Unthinkable (17 page)

T
here is no reason to believe that Iran's development of a nuclear capability would mean the start of Armageddon. Nevertheless, it would be a problem for the United States and a threat to the Middle East. It would be a situation best avoided whether Tehran is content to stop with a breakout capacity or seeks a full-blown arsenal. For that reason, it's important now to turn to the options left to the United States and our allies to try to prevent that unhappy situation and try to assess whether the costs of doing so outweigh the risks of not doing so.

Even at this late stage, it is worth considering policies that seem to hold some prospect of preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability. There are four worth exploring: a revised version of the current carrot-and-stick strategy (referred to by the Obama administration as its
“Dual Track” policy); a plan for regime change to try to topple the current ruling leadership before it acquires a nuclear capability; an Israeli military strike on key Iranian nuclear facilities; or an American military operation to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

It is important to recognize that the first three proposed courses of actions are not “final” or “complete” options. Their ultimate success or failure lies outside American control. For these three policies, ultimate success would only be possible if the Iranian government (even a new Iranian government, in the case of the regime change scenario) agreed to end its pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability. In every case, the Iranians might simply soldier on toward a nuclear weapon or a narrow breakout window.

Only the fourth course, an American military campaign, constitutes a final option because even if the United States started with limited measures, it could escalate to a full-scale invasion and occupation of Iran. In that case, whatever else it might accomplish and might cost, Iran's nuclear ambitions would end for the foreseeable future, just as our invasion of Iraq ended Saddam's dream of a nuclear arsenal once and for all, even if at a much higher price than anyone signed up to pay. In that sense, only an American invasion of Iran constitutes a true alternative to containment. The other three are gambits that might succeed in accomplishing our goal, but also carry the risk of failure. And if they fail, they will still leave the United States with the choice between war and containment.

None of these four policy options are dumb ideas. None of them is craven. All have merits and advantages. All have been proposed and advanced by smart, experienced, patriotic, and insightful men and women. Ultimately, however, I fear that none of them will succeed at an acceptable cost. Two of them—a revised Dual Track approach and some aspects of regime change—have enough promise to try. They are both worth trying
regardless of their likelihood
. The other two possible options—an Israeli strike or an American military effort—I see as entailing more risks and costs than the likelihood of success merits. The rest of this part of the book will examine each of these four options, before turning to a fuller
discussion of what the alternative to prevention, containment, would entail.

When it comes to choosing among our options toward Iran, one of the most important and least acknowledged factors to understand is that where you start shapes where you end up, and where you are willing to end up shapes both how far you are willing to go and, to a great extent, where you start. This is the case for two reasons. First, everyone must make certain assumptions to fill in the many gaps in our knowledge of Iran. These assumptions will determine whether you prefer the costs and risks of a war with Iran or the costs and risks of containing a nuclear Iran if all else fails. Second, what you are ultimately willing to accept, in terms of war or containment, also goes a long way to determining how far you are willing to go in exploring alternatives to war as a means of preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear capability.

To understand these phenomena a bit better, it seems best to start with the second point, that when all else fails, whether you prefer containment or war shapes what you are willing to do and willing to try before the United States gets to that point.

Think of it this way. If you are ultimately willing to live with a nuclear Iran, believing it possible to do so and that the costs and risks of containment are “better” than the costs and risks of a war with Iran, why not make the effort to try to convince the Iranians to give up their nuclear program peacefully? The worst that could happen would be that Iran uses the negotiations as a ploy to buy time to complete their work on nuclear weapons. However, if you are willing to contain a nuclear Iran, that end-state is something that you are already willing to accept. It may not be an ideal outcome, but it is not unacceptable to those willing to opt for containment. On the other hand, if the carrot-and-stick approach works—if it convinces the Iranians to slow down their program, stick with a breakout capability, or accept more intrusive inspections (or a variety of other
limits), any and all of this would create a situation better than the status quo. And since those willing to contain a nuclear Iran must also ultimately be ready to accept the status quo, any improvement is a victory. Moreover, if the carrot-and-stick approach could convince Iran to give up its nuclear program altogether, then that is the jackpot, and there is no reason not to give that option every chance to succeed since you are already willing to accept even the worst-case scenario if it fails.

The same logic largely holds for regime change. If you are willing to contain Iran, even a nuclear Iran, and prefer that course to a war with Iran, why not try regime change? The time it could take to work or prove that it has failed (one of the greatest problems with this option) is irrelevant. Since you were always willing to contain even a nuclear Iran, if Iran acquired a nuclear capability before regime change worked or demonstrated that it had failed, it doesn't matter. Of course, there are still reasons why it would be best to topple the regime before it crossed the nuclear threshold, such as avoiding the messy question of what happens to any nuclear weapons in the midst of a revolution or palace coup and preventing the current regime from gaining any value from its nuclear arsenal before it is overthrown. However, a willingness to contain
this
regime with nuclear weapons presupposes a willingness to take the actions necessary to prevent it from taking advantage of them for as long as necessary. Similarly, the containment scenario assumes that there will be a political transition in Iran at some point (and probably a messy one), and therefore the problems of such a transition cannot be reasons to eschew regime change.

The exact opposite is the case if you are unwilling to contain a nuclear Iran and are willing to go to war to prevent it. If that is the case, you will want to ensure a successful military campaign to prevent Iran from acquiring either a nuclear arsenal or the ability to field one. Once Iran has a nuclear weapon, it is unimaginable that the United States, let alone Israel, would attack it, except in dire circumstances. Consequently, the United States could not afford to wait too long to attack, lest Iran exercise its breakout option.

Thus, if you prefer war to containment when all else fails, you can try both the carrot-and-stick and regime change policies for a little while, but not for very long. Not so long that Iran may have a narrow enough breakout window to field a weapon before the United States can do whatever is necessary to end the program. The amount of time the United States would need for a successful military campaign is variable, however, as it rests on whether we can achieve our objectives with only an air campaign or if it becomes necessary to follow up with a ground invasion.

Likewise, if war is the preferred
ultima ratio,
the United States will need a good casus belli to generate as much domestic political and international support for going to war with Iran as possible and avoid repeating our post-Iraq-invasion isolation. The most obvious way to do both would be to put a good deal on the table for Iran as an ultimatum: Either Tehran accepts the offer or—instead of imposing still more sanctions—the United States will attack.
¹
And the ultimatum would need a time limit to prevent Iran from dithering, giving half answers, accepting then rejecting the deal, accepting parts of it, or anything else short of a full “yes.” The worst thing for someone who prefers war to containment is for Iran to be able to drag out negotiations, all the while making progress toward a nuclear bomb. So this too means that those who prefer war can only give a revamped carrot-and-stick a short time to succeed before they have to shift to the military option. Since no one really knows how close Iran is to a breakout capability, for those willing to go to war, how much time they can afford for diplomacy is also unknown.

If you are willing to accept all the costs and risks of a war with Iran, for the same reason, you cannot accept anything except a very good deal with Iran. For those willing to accept war as the last resort, the worst nightmare is a weak or partial agreement that allows the Iranians either to keep a narrow breakout window or to cheat and so narrow the window (or even develop a weapon itself) in secret. If that happens, Iran could surprise the world with a nuclear weapon before the United States could go to war to prevent it. In other words, a bad deal with Iran could leave the United States and its allies with no choice but to contain Iran. If you
are willing to accept containment, that's fine; if you prefer war to containment, it's a disaster.

GOOD DEALS AND BAD DEALS.
The objective of all the alternative policies to force or containment is to convince Iran to agree to a negotiated settlement of the nuclear impasse. As always, no one, probably including most of the Iranian leadership, knows just what the Iranians would be willing to accept in a nuclear deal. However, if we compare Iran's rhetorical declarations and the West's demands, it is possible to imagine a deal between the two sides in which Iran gets the multilateral sanctions lifted and what would amount to a rudimentary breakout capability—limited enrichment and possession of LEU that would theoretically enable Tehran to assemble a nuclear weapon in six to twelve months—in return for Iran agreeing to forgo the possibility of achieving a rapid breakout capability and accepting intrusive UN inspections to assure the international community that it is not cheating on the agreement. Such a deal seems to fall into the narrow area of overlap between the two sides' declared positions.

Whether you are willing to accept war or containment will determine whether you see such a deal as miraculous or disastrous. If you are willing to contain Iran, this deal looks great because almost any agreement that imposes real constraints on the Iranian nuclear program is worthwhile. Right now, Iran is moving smartly down the path toward a nuclear arsenal. It already has acquired the theoretical capacity to develop nuclear weapons, although it would probably require at least a year before it could field one from a decision to do so. With each passing day, the amount of time that Iran would require to build a nuclear weapon diminishes, and at some point in the next few years, Tehran will probably be at a point where it could build a bomb in just a few months from a decision to do so. That is the baseline, the starting point for containment. Consequently, any time that the United States can buy, any limits on the Iranian program, any additional monitoring and inspections, any additional pressure on Iran—any improvement over the status quo—is worth it because it
leaves the situation with Iran better off than it otherwise might be. Therefore, any halfway-decent deal produced by the carrot-and-stick approach is going to make containment easier, stronger, and less risky than it would be without such a deal.

From the opposite perspective, if you prefer to go to war, you will likely see this deal as enabling Iran to retain an unacceptable, even if longer-term, breakout capability. The mere fact that a deal had been struck—a deal potentially easy for Iran to honor—would also be dissuasive because it would make it far more difficult to build either domestic or international support for war, since the Iranians will be seen as behaving reasonably, honoring international agreements, and demonstrating the “peaceful” intent of their nuclear ambitions. Such a deal would make it even harder to build support for military action than was the case before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when Saddam's allies claimed that he was “mostly” complying with the UN resolutions and therefore military action was premature. Moreover, many who favor war with Iran over containment tend to believe that Iran will find ways to cheat on any agreement. For that reason, too, they tend to be willing to accept only deals with Iran that altogether eliminate Iran's breakout window by prohibiting all enrichment activities. That it seems even less likely that Iran could be convinced to agree to such terms is not meaningful for this group, since they are willing to go to war, and may be looking for the justification to do so.