to reach a compromise with the West over Iran’s nuclear program, Mousavi charged that the current proposal would lead to disaster. “The discussions in Geneva were really surprising, and if the promises given [to the West] are realized, then the hard work of thousands of scientists would be ruined.”
Iran’s approach to security is not just about Ahmadinejad, nor about “extremism.” It has structural drivers as well, and those will not change rapidly.
The US is preparing to push for new sanctions against Iran in light of its nuclear program, aiming to interfere with Iranian trade more broadly.
A comprehensive sanctions approach has more chance of success than efforts so far, and Iran might be more susceptible to pressure in the wake of the post-election political and societal divides that have opened up. But analysts note that sanctions may be weakened by Russian and Chinese resistance, and that sanctions may simply may not be enough to change Iran’s course. One problem is that Iran is fixing one vulnerability, building up its capacity to refine gasoline.
Some US politicians are talking about regime change in Iran in place of more gradual measures. Sanctions might bring this about, but the US lacks leverage, and pushing for it might delegitimize the very forces that might replace the current government. In any case, regime change would not guarantee an end to the nuclear program: support for aspects of it is widespread among Iranians, and Iran’s strategic situation will remain largely the same.
A military strike is also put forward as plausible, but most analysts see it as at best a delaying tactic. It also has severe potential downsides:
- It might well mean an angrier, more aggressive Iran, possibly more determined to pursue nuclear weapons.
- A strike might rally the populace around the regime and even around the nuclear program, reducing the impact of sanctions or regime change.
- Iran has substantial ways to retaliate against the US, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond.
- If Israel carries out an attack, it runs the risk of turning the Iranian-Israeli struggle from a cold war to a hot one, increasing the danger to Israel in the medium- and long-term, especially when Iran acquires nuclear arms anyway.
Iran may now have enough nuclear fuel “to make a rapid, if risky, sprint for a nuclear weapon,” the New York Times reported this week.
However, design work on an actual nuclear weapon may have been halted in 2003, and “it is unclear how many months — or even years — it would take Iran to complete that final design work, and then build a warhead that could fit atop its long-range missiles.” This makes the US believe it would have ample warning if Iran actually began pursuing a nuclear weapon in earnest — the Times notes that the official estimate is that Iran could have a bomb between 2010 and 2015, with later dates in that range more likely.
It also remains unclear how much effect the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran would have. NPR explored this issue late in August.
- Experts interviewed for that story suggest, as others have, that Iran is not ruled by a suicidal regime, and could likely be deterred, just as more radical regimes (such as Mao’s China) have been in the past.
- “If Iran gets the bomb, we’re going to have a period of experimentation in the beginning, where Iran is trying to figure out how much power this new capability has conferred,” says Gary Milhollin, the director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, noting that this could lead to a confrontation stemming from miscalculation.
- Mike Shuster of NPR notes: “If Iran does eventually build nuclear weapons, its deterrent is unlikely to grow beyond a handful of bombs. Iran’s own supply of natural uranium is believed to be quite small and dwindling already. Acquiring uranium from other nations could be difficult if Iran sought to keep it secret.”
Fareed Zakaria advocates doing nothing with Iran in this week’s Newsweek (”On Iran, Do Nothing. Yet,” August 3, 2009, p. 26).
In the short term, the US should not confer legitimacy on the post-election regime, and in any case has already made a serious offer of talks.
In the longer term, he suggests that passive measures — deterrence and containment — are better than active alternatives in confronting a nuclear-armed Iraq. He notes that that approach “worked against Stalin and Mao and works against North Korea, a far more unstable and bizarre regime.”
Zakaria also examines the trend others have noted: that Ahmadinejad represents not the ultimate expression of the religious regime, but its loss of power to secular and military forces. “The Islamic Republic of Iran is losing its distinctive religious basis and becoming another Middle Eastern dictatorship — except that it now hosts an opposition movement that does not seem ready to quiet down.”
It is unclear which Iranian elite is “better” from a Western perspective: the mullahs don’t have the “apocalyptic” mindset that some in the US and Israel ascribe to them, Zakaria notes, but they do have deep-seated beliefs that tend them toward anti-Western and anti-Israeli directions. Ahdmadinejad’s faction could conceivably end up more pragmatic; one of his recent disputes with the clerics was based on his appointment of a top deputy who said that Iranians were friends with everyone, “even Israelis,” contravening a central tenet of Iranian policy.
A Sunni extremist takeover of Pakistan would be an immense threat to the US and hard to counter, Bruce Reidel writes in The National Interest.
Such a takeover
would create the greatest threat the United States has yet to face in its war on terror. Pakistan as an Islamic-extremist safe haven would bolster al-Qaeda’s capabilities tenfold. The jihadist threat bred in Afghanistan would be a cakewalk in comparison. The old Afghan sanctuary was remote, landlocked and weak; a new one in Pakistan would be in the Islamic mainstream with a modern communications and transportation infrastructure linking it to the world.
“A jihadist victory is neither imminent nor inevitable, but it is now a real possibility in the foreseeable future,” he writes. It would require the Taliban expanding eastward, and teaming up with the radical group Lashkar-e-Taiba in the Punjab, assisted by harnessing the grievances of Pakistan’s vast impoverished classes.
A jihadist Suni emirate would face significant internal resistance, Reidel writes, including from Shia, who make up a fifth of the population. To counter potential opposition within the army, the new regime would likely create a parallel military force, like the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
“In the end, we would be left with an extremist-controlled Pakistan, infested with violence, an almost completely dysfunctional economy, harsh laws and even-harsher methods for imposing them, and above all a nuclear-armed nation controlled by terrorist sympathizers,” Reidel suggests.
External effects would be severe:
- Pakistan would increase its influence in Afghanistan, with some of the Pashtun areas all but incorporated into Pakistan.
- Afghanistan would be split between Pakistan-backed Pashtun and their Tajik, Uzbek, and Shia opponents backed by Russia, Iran, and the Central Asian countries.
- Iran and Pakistan would face off in Afghanistan, and support separatists movements. Iran would accelerate its nuclear program in the face of the Pakistani threat.
- India and Pakistan might easily come to blows, with anti-Indian extremists in power in Islamabad.
- Israel and Pakistan would be active adversaries, but Israel would have few options for countering the distant Asian state.
- All Muslim countries would face the prospect of a newly energized radical movement using Pakistan as a support and training base.
- The United States would lack military options, and a blockade would be difficult to carry out and hard to sustain.
(Image courtesy openDemocracy)
Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace made several forecasts for Iran in the course of an interview last week with Middle East Progress:
- “The combination of oil at $60 a barrel and heightened economic sanctions is going to be much more difficult for the Ahmadinejad government to endure, I think it’s going to require the use of very repressive means to stay in power. And again, the political and economic costs of this repression are significant over the long term.”
- ” The reality is that as long as Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and company are in power, we’re never going to reach a nuclear accord which sufficiently allays our suspicions—and Israel’s suspicions—that Iran is pursuing a weapons program.”
- “Ahmadinejad would welcome an Israeli strike in order to try and achieve the same outcome as Saddam Hussein’s 1980 invasion of Iran—namely to unite disparate political factions against a common threat and keep giddy Iranian minds busy with foreign quarrels.”
- “If Saudi Arabia—whose relations with Iran have deteriorated since Ahmadinejad became president—were to quietly increase output in order to provoke a price drop it could prove devastating to Iran, far more damaging than any sanctions that are now being deliberated.”
Events of the last three week’s have unsettled Iran’s future, and the range of potential outcomes is now broader than it was before.
Regardless of how Iranians actually voted, “Iran is a divided country now,” as one analyst put it to the New York Times, with different forces backing more starkly competing visions of the world. As a result, all of these outcomes have become more likely:
- A shift to straight authoritarianism, unleavened by the partial democracy that had characterized post-revolution Iran, with the security forces and hard-line conservatives at their core
- A rapid transition to a less authoritarian version of Iran’s religiously based governance system, an idea supported by “many prominent first-generation revolutionaries”
- An outright collapse of the theocratic system, though this might plunge Iran into civil conflict
The forces driving these futures are quite complex. These are a few factors that have emerged:
- Some grand ayatollahs have expressed sympathy with the dissenters and have not sided with supreme leader Khamenei, the Washington Post notes.
- Powerful establishment figure Rafsanjani may be abandoning opposition candidate Mousavi, Juan Cole reports.
- The Basij volunteer militia, other security forces, and even the Revolutionary Guard may be less monolithic than thought, and might balk at some kinds of repression, analyst Afshin Molavi suggests.
- An Iranian student has suggested that Ahmadinejad could be in a position to do a “Nixon-to-China,” improving relations with the US on the basis of his conservative credentials.
Though Iran appears to be headed for more years with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president, columnist Roger Cohen recently noted a potential long-term path for the nation.
Former president and powerful establishment figure Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani “believes in a China option for Iran: a historic rapprochement with the United States that will at the same time preserve a modified regime.”
This could either mean simply less militancy abroad, which would greatly reduce external pressure on the country, or a the full Chinese option: greatly reducing the trappings of Islamic theocracy while maintaining control of key aspects of power. The analogy is not precise, however, as Iran is much more democratic than China, and indeed more democratic than most states in the Middle East, US allies included.
(Flag courtesy State Dept.)
A new analysis by the Institute for Science and International Security attempts to answer that question, the Washington Post reports.
A military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities would probably only delay the country’s progress toward nuclear-weapons capability, according to a study that concludes that such an attack could backfire by strengthening Tehran’s resolve to acquire the bomb. The analysis by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security found that Iran’s uranium facilities are too widely dispersed and protected — and, in some cases, concealed too well — to be effectively destroyed by warplanes. And any damage to the country’s nuclear program could be quickly repaired.
Moreover, Albright told the Post, Iran would likely emerge more intent on acquiring nuclear weapons. He said that:
an Israeli or U.S. attack would result in broader popular support for Iran’s ruling clerics and could lead Tehran to sever ties with the U.N. nuclear watchdog. “Iran would likely launch a ‘crash’ program to quickly obtain nuclear weapons,” Albright said in an interview. “An attack would likely leave Iran angry, more nationalistic, fed up with international inspectors and nonproliferation treaties, and more determined than ever to obtain nuclear weapons.”