Unthinkable (39 page)

Some have argued that even if the Iranians were to rebuild, the United States could just attack again. This idea strikes me as infeasible and improbable. The only time that the United States has been willing to do something like that was against Iraq in the 1990s, when we repeatedly struck Iraqi targets to enforce compliance with the UN resolutions and no-fly zones. Within a few years (probably by 1996 and unquestionably by 1998), however, the international community had tired of these constant strikes and turned against them. Once that happened, even our most enthusiastic Arab allies found it increasingly difficult to support such operations.

In every other conflict—in Iraq in 1991, in Kosovo in 1999, and again in Iraq in 2003—when air strikes alone could not do the job and the adversary resumed its course, the United States felt it had no choice but to escalate to a ground invasion (one that fortunately proved unnecessary in the end in Bosnia and Kosovo). It is understandable that Washington would act this way. The president of the United States cannot be seen as clinging to ineffectual military operations. If airpower does not eliminate the Iranian nuclear program for all time the first time, the president will face tremendous pressure to escalate to a much greater level of force to get the job done. When the American people are roused to war, they want to see it won as quickly as possible to minimize casualties and other costs, and so that they can go back to peace. Repeatedly going to war with Iran is something that the United States simply cannot sustain.

The best way to build international support for an air campaign is old-fashioned diplomacy.

The two Bush administrations together furnish us with everything
we need to understand how to build diplomatic support for a war with a Middle Eastern state believed to be trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction. The Bush 41 administration did everything right in fashioning a coalition to evict Saddam from Kuwait in 1991. The Bush 43 administration did everything wrong in its rush to topple Saddam from power in 2003. Between what the Bush 41 administration did and what the Bush 43 administration did not do, we have an excellent blueprint for how to secure international support for a war against Iran. The most important lessons include:

1. 
Take your time
. Going slow is important to demonstrate that the United States is not rushing to war. The United States does not have forever. It would have to attack before Iran acquired a workable nuclear weapon—not just adequate fissile material, a canard that gets bandied about. However, even the worst-case estimates indicate that the United States has at least one to three years before Iran would be able to do so from a decision to start—a decision that has not been given, as best we can tell. If these estimates are inaccurate or the Iranians stick with a breakout capability, as many expect, Washington will have even more time. Using that time for diplomacy would be vital to demonstrate that the United States had exhausted all the alternatives and given Iran every opportunity to solve the impasse.

2. 
Make Iran a great offer
. If the United States is going to convince other countries to support a military operation, it will have to convince them that it was willing to take “yes” for an answer and the Iranian regime wasn't. That would mean putting a deal on the table that the entire international community would see as a great deal for Iran if it were only seeking nuclear energy, and so other countries would also see no reason for Iran not to accept it. Dennis Ross, President Obama's former chief Iran advisor, and Iran expert Patrick Clawson—with whom I agree on almost nothing—have both made this suggestion, and they are right that it is necessary to do so to build international support before the United States could even consider military operations.
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3. 
Enlist others to help improve the offer and help convince Iran to accept it
. Russia and China, Turkey and Brazil, India and others all need to be a part of the process. The United States should ask them to help fashion the deal, take their advice, and encourage them to speak to the Iranians. Once the deal has been crafted, these same countries need to be encouraged to convince Iran to accept it, and be given the time to do so. They can't take forever, but the time limits would need to be measured in months, not weeks, let alone days. Everyone must believe that the United States gave peace every chance and turned to war only when there was no other choice.

4. 
Go all the way
. Any offer to Iran cannot give the Iranians everything they want. However, the United States can and should go much further than it has. The United States needs to give the Iranians what they want related to civilian nuclear power (and throw in some incentives to make it easier to build nuclear power plants), to be ready to accept limited Iranian enrichment, and to prepare to rely on inspections and monitoring to prevent an Iranian breakout.

AN ULTIMATUM, NOT A NEGOTIATION.
A critical difference between this approach and what we have done so far is that if the United States decided that it was ready to go to war, it should handle the negotiations with Iran differently from the past. In the talks so far, the United States has assumed that there would be a protracted negotiation between Tehran and the P-5+1, and the United States would be expected to make gradual concessions in return for the same. Consequently, the United States has resisted making any major concessions up front for fear that Tehran would “pocket” them and demand additional compromises during the negotiations. This concern was reasonable, but has proven self-defeating. The United States has been willing to put so little on the table that the Iranians have seen no point even in negotiating seriously. If the United States is ready to go to war with Iran, the talks need to be conducted in a wholly different manner: the offer needs to be an ultimatum, not a bargaining position.

However, for the United States to deliver an ultimatum to Iran that would be accepted as a legitimate casus belli by other countries, that ultimatum will have to pass their muster. The Russians and Chinese in particular will not support a war against Iran if the ultimatum presented to Iran does not appear reasonable to them.

TWO CONUNDRUMS.
If four paradoxes would confound an Israeli strike, building the diplomatic support for an American strike faces two conundrums of its own. To gain international support, the United States would have to present Iran with an ultimatum that Russia, China, Brazil, India, and other major countries who oppose war with Iran would see as “acceptable” to Iran. However, at least some of those countries (starting with Russia) so oppose a war with Iran that they will probably declare unacceptable any offer the United States makes in the form of an ultimatum, to try to deny Washington international legitimacy for a strike.

This problem is daunting, but it may not be insurmountable. The United States should be able to work with other countries such as China, India, and Turkey to craft a proposal that should meet Iran's legitimate needs. If Russia continues to object, it could block action in the Security Council, but would not necessarily deny the operation informal international legitimacy. During the conflict in Kosovo, the Russians similarly opposed a war against Serbia so vehemently that they blocked all action in the Security Council, but the United States and its allies handled themselves so well (and Milosevic so badly) that NATO garnered widespread support for the operation even without a UN Security Council resolution.

The second conundrum for the United States is that Iran might accept the terms of an ultimatum, and if they did so, the United States would have to accept it as well and call off the war. An ultimatum to Iran should look something much like the deal proposed in chapter 6, as the ultimate goal of a carrot-and-stick approach: Iran would be allowed to have civilian nuclear power, would be allowed to enrich uranium up to 5 percent purity, would be allowed a limited number of centrifuge plants and centrifuges, and would be allowed to have a small stockpile of LEU, in return
for forswearing any enrichment and stockpiles beyond that, and accepting intrusive and comprehensive monitoring and inspections.

As was the case with the carrot-and-stick approach, whether one is willing to accept that deal determines whether this is a problem or not. For someone like me, who is willing to accept containment over war, this situation is win-win: Iran accepts a deal that would curtail its nuclear activities as well as forcing it to accept intrusive inspections
and
the United States does not have to go to war. However, many who favor air strikes do so because they would not accept such a deal. Either they believe that Iran would cheat and get away with it, like North Korea, or they do not want to leave Iran with even a latent, long-term breakout capability. For them, air strikes are preferable to a deal. But the problem is that the only way to get international support that could make air strikes successful comes at the cost of having to accept such a deal if the Iranians will.

I do not see a good way around this second conundrum. If the United States does not offer Iran a reasonable ultimatum, it will not have international support for war. Instead, we will face the same kind of situation as in 2003. Like then, it won't matter much for the opening act, the takedown, but it could prove fatal in the crucial succeeding acts, the follow-through. As has often been our mistake, the United States might win the “war” and lose the “peace,” and the latter matters far more than the former.
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DOMESTIC SUPPORT.
Another challenge for an American president seeking to employ air strikes against the Iranian nuclear program will be generating domestic support here in America. So far, the American people have shown little eagerness for military operations against Iran. President Obama and his political advisors made their perception of American war-weariness a critical theme of the president's 2008 and 2012 electoral campaigns, and one of the few remarks in the president's second inaugural address related to foreign policy was Obama's pronouncement, “A decade of war is now ending.”
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Polls of the American public have demonstrated a schizophrenic reaction
to war with Iran. Polls that ask a simple binary question—some version of “If Iran is close to developing a nuclear weapon, should the United States use force against it?”—have typically shown results that have varied from a strong majority in favor of war to a strong majority opposed. A March 2012 survey conducted by Reuters-IPSOS found that respondents favored a military strike against Iran 56 to 39 percent if Iran were developing nuclear weapons.
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The Foreign Policy Institute's 2012 National Survey, conducted in September 2012, showed 62 percent of respondents favored military action to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons against only 23 percent who opposed it.
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A Fox News survey from October 2012 concluded that 63 percent of Americans supported the United States taking military action to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons, and only 27 percent opposed it.
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In contrast, the 2012 Chicago Council on Global Affairs annual survey found that Americans opposed even a UN-sanctioned attack on Iran by 51 to 45 percent, while 70 percent of respondents opposed a unilateral American attack on Iran's nuclear program.
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In October 2012, a CBS News/
New York Times
poll found that only 20 percent of Americans felt that Iran was “a threat to the United States that requires military action now,” compared with 55 percent who felt that it could be contained by diplomacy now, and another 16 percent who felt that it was not a threat at all.
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However, whenever Americans have been asked to choose among a variety of ways that the United States could respond to Iran nearing the acquisition of a nuclear weapon, only a small minority favor the use of force, while a much larger majority oppose it. Only 17 percent of respondents to a January 2012 survey by the Princeton Survey Research Associates International backed an air campaign against Iran's nuclear sites if sanctions proved inadequate. This number compared to 47 percent who supported increased sanctions and 13 percent who favored more aggressive covert action.
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Likewise, a February 2012 NBC News/
Wall Street Journal
poll asked respondents how the United States should respond if Iran's nuclear program got “close to developing a nuclear weapon.” Only 21 percent felt that the United States should “take direct military action,”
compared to 75 percent who opposed direct military action, although some of these favored other courses of action (supporting an Israeli strike, or more diplomatic and economic actions).
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A CNN/ORC International poll from the same period found that only 17 percent of Americans wanted the United States to use force against Iran to “shut down” its nuclear program, with 60 percent arguing that diplomatic or economic action was the right response, and 22 percent saying no action should be taken at that time.
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This mixed bag suggests that while a determined president could mobilize the American people to act against Iran if he were determined to do so, he might find that support fragile. The Bush 41 administration concluded that it was critical to demonstrate strong international support for evicting Saddam's army from Kuwait to build domestic support for the Gulf War. So too might a president need to show the American people that much of the world agreed with us and was ready to help us in a fight with Iran, to gain the kind of domestic political support that he or she would undoubtedly want before launching military operations against Iran. And it is always important to keep in mind that in March 2003 most Americans backed the invasion of Iraq.

It isn't inevitable that Iran would lash out in response to an American air campaign, but no American president should assume that it would not. Iran hasn't always retaliated for American attacks against it. After the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 in December 1988, many believed that this act of terror was Iranian retaliation for the shooting down of Iran Air Flight 455 by the American cruiser USS
Vincennes
in July of that year. All of the evidence now points to Libya as the culprit, which if true would suggest that Iran never did retaliate for its loss. Nor did Iran retaliate for America's Operation Praying Mantis in 1988, which resulted in the sinking of a number of Iran's major warships. It is possible that Iran would simply choose to play the victim if attacked by the United States,
assuming that this gambit would win the clerical regime international sympathy. Iran might decide that withdrawing from the NPT, evicting the inspectors, and rebuilding its nuclear program would be retaliation enough.