Unthinkable (61 page)

In addition, I hope you recognize how ultimately subjective so many of these statements are, and how hard it is to ascribe any real precision to their likelihood. There are simply too many unknowns at work here to be able to say much with real confidence. The best we can do, as I have tried throughout this book, is to lay out the evidence from Iranian and international history relevant to each of these issues, the deductive logic behind each, and how other, similar states have behaved in similar circumstances. That is not terrible, and it is certainly the best we are going to be able to do, but is a far cry from certainty.

Now let me explain how I get to where I get to.

AIR STRIKES.
My starting point is a simple one. I have a great deal of concern about air strikes. I am an old military analyst, and this operation
rubs me the wrong way. I am certainly no shrinking violet. I am no pacifist. I believe that force can advance our national interests and should be employed when necessary. I supported a war against Saddam, albeit not the one that the Bush 43 administration waged. I was among the first to argue that the United States had to shift to a true counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, and supported the “surge” there when the Bush administration finally came around to this realization.
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I am also a firm believer that airpower can do some remarkable things, including on its own. I supported the U.S. strategy in Operation Enduring Freedom against Afghanistan—and said so in print. I also supported Operation Desert Fox, and said so in print. In fact, I wanted it to go on longer and go after more of Saddam's security apparatus. Nevertheless, I get very nervous when people start telling me that a limited air campaign can solve all of our problems. That is something that has been promised repeatedly throughout history and has almost never proven close to being true.

Still, my thinking about air strikes has changed over the years. I once saw a great many risks inherent in the air strike option that have since faded. The American effort to secure and rebuild Iraq was probably the biggest of those. At one time, it was too important and too vulnerable to Iranian retaliation to risk. Today, for good or ill, it is gone and therefore cannot be a reason to oppose an air campaign. Similarly, although I am hardly 100 percent confident that we know where all of Iran's nuclear sites are, I have a lot more confidence than I did ten years ago. The intelligence services of the United States and other countries have been going over Iran with a fine-tooth comb and the discoveries of Natanz, Arak, and Fordow suggest that they have learned something from their past mistakes. I may not be 100 percent confident, but I am more comfortable than I once was.

Yet each time I work through the air strikes option, I cannot get it to work out right. As you have read, I am concerned that air strikes will prove to be nothing more than a prelude to invasion, as they were in Iraq and almost were in Kosovo. I note that even Matt Kroenig, a passionate
advocate of air strikes, shares my fears, writing, “In the midst of such spiraling violence, neither side may see a clear path out of the battle, resulting in a long-lasting, devastating war, whose impact may critically damage the United States' standing in the Muslim world.” I find I concur with the way that Tom Donnelly, Dany Pletka, and Maseh Zarif, three people normally found on the rightward side of the political aisle, put it in their analysis of the problems of containment: “We agree that escalated confrontation with Iran—and there is undeniably, a low-level war already being waged by Iranian operatives or proxies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere—would throw an already volatile region into chaos, perhaps spread and involve other great powers, and place a heavy burden on over-stretched American forces and finances. The costs of war are all too obvious and painfully familiar.”
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I fear that Iranian retaliation will prove more than we are willing to bear or that Iran will choose to reconstitute its nuclear program—and will do so as a weapons program, without the constraints of the NPT. Both seem like quite high likelihoods based on past Iranian practice, Iranian public and private statements, and the behavior of other, similar regimes under similar circumstances. If either proves to be the case, let alone both, I think it will be difficult for the president to avoid shifting to an invasion. I was there, in the room in 1999 when the Clinton NSC reached the conclusion that the NATO air campaign was not accomplishing its mission and therefore the United States would have to invade Kosovo if Milosevic did not back down before the ground force was deployed and ready. It was a grim moment.

If the United States attacked Iran to destroy its nuclear sites and the Iranians retaliated in ways we found too painful to bear, or they stood up from the rubble, brushed off the dust, and vowed to rebuild and this time to get a bomb—the fatwa be damned—I do not believe the president, any president, could just stop. The president would have to defend the American people and the American homeland against attack, retaliatory or otherwise. Likewise, if the president commits the nation to war to defend against
what he will have to say is a grave threat to our vital national interests, he is going to have to finish the job with ground troops if air strikes alone fail to get it done.

CONTAINMENT.
As with air strikes, I start with the history. My reading of history is that nuclear deterrence works. Certainly, it has never failed—at least not yet. I am persuaded that the logic of nuclear deterrence is so simple and dramatic that it is compelling and the vast majority of people will be swayed by it. However, I do not think that nuclear deterrence is easy, perfect, or self-sustaining. While I have no idea just how close the world came to a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Kargil War, I don't particularly like taking any steps in that direction.

Similarly, my reading of the history of the containment of Iran is that it has worked quite well. Amid our fourth decade of containment, Iran is weak, isolated, internally divided, and externally embattled. It stirs trouble in the region as best it can, but it is no threat to the territorial integrity of any other country and its unconventional warfare campaigns have tended to be lethal nuisances far more than they have contributed to meaningful shifts in the balance of power—or even threatened the leadership of key states. Although they keep trying and someday might succeed, Iran has never overthrown the government of an American ally. Likewise, it has exacerbated a lot of regional conflicts but never caused one. In short, my reading of the history is that both nuclear deterrence and containment of Iran are powerful concepts that have proven themselves reliable over time.

Nevertheless, I recognize the dangers of both, and am concerned about how Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons could change the dynamics that produced both of those historical patterns of success: nuclear deterrence and containment of Iran. The problems that loom largest to me are the potential for nuclear crises, especially in the early years after Iran acquires a nuclear weapon but has not yet learned the rules of the nuclear road; the potential for proliferation, particularly by Saudi Arabia and perhaps the UAE; the potential for the oil market to go haywire; and
the potential for Khamene'i's successor to prove more dangerous than he is. In general, I am concerned about each of these problems, but I suspect that each is not catastrophic to begin with and could be significantly mitigated by American action.

Crisis management is my greatest concern about containing a nuclear Iran. I am far more concerned about the potential for crises to escalate than I am about the impact of more aggressive Iranian unconventional warfare. I expect that a nuclear Iran would become more aggressive in its support for terrorism, insurgents, and other subversive groups, and I believe that will further destabilize the Middle East. But given the accomplishments of Iranian unconventional warfare to date, I do not see an expansion of that effort as a compelling argument in favor of going to war with Iran instead. That is especially so since it seems highly likely that an American air campaign would cause the Iranians to do exactly the same thing, perhaps with even greater zeal and less restraint, since they will have just been attacked. In contrast, if the United States were relying on containment, Iranian subversive efforts would take place under a rubric of red lines and a desire to poke at us without provoking us. In fact, unless Iran finds a way to overthrow a foreign government in a way it never has in the past, the worst that is likely to happen from this would be that Iran's efforts would provoke a nuclear crisis. That would certainly be dangerous, but what would make it dangerous was the fact that it was a nuclear crisis, not the Iranian subversive activities. So that just brings me back to my concern about nuclear crises.

Crises, especially nuclear crises, suffer from a variety of inherent problems related to time, uncertainty, communications, all of which are going to be worse with the Iranians simply because of the nature of their system and their perceptions of the United States. However, as I have also described in the preceding pages, there are important mitigating factors. The first is that the logic of nuclear deterrence is incredibly powerful, and I have seen nothing in Iran's behavior under Khamene'i, or even Khomeini for that matter, that makes me feel that they will not understand it as well. I feel quite comfortable about that judgment. I wish that I could
be certain, but that is never possible and the small residual doubt cannot be allowed to be determinative. We could not be certain that nuclear deterrence would work with the Soviet Union, China, Pakistan, or North Korea either, yet it has worked in every case so far.

The second important mitigating factor is that America's possession of escalation dominance over Iran is an extremely powerful force to ensure that nuclear crises with Iran do not get out of hand, and that they end to our advantage. Once we are involved in a crisis, there is no level of warfare at which Iran can defeat the United States The smartest thing they could do would be to back down, de-escalate, and try to go back to fighting at the unconventional level where they may have an advantage over us—although even that is no longer certain after Iraq, Afghanistan, the war on terror, and the Arab Spring. At any other level of warfare, we will do infinitely greater damage to them than they can do to us. There is always the potential for catastrophic miscalculation, but in every nuclear crisis in the past, regardless of the participants—including India and Pakistan—the moment that their nuclear arsenals were engaged, all sides suddenly began to demonstrate enormous care and caution, and a willingness to tolerate humiliating defeat rather than face annihilation. That includes risk-tolerant and casualty-tolerant leaders like Khrushchev, Stalin, and Pakistan's generals. Iran's leaders would thus have to be categorically different kinds of people to act differently—again, they would have to be as different as Saddam Husayn, who was willing to gamble on the ruin of his regime and his own death on numerous occasions from 1980 until his final miscalculation in 2003. There is nothing about the behavior of Iran's leaders that looks to me like they belong in that narrow category.

The Saudis also worry me. My experience of the Saudis is that they don't bluff lightly, unlike some of our other Middle Eastern allies. I take them at their word when they say that they plan to get a bomb of their own if the Iranians do. Nevertheless, I suspect that when it comes down to it, doing so will prove harder for the Saudis than it might seem now. First, I am skeptical that the Iranians will weaponize, at least for some time, because they fear Russia, China, and India joining the sanctions;
they fear the United States mounting an all-out regime change campaign against them; and they may even fear an American or Israeli military response. In the ambiguous circumstances in which Iran abstains from weaponizing, would the Saudis go for a bomb? To the rest of the world, it will look like international pressure is working with Iran—and then the Saudis come along and wreck it by getting a bomb of their own? Maybe. There is also the question of whether the Pakistanis will actually give it to them if they ask for it, no matter how much Riyadh may have contributed to Islamabad's bomb-making program. The Pakistanis have actually been remarkably careful with their nuclear arsenal, and they may fear that if they are caught giving a bomb to someone, they will come under severe international sanctions that they simply cannot tolerate—and from which neither the Americans nor the Chinese will save them. The Saudis, too, may still calculate that it is more useful for them to have a strong defense relationship with the United States than to go out on their own, acquire a small nuclear arsenal, and perhaps sour the long strategic relationship with the United States that has been the cornerstone of their security since the Second World War.

Then there is the issue of Khamene'i's successor. First, I suspect that for their own reasons the Iranians are not going to pick a crackpot to succeed him. Next, in a post-Khamene'i era, my guess is that the Supreme Leader will be more constrained even than he is now. This is the nature of bureaucratic autocracies: they dislike strong leaders who want to push for particular visions. Left to choose their own leaders, they tend toward safe choices—nonentities, consensus builders, and committees. Just looking at the current Iranian political scene, it strikes me as difficult for one of the real firebrands to get himself named Supreme Leader. Even if one of them could, I think it highly unlikely that they would be even as bad as Khomeini, who still abided by deterrence logic and respected the overwhelming strength of the United States even if he fought it however he could. So to the extent that I worry about Khamene'i's successor, it is not as much as I worry about the risks and concerns of a war.

Finally, there is the issue of oil. I am certainly very concerned about
the potential for the price of oil to swing wildly as a result of a range of factors related to Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons. However, I am struck by how dependent this problem is on American behavior. That's why I wanted to come to this last. Oil prices do not operate in a vacuum. They are determined by traders trying to predict outcomes—traders who can panic, but who also learn. And it is what they learn that is likely to have the greatest impact, because the overall risk premium (the long-term increase in the price of oil) is likely to prove far more important than spikes resulting from individual crises. The global economy can overcome virtually any single spike, but a series of spikes resulting in ever-worsening long-term volatility would be devastating.