Llewellyn
King
Read Llewellyn's bio and previous columns
October 29, 2007
The Awful Choices
Posed By Iran
Winston Churchill
said that a decision not taken was nonetheless a decision. The decision
to bomb Iran has not been taken, and President Bush's tightening of
sanctions against Iran may be a decision not to decide.
Here in Washington
D.C., debate about Iran is dominant. Unlike the debate that preceded the
invasion of Iraq, this one features a much greater emphasis on what
happens after striking as many as 20 Iranian nuclear sites. Ergo,
lessons have been learned.
The hawkish argument
is pretty simple: If you delay Iran's production of an indigenous weapon
for decades, you will not only protect Israel from a future horror, but
you will also send a categorical message to other proliferators that
there will be consequences for defying the United States. It is an
argument about the future.
The dovish argument
is about the day after. It is an argument over what happens immediately,
and how catastrophic the consequences will be in the months after a
unilateral aerial assault. With the Iranian street aflame, will Iran
send its conventional forces across the Iraq border to engage the U.S.
forces in formal warfare, even as they are fully engaged in fighting the
insurgency? Will Iraq succeed in disrupting tanker traffic through the
Straits of Hormuz, pushing world oil prices to $150 a barrel? Will Iran
endeavor to engage Israel directly rather than through its surrogate
Hezbollah?
Then there is the
unknown reaction of Russia and China, both of which are cozy with Iran.
And again, will Turkey take advantage of the chaos to invade Northern
Iraq to suppress Kurdish terrorists, even to commandeer Kurdish oil?
Will the whole of the Middle East go up in flames, as Egypt's Hosni
Mubarack has warned?
The administration
has sent every warning to Tehran that it will not abide continued
uranium enrichment. While Bush talks diplomacy, Vice President Dick
Cheney continues to beat the war drums with tough rhetoric.
Additionally, the administration has asked for money from Congress to
modify B-2 stealth bombers to carry “bunker-buster” bombs. Because
Iranian air defenses are fairly good, this says two things: We're
preparing to come after your underground facilities, but not before we
modify our weapons. A strong signal, but a mixed one.
Inside the
administration it is believed that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
and Defense Secretary Robert Gates are dovish, while Cheney and those
outside the government but with influence in decision-making, and who
supported the Iraq invasion, are keen on striking Iran. The military is
known to believe that it has its hands full, and is concerned about the
safety of its forces in Iraq should conventional Iranian divisions pour
across the border.
Another wild card is
Saudi Arabia. Its armed forces are well-equipped with American gear, but
it has no record in serious combat. The Saudis do not like the Iranian
strength in the region, and Saudi Arabia is predominantly Sunni while
Iran is Shia. The Saudis have told Cheney that if the United States
withdraws from Iraq, Saudi Arabia will go in to bolster the Sunni
minority, but they would not want to be at war with Iran. There are only
about five million Saudis, but there are 80 million Iranians.
A small but not
insignificant light on the state of play in the administration and the
military comes from Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.
When journalist Juan Williams said on “Fox News Sunday” that Petreaus
was seeking permission to follow Iranian insurgents across the border
into Iran, Petraeus had his spokesman call Williams to say that the
general did not want that authority and had not sought it. In other
words: I have got enough war to manage, I do not need to add hot
pursuit.
The problem comes
back to Iraq. If there were no U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq, we
could probably bomb Iranian nuclear installations with little
consequence. As it is, we would have to bomb the nuclear targets and, if
Iran reacts by invading Iraq, escalate the air war, bombing conventional
military targets like missile silos. If things continued to deteriorate,
we would have to go after infrastructural targets like bridges, power
plants and oil installations.
There is a third
line of argument that says the Iran bombing could be carried out by
Israel, which, after all, took out Saddam Hussein's reactors in 1981 and
has just taken out a presumed nuclear target in Syria. The problem is
that Israeli bombers, and fighters, do not have the range to reach Iran
and get back without in-air refueling. That would require U.S. tankers
flying from U.S. bases in places like Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, etc. And that
would not sit well with those countries and would Americanize the
attacks anyway.
No wonder a third
bird has joined the hawks and doves of old. It is the ostrich.
© 2007 North Star
Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
Click here to talk to our writers and
editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.
To e-mail feedback
about this column,
click here. If you enjoy this writer's
work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry
it.
This
is Column # LK014.
Request permission to publish here. |