Unthinkable (62 page)

However, what is so important about the oil issue is what is so important to so many aspects of containment: the American role. In speaking to oil experts and reading their work for decades—and then specifically about this issue for this book—what stands out is how much they believe that American behavior is likely to prove decisive. The more that the United States is seen involving itself early and actively in problems related to Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon and to threats in the region more generally, the more reassured they will be. Similarly, the more that regional crises are resolved quickly and without escalation, the more that the oil markets will be reassured, and that too will be much more likely if the United States intervenes quickly and decisively. Finally, if regional crises end with Iran chastened rather than emboldened, that too will calm the oil markets and that too is far more likely if the United States gets involved than if it doesn't.

That is an important point to me because it echoes the conclusions of so many other points about containment: that it is far more likely to prove successful if the United States is an active participant rather than a passive bystander. Crisis management, proliferation, the potential overreactions of our own allies, and oil price volatility are all likely to prove highly sensitive to the American role. The more that the United States acts as the “guardian of the Gulf,” stepping in to crises between Iran and other states, reassuring its allies, facing down the Iranians whenever it
is necessary, mediating conflicts whenever it is possible, the more that all of these problems will be ameliorated. Thus, another advantage I see in containment is that its success is likely to depend heavily on how the United States acts—because if we act, there is good reason to believe that containment can succeed.

However, the alternative is also true. That the less we act, the more likely that containment will fail. The more that we leave crises to the states of the region to work out themselves, the greater the likelihood that they will end badly. The more that we stay in the background, the more that our regional allies will feel the need to deter or push back on Iran themselves, and that will not only provoke more such crises: it will push them to seek nuclear weapons to be on a par with Iran when they do so. And the more that oil traders see these kinds of problems cropping up and not seeing the United States doing anything about them, the more frightened they will become, the more that the price of oil will rise, and the easier for small incidents to produce very big swings in the price of oil. The price of oil is the ultimate “public good” and the United States remains the only country capable of providing that public good. If the oil markets see the United States walking away from that role, they will panic and that will be very bad for business—everybody's business.

I also contrast this with air strikes in another way. Again, what this analysis of containment reveals is how much the potential success or failure rests on how the United States acts, which I find reassuring. With air strikes, the ultimate outcome depends on how Iran acts: how they choose to retaliate, whether they choose to reconstitute their nuclear program, when they agree to stop fighting. Those will be their decisions to make and we will have relatively little ability to influence them. Yet this could be the difference between success and failure, between a relatively brief air campaign and an invasion and occupation. And that troubles me.

Thus, when I compare the costs and risks of air strikes to the costs and risks of containment, I ultimately judge that I am more comfortable paying the costs and running the risks associated with containment than I am those associated with air strikes, or more properly, war. I do not say that lightly.

What's more, I think it important to add four brief caveats to this conclusion. First, I am much more comfortable espousing containment if it is pursued by a United States that is militarily and diplomatically involved in the region, not aloof and disconnected. The Obama administration has been trying to remove itself from Middle Eastern disputes wherever and however it can. The Middle East is not better off for it, and I fear that we will pay a price for it as well. Likewise, many of the most ardent—and most intelligent and knowledgeable—proponents of containment do so in the name of a policy of “restraint” that would similarly see the United States less active and engaged in the problems of the Middle East. That approach strikes me as being particularly dangerous as part of the containment of a nuclear Iran. It is not that it is bound to fail, only that it will be much harder for it to succeed. Far better for the United States to play an active role and boost the odds of containment's success along with it. After all, one of the greatest problems with containment is that if it fails it potentially could fail catastrophically.

Second, to return to one of the themes of the last chapter, all of this underscores just how much better it would be if Iran could be kept from weaponizing, even if that means allowing them a narrow breakout window. All of the problems of containment—crisis management, proliferation, oil prices, and so on—are ameliorated if not eliminated if Iran is kept from weaponizing.

Third, although I generally oppose the idea of going to war with Iran and prefer to contain Iran, even a nuclear Iran, if left with only the choice between these two, I believe it would be a huge mistake to let the Iranians believe that the United States has ruled out the military option. It is one
thing for some former government official at a Washington think tank to say that we should not go to war; it is something else entirely for the sitting president or secretary of defense to say it—or even imply it. We do not know just how much Iran's own restraint with regard to its nuclear program stemmed from a fear that the United States might attack, but it was almost certainly part of their thinking. I suspect that Iran would prefer not to be attacked by Israel, but I think it is frightened of being attacked by America, and I think that fear has had a salutary effect on their behavior, including helping to convince them that they shouldn't weaponize, or at least should not weaponize yet.

Last, I want to return to one point I made in discussing American military options: the calculus for war changes if Tehran takes some foolish action that would justify an attack on Iran in the eyes of the American people and international public opinion. So many of the problems of air strikes relate to the difficulty we may have generating political and diplomatic support, coupled with the difficulty of bringing such a war to a close short of an invasion. However, if the Iranians attack us first, then we would be well within our rights to respond by crushing their nuclear program and then walking away. If they wanted to retaliate themselves, there would be plenty more target sets we could hit that would make such a conflict increasingly painful for Tehran. The key differences would be that the military operation would not have to be justified by the grave threat posed by Iranian nuclear weapons to America's vital interests, and international and domestic opinion would be with us. In these circumstances, bombing Iran's nuclear sites, and perhaps buying ourselves anywhere from two to ten years, would not just be acceptable, it might well be the best option of all.

I have been reading books, articles, memos, and policy papers making the case for one or another way of handling the Iranian nuclear program for at least a decade and a half. In researching this book I have gone back
over many of these pieces—and read many that I hadn't earlier. One of the most dispiriting aspects of this survey has been to see how much hysteria has come to surround this issue. Many of the brightest, most experienced, most able of our nation's thinkers and policymakers are guilty of this practice. On both left and right, advocates of one position or another have employed some of the most outrageous, unrealistic, even ridiculous forms of argumentation. Both sides consistently present only the worst case for the course of action favored by the other, and only the best possible case for their own preferred policy.

On the left, many smart, well-intentioned people put forth preposterous claims about what will happen if the United States bombs Iran, to persuade the undecided of the virtues of containment. This includes the argument that the “Arab street” or even “the entire Muslim world” will rise up against the United States if we strike Iran. No, they won't. It's not just that people have been making this prediction repeatedly for several decades about any number of other American actions and been proven wrong every time. It's also that most Arabs, and a whole lot of Muslims, are ambivalent at best about Iran and its nuclear program. They won't like an American (let alone an Israeli) air campaign, some might use it as an excuse to vent their anger about other issues, but most will have their own problems to worry about.

For some on the right, the preferred course of argumentation seems to be to try to discredit containment by holding it to ridiculous standards. The most obvious of these is the insistence that we can only trust containment if we are 100 percent certain that Iran's leaders are not messianic or insane. Of course, we can never be 100 percent certain of any human enterprise and so it is absurd to establish that as the standard for anything. We can't be 100 percent certain that air strikes against Iran would not cause the end of the world, either. The evidence we have strongly indicates that Iran's leaders are not messianic or insane, and there simply is no good evidence that they are. That is as good as it gets for mere mortals, and more than adequate for countless policy decisions of similar import in the past.

Another example of this ploy is that some who oppose containment and favor air strikes have argued that for containment to be considered successful, it would have to prevent Iran from transferring nuclear technology to other countries. It's hard to know what “success” would mean in this case, but if it means that we have to bomb Iran unless we can be certain that they won't give another country blueprints for a centrifuge, then this criteria is hard to take seriously. After all, Pakistan's A. Q. Khan network transferred all manner of plans and nuclear equipment to a variety of countries, including Libya, North Korea, and Iran. It's tough to think of countries we would have less wanted to receive nuclear technology than these three. Yet we did not bomb Pakistan. In fact, they are now one of the largest recipients of American aid. North Korea then turned around and transferred nuclear technology to Asad's Syria (one of the other countries we really did not want to receive such assistance), and still we have not bombed North Korea, either. Thus, this cannot be a reasonable standard for the “success” or “failure” of containment, and it certainly cannot be a basis for mounting air strikes against Iran.

Still another alarming issue raised by those who oppose containment is the possibility of an accident involving Iranian nuclear weapons—an accidental detonation or even an accidental launch. However, there is no reason to suspect that Iran will be any more careless with its nuclear weapons than Pakistan, India, North Korea, or someday a nuclear Brazil or Argentina will be. These countries have actually demonstrated great care with their nuclear forces. In truth, to the best of our knowledge, the country that has behaved most cavalierly with its nuclear forces and had the most accidents with them has been the United States. For periods of the Cold War, we had bombers in the air loaded with nuclear weapons on a regular basis—and at least once, a bomber accidentally dropped four nuclear bombs on Spain (fortunately, they did not set off a nuclear explosion). No other nuclear power has ever behaved so carelessly.
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Thus, while there is certainly some validity to this fear, it is a problem with nuclear proliferation, not necessarily with Iran. The more countries with nuclear weapons, then simply by the law of averages, the greater the
likelihood that there will be an accident. But that is hardly a justification for attacking Iran. If that is our standard, why didn't we attack North Korea when it crossed the nuclear threshold? Or Pakistan? Or India? Or Israel? Similarly, should we attack Brazil if someday it decides to acquire nuclear weapons? Or South Korea? In other words, this is a reasonable concern and an issue that should be addressed, but it is not a valid criterion for attacking Iran to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

I will not speculate on the motives behind this unnecessary and unfortunate hysteria from both sides around the Iranian nuclear issue. I do not know whether these reflect a sense that in today's polarized world this is what it takes to persuade a broader audience of one's preferred position, or a genuine—but genuinely irrational—fear of the consequences of the other side's position. It probably varies from person to person and in many cases may reflect some mix of the two. Whatever the motives, it needs to stop. The experts need to stop indulging in this unhelpful behavior, but more than that, the public needs to recognize it for the hysteria that it is.

The Iranian nuclear issue is hard enough as it is without such exaggeration. Adding to it simply turns what is already a difficult conversation into a useless screaming match.

As I have noted earlier, the world will not end the day after Iran acquires nuclear weapons. It did not end when Russia got them. Or when Mao's China, or Pakistan, or North Korea got them, either. The world will be more difficult and there will be real and dangerous risks, but the apocalypse is low on that list. It is highly unlikely that Iran will use nuclear weapons unprovoked or give them to terrorists. I say that as an American, but as a reminder, polls have consistently demonstrated that four out of every five Israelis believe the same.

By the same token, a war with Iran is not going to cause the fall of the United States of America. It will not bankrupt the country. It will not result in massive loss of American life on the scale of the Civil War or World War II. It will not mean the end of Western civilization. It will not
drag the United States into a vast war with the Islamic world. It will not cause the Arab street to “rise up” against the United States, or Israel.