Asking The Wrong Questions About Iran

The United States is preparing its third rush towards war in six years, and experts are already warning that by hyping up the tension between U.S. occupying forces and Iranian diplomatic forces on the ground in Iraq, the U.S. is risking a situation similar to "August 1914 all over again." At that time in Europe, an unwillingness to back down produced a situation where a single misread signal caused a conflagration, dragging the entire region into mutual devastation due to interlocking alliances.

Speaking of justifications, recent excellent reporting from several sources has savaged Bush administration credibility on a number of fronts. The New York Times' William Broad and David Sanger reported Sunday  that the "frenetic activity" around Iran's nuclear plant in Natanz in preparation for an expected announcement on February 11, the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, "may be mostly about political showmanship." In other words, it's an attempt to put a proud face on a program beset by crude technological know-how and numerous failures. That's why officials estimate it will take four to five years for Iran to successfully go nuclear.

McClatchy's Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay and the Los Angeles Times' Maura Reynolds  have questioned administration claims that Iran is arming Shiites attacking U.S. forces in Iraq. They point to the fact that promised public display of purported evidence against Iran has been delayed by the United States on multiple occasions and has yet to occur. Meanwhile, the ratio of U.S. deaths in Sunni provinces of Iraq like Anbar, far from purported Iranian influence, is actually increasing.

Even the official National Intelligence Estimate released on February 2 stated (via Laura Rozen ):

Iraq’s neighbors influence, and are influenced by, events within Iraq, but the involvement of these outside actors is not likely to be a major driver of violence or the prospects for stability because of the self-sustaining character of Iraq’s internal sectarian dynamics.

The only hope to stopping this lies in domestic opposition politics. Unfortunately, already two leading Democratic contenders for the presidency, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, have voiced their willingness to bomb Iran. Talking Points Memo blogger David Kurtz has highlighted the inadequacy  of the stated plans of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to military action against Iran.

And Paul Pillar, former intelligence officer for the Near East over at the CIA (and a man with an entirely respectable reputation for being right on both international terrorism and Iraq in the past), pointed out in an op-ed in Sunday's Washington Post  that not only are the majority of politicians not doing enough to stop war with Iran, much like the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, they aren't even asking the right questions. He points to the endless debates about the presence or absence of WMDs. What, he asks, would change, had there been WMDs in Iraq?

... The war itself would be the same agonizing ordeal. An insurgency driven by motives having nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction and little to do with Hussein would still be going on.

Iraq's sectarian divisions and intolerant political culture would still have pushed it into civil war. Iraq would still have become the latest and biggest jihad, winning recruits and donors for al-Qaeda and boosting the militant Islamic movement worldwide. And the United States would still be suffering the same drain of blood and treasure in Iraq and most of the same damage to its global standing and relationships.

Similarly, he says, the questions of whether Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons alongside its stated civilian nuclear goals, or aiding in attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq, while important, should not be the focus.

Instead, he offers a host of other, far more important questions to consider about the effects of military strikes would be and their usefulness in promoting American goals:

What would be the urgency of taking forceful action, given that the announced estimate is that Iran is still several years from acquiring a nuclear weapon?

How malleable (and how well-defined) are Tehran's intentions, and what changes in Washington's policy might lead Tehran to abandon a weapons program? Even if Tehran's intentions do not change, what other options would impede or slow its nuclear program? If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, how would that change its behavior and affect U.S. interests? In particular, why would deterrence, which has kept nuclear peace with other adversaries, not work with Iran?

... How much would Iran's nuclear efforts be set back, especially given that bombs are not very good at destroying knowledge and expertise? Would the Iranian response be appreciably different from that of Iraq after Israel bombed its nuclear reactor in 1981 (Iraq redoubled its nuclear efforts while turning to different methods for producing fissile material)?

... How much would the direct assertion of U.S. hostility strengthen Iranian hard-liners, whose policies are partly premised on such hostility? How much would it add to all Iranians' list of historical grievances against the United States and adversely affect relations with future governments?

Today, London's Centre for Foreign Policy, together with various British unions and NGOs, answered some of those questions by exploring the consequences of hypothetical military action against Iran: the result? "disastrous ."

So which Democratic leaders are willing to stand up and call for drastic de-escalation of rhetoric about Iran? Which presidential candidates are willing to forgo demonizing Iran? It seems that most of our leadership have yet to learn the lessons of the lead-up to Iraq. It's not about politicization of intelligence. It's about learning to think outside the simplistic logic of military aggresiveness.