U.S. had better be ready to raze Iran’s nuclear sites (Charles Krauthammer)

Boston Herald ^ | Sept 15, 2006 | Charles Krauthammer

[jdm]

WASHINGTON - In his televised 9/11 address, President Bush said that we must not “leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons.” There’s only one such current candidate: Iran.

The next day, he responded thus (as reported by Rich Lowry and Kate O’Beirne of National Review) to a question on Iran: “It’s very important for the American people to see the president try to solve problems diplomatically before resorting to military force.”

“Before” implies that the one follows the other. The signal is unmistakable. An aerial attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities lies just beyond the horizon of diplomacy. With the crisis advancing and the moment of truth approaching, it is important to begin looking now with unflinching honesty at the military option.

The costs will be terrible:

Economic: An attack on Iran will likely send oil prices overnight to $100 or even to $150 a barrel. That will cause a worldwide recession perhaps as deep as the one triggered by the Iranian revolution of 1979.

Iran might suspend its own 2.5 million barrels a day of oil exports, and might even be joined by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, asserting primacy as the world’s leading anti-imperialist. But even more effectively, Iran will shock the oil markets by closing the Strait of Hormuz through which 40 percent of the world’s exports flow every day.

The U.S. Navy will be forced to break the blockade. We will succeed but at considerable cost. And it will take time - during which time the world economy will be in a deep spiral.

Military: Iran will activate its proxies in Iraq, most notably, Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. Sadr is already wreaking havoc with sectarian attacks on Sunni civilians. Iran could order the Mahdi Army and its other agents within the police and armed forces to take up arms against the institutions of the central government itself, threatening the very anchor of the new Iraq. Many Mahdi will die, but they live to die. Many Iraqis and coalition soldiers are likely to die as well.

Among the lesser military dangers, Iran might activate terrorist cells around the world, although without nuclear capability that threat is hardly strategic. It will also be very difficult to unleash its proxy Hezbollah, now chastened by the destruction it brought upon Lebanon in the latest round with Israel and deterred by the presence of Europeans in the south Lebanon buffer zone.

Diplomatic: There will be massive criticism of America from around the world. Much of it is to be discounted. The Muslim street will come out again for a few days, having replenished its supply of flammable American flags most recently exhausted during the cartoon riots. Their governments will express solidarity with a fellow Muslim state, but this will be entirely hypocritical. The Arabs are terrified about the rise of a nuclear Iran and would privately rejoice in its defanging.

The Europeans will be less hypocritical because their visceral anti-Americanism trumps rational calculation. We will have done them an enormous favor by sparing them the threat of Iranian nukes, but they will vilify us nonetheless.

These are the costs. There is no denying them. However, equally undeniable is the cost of doing nothing.

In the region, Persian Iran will immediately become the hegemonic power in the Arab Middle East. Today it is deterred from overt aggression against its neighbors by the threat of conventional retaliation. Against a nuclear Iran, such deterrence becomes far less credible. As its weak, non-nuclear Persian Gulf neighbors accommodate to it, jihadist Iran will gain control of the most strategic region on the globe.

Then there is the larger danger of permitting nuclear weapons to be acquired by religious fanatics seized with an eschatological belief in the imminent apocalypse and in their own divine duty to hasten the End of Days.

The mullahs are infinitely more likely to use these weapons than anyone in the history of the nuclear age. Every city in the civilized world will live under the specter of instant annihilation delivered either by missile or by terrorist. This from a country that has an official Death to America Day and has declared since Ayatollah Khomeini’s ascension that Israel must be wiped off the map.

Against millenarian fanaticism glorying in a cult of death, deterrence is a mere wish. Is the West prepared to wager its cities with their millions of inhabitants on that feeble gamble?

These are the questions. These are the calculations. The decision is no more than a year away.

[zipper]

Yes, the changes will have to be detected through satellite reconnaissance-- or through post-mission BDAs.

I'd say the chances of a military action are already greater than 50 per cent-- and President Bush is not going to wait until his last days in office.

One lingering question is-- who will be on board with us, and who won't?

[Rumple4]

a year and half away, this same guy is on tv moaning about the quagmire Iran has become.

[zipper]

I suspect he'll launch an attack, everyone will condemn him, including his successor, who will privately thank his lucky stars Bush had 'nads.

Just as happened with Osirak...

"Many foreign governments, including the United States, condemned the operation, and the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed UN Security Council Resolution 487, which “strongly condemns the military attack by Israel in clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct.” (S/RES/487).

The operation was also widely criticized by the Israeli left-wing opposition, who claimed that a major reason for the specific timing of the operation (as opposed to its necessity, which was generally accepted) was the proximity of the general elections only three weeks later."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osirak

[Southack]

First of all, I'm going to tell you something that will shock you: Iran is bluffing.

Any real program by Iran to go nuclear would have been covert and would have simply waited until President Bush left office before going public with an atomic fait accompli.

Now, that being said, we can't afford to take the chance that Iran isn't bluffing.

So a variety of actions have been going on. A federal mandate to switch diesel to natural-gas and coal production has been implemented, for instance. Starting this year clean diesel is being sold, old diesel outlawed.

Interestingly enough, the U.S. has the world's largest supply of coal, which makes coal oil, which can be refined into gasoline or into clean diesel. The U.S. also has access to large supplies of natural gas, which again can make clean diesel.

E85 has been federally mandated. Now ethanol is in a large portion of our gasoline nationwide, reducing our demand for foeign crude oil.

70% more oil drilling permits have been approved since President Bush took office. The Alaska Petroleum Reserve has been opened to new drilling, and ANWR is up for new drilling (to be passed shortly by Congress).

These events did not occur in a vaccum.

Then U.S. troops were based in Afghanistan. Later, additional U.S. troops were based in large numbers in Iraq. NATO was further brought in to Afghanistan and activated in Turkey. U.S. naval assets were brought in to the Persian Gulf area.

In sum, the above places U.S. and allied forces to the North, South, East, and West of Iran. Iran is outflanked. Surrounded. The military game is over before it begins.

Next, the EU was brought in to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program. This is important. Here's why:

Iran is bluffing.
Iran's real goal is to drive a wedge between the EU and the U.S.

To drive this wedge, Iran wants to prod the U.S. into doing something that the EU will disapprove (at a level heretofor never seen).

This is why Amadinejad is making a never-ending series of provactive statements. This is why Iran publicly broke the UN seals on their 48 uranium-hexaflouride gas centrifuges (a real atomic program would have done so in secret).

But frustrating Iran is President Bush's simple strategy:
#1: let the EU do all of the negotiating with Iran, and
#2: let the EU and Iran know that there is a line that if crossed, means the U.S. will take military action on a scale not seen since 1945.

And not only does this strategy frustrate Iran's real goal of driving a wedge between the EU and U.S., but it also boxes in Iran as well as provides the only viable policy option for the *next* U.S. President to continue.

Even a Democratic President elected in 2008 would be unable to change from having the EU do all of the negotiations with Iran, and certainly wouldn't let Iran know that the U.S. would refrain from GWB's policy of doom should a line be crossed.

Now, with all of that said, don't be surprised to see the first U.S. military action be something benign such as an oil blockade that keeps all of Iran's oil in Iran while keeping out the lifeblood of Iran's economy: money.

Such a blockade is easy to criticize from a variety of angles, but the pieces are in place for that to be a President's first response to Iran appearing to step over the line.

So the U.S. runs on coal oil and clean diesel for a while. Life goes on.

Such a move would be employed to force Iran's hand...to prod *Iran* into doing something that would justify to the EU the U.S. wiping out that which crossed the line.

Which is to say, if Iran really isn't bluffing, the U.S. will go nuclear on Iran at some point, but don't be surprised if that isn't our *first* response to Iranian transgressions.

[STD]

We've been given our marching orders from Israel

[TYVets]

The U.N. is much too weak and fractionalized to deal a decisive blow to the Iranians.

The U.N. is much too weak, too corrupt, too broke to deal more than 3 hands of blackjack.

[AngelesCrestHighway]

RAZE 'em...RAZE 'em good...

[nathanbedford]

Tempting as it is, I cannot agree with you that Iran is bluffing. One can't be sure as you say, one can only put the probabilities on a scale and by that measurement the notion that Iran is bluffing loses on two counts: first, Iran has very little to gain and much to lose in bringing about a confrontation over nonexistent nukes. By Iran, I mean the mullahs presently in power who can twist the lion's tale easily enough without provoking him. In other words, the mullahs can keep their authoritarian control over Iran by railing against America and Israel without running such high risks. Second, to forgo the quest for nukes runs counter to the essential nature of aggressive Islam which the mullahs who are in control of Iran personify to a man. What does their revolution mean if not the expansion of Islam? The purity of Islam? How better can the infidels be brought to grace then by the nuclear sword?

So, the mullahs are not bluffing or at least, as you say, we must proceed under the assumption that they are not bluffing. What to do about it?

All of the steps which you recite to move us away from Muslim oil dependency are wonderful and they should have been taken in a generation ago but they were not. Now we must wait a generation for their effect, and that is time we do not have. We did not drill and we do not build refineries. Equally, we cannot transition within a generation.

The alternative to doing nothing is not, as you suggest, going nuclear against Iran. I cannot conceive of a bigger blunder. Iran's nuclear potential must be taken out but it must be done with conventional weapons. You cite our forces in Afghanistan and Iraq as potential stepping stones into Iran, and so they are. But in today's age, such bases are less valuable than they were even 10 or 20 years ago. You cite that we have moved the Navy into the Gulf, and so we have. But a Navy can be moved anywhere it is wet and can be positioned in the gulf at will.

The problem with taking out Iran's nuclear potential by conventional assets is that our air power is insufficient to accomplish the task alone, and our ground forces are being wasted in Iraq. By all accounts, we simply do not have the ground forces available to mount a conventional strike. We cannot do it alone with conventional air assets. That is our dilemma and we compounding it in Iraq.

By the nature of democracy, and our alliance with other Western democracies, a protracted boycott or sanctions regime, or blockade, is doomed to failure. Worse, it must ultimately rebound against us and backfire. It will not bring sufficient pain to Iran to cause the mullahs to change their ways but it will certainly break the Western alliance. Whatever is done 'twer better if it were quickly done.

We armchair strategists lack intelligence to tell us how long a grace period we have before Iran gets the bomb. Some accounts say they have one already and some accounts say it must be more than a decade. George Bush will be out of office in about 15 months. I do not share your confidence that a Democrat will have the starch to do what's right. As a matter of fact, I think the odds are long against it. That would run counter to everything the post-Vietnam War Democratic Party stands for.

If we knew that we had 10 years, we could set in train a campaign to undermine the Iranian regime from within. But even if the CIA were to report today that we had those 10 years, given the degree to which the CIA is discredited by its blunders of in Iran, can one steak the very future of America on its findings?

I'm afraid it is up to George Bush and his Christian character.

[MindBender26]

>The U.S. should be waging the same type of asymmetric warfare on Iran that Iran has waged against the U.S. and the West for the last 25 years. The U.S. should exploit some or all of Iran's dissident groups by providing whatever resources they require to fight the Mullahs. This may not solve the nuclear issue but it could bring the Iranian religious dictatorship to its knees and take some pressure off Iraq and Israel.

Your first sentence is correct, but why adopt a losing strategy thereafter. Why play the weak hand in a/sym warfare?

Why not set up pretexts, then nuc now. Radical, I know, but what are the alternatives with a probability of success.

[T.L.Sink]

Very good observations and assessment of Bush who is certainly not a traditional conservative. I think the terrible dilemma posed by Krauthammer necessitates the second option - diplomacy will inevitably fail and Iran MUST be prevented from creating a nuclear arsenal - by military action.

It seems to me to be a classic case of intervention, with all its dangers, being far more desirable than failing to act.

Benjamin Netanyahu made a very astute observation about why the Iranian situation is unique. He said that during the Cold War the Soviet Union, although it proclaimed a very irrational ideolgy, conducted its foreign policy rationally. Why? Because they wanted to live and didn't want a nuclear holocaust. This is why MAD was effective in preventing such a conflict.

But he said that Iran is completely different. It's predicated on a fanatical and apocalyptic religious vision that prays for and welcomes catastrophe as part of the divine plan for the return of the last Immam.

My fear is that many "rational" Westerners are unwilling or unable to recognize true EVIL and take it seriously as the very imminent and dangerous threat that it is.

We have an almost superstitious reverence for "diplomacy" and "negotiation". And an equally naive belief that, at bottom, our enemies are rational and we just have to "talk it out" and determine what they "really want".

While such procedures have their place, I think it would be disastrous if we let the Iranians suck us into their stalling-for-time strategy. When we see reality it may be too late.

We don't take the loudly and proudly proclaimed threats of these mullahs seriously at our own peril!

[Wristpin]

Interesting...You forgot one reason for the Iranian saber rattling. The Price of Oil and it's effect on western economies. I never seen a figure on the cost of the "Fear Premium" we've been paying for the last 1-1/2 years, but I imagine it must be close to the economic damage done by 9/11.

[nathanbedford]

As one who lives in Germany, I am acutely sensitive to the sentiment expressed by JPM to the effect that we are in thrall to Israel's national interest rather than to our own. And this is a criticism which is widely current here in Europe. Indeed, it is this belief which permits the Europeans to stick their heads in the sand over the entire issue of terrorism, especially nuclear terrorism, because they believe that their disassociation from Israel immunizes Europe from such threats.

It seems to do little good to point out that terrorism already exists against Europe in Spain and in Great Britain and recently in Germany itself. It seems to be a disconnect in it arises out of America's connection with Israel. In fact, Europeans tend to believe that Americans, by a close association with Israel, are making life more dangerous for them.

I have often posted that it is necessary for American find its own way and be prepared to jettison Israel if necessary. After all, my children's fate is tied to the United States of America, not to Israel. I have often been tempted to post in response to mindless support of Israel or in support of mindless exortations to "nuke" Iran, or Mecca, or wherever, and ask of what country are these people citizens? But to do so is to court charges of anti-Semitism and start a whole pissing match which is tedious and diverts us from our real task which is to voice a conservative foreign policy for the USA. Besides, anyone who supports my avatar must be doubly careful in this regard.

But if I thought that America was being led down the path by Israel or Israel's agents in the American government, I would not hesitate to scream. However, there is a difference between parallel interests and substitute interests. I believe America's need to prevent Iran from getting the bomb is parallel to Israel's and we are not acting solely as a proxy for Israel. I do not think if we repudiated Israel today that it would solve our problem with the Iranians getting the bomb.

Finally, whatever the wisdom over the years of so intimately entwineing ourselves with Israel, we are today where we are, and we must go on from here. Whether it was simple human justice, or folly, to cast our lot with 4 million Israelis against 1.4 billion Muslims with all the oil in the world, one can argue until the next millennium. But those risks which we accepted were courted initially when we had a monopoly on the nuclear bomb and then, later, when we were dealing with a rational adversary in the Soviet Union.

The Specter which confronts us now, as you point out, is an irrational adversary with the bomb. In this situation, we put at risk our Western alliance, and we make it almost impossible to turn sane Muslims against the crazies which must be done if the war is ultimately to be won.

Just as we have ceded definition of victory in Iraq to our so called "allies" in Iraq, so we have put our faith to some degree in the hands of the Israelis and Palestinians. In Iraq, we cannot have victory without a democracy and we cannot have democracy without cooperation from the Iraqis. In the broader mid East, we will find it very difficult to work with sane and somewhat secular Muslims against fundamentalists unless the Israelis and the Palestinians can come to a modus vivendi. So our fate in both realms is out of our hands, we cannot impose democracy on Iraq, and we cannot impose peace on Palestine.

[Marine_Uncle]

I have taken the position for the past half year or so that Iran is bluffing on it's nuclear cycle capabilities.
I weary of re-writing reasons why I believe this is the case, but concure with your over all assesment.
Regarding the oil drilling/distribution in the USA, I take a different stand.
It will take years to actually realize those alternate fuel sources, assuming the congress,president, and all the tightly associated industries where actually in concordance to work toward the day the US could become oil independent.
The US airforce and Navy will eventually be in the position to take out deep buried nuclear facilities once the current series of deep penetrating nuclear/non-nuclear bombs are put into contruction... perhaps less then a year away. Once we can destroy things at 150-200 feet plus into solid bedrock, then with certainty we will be ready to surgically take out all their underground nuclear develepment facilities.
GWB only waits for these new deep penetrators to be fully tested and approved for use.
I am getting ready for work, so will not be available for what could be interesting dialogs with the Freepers in this post.
So to all, do have a great day.

[cooldog]

I find your attitude toward support for Israel incredibly short-sighted, at best.

The Arab/muslim hatred for Israel has nothing of sanity in it. Were Israel gone, they'd simply find a new focus for their insane hatred.

Guess what?

Europe's next, because they're closest.

You'd better hope Israel survives ....

[Uncle Vlad]

Krauthammer is right. It's five minutes to midnight. Here's some more info on the subject: www.obsessionthemovie.com

[ChildOfThe60s]

Should we go after them, it should be with such overwhelming force, that they have nothing left to close the straits with.

Unfortunately, closing the straits would be a relatively easy matter, which has always been a major concern in regards to open hostilities in the region. Run a ship out there and scuttle it. Straits blocked.

[Quix]

Then there is the larger danger of permitting nuclear weapons to be acquired by religious fanatics seized with an eschatological belief in the imminent apocalypse and in their own divine duty to hasten the End of Days.

The mullahs are infinitely more likely to use these weapons than anyone in the history of the nuclear age. Every city in the civilized world will live under the specter of instant annihilation delivered either by missile or by terrorist. This from a country that has an official Death to America Day and has declared since Ayatollah Khomeini’s ascension that Israel must be wiped off the map.

Against millenarian fanaticism glorying in a cult of death, deterrence is a mere wish. Is the West prepared to wager its cities with their millions of inhabitants on that feeble gamble?

These are the questions. These are the calculations. The decision is no more than a year away.
= = = =

Am glad someone is speaking the truth . . . even the truth that the puppet masters have set-up and plagued the world with.

Sobering times. May all the righteous be prayerful 24/7

Thanks.

[semaj]

I agree with your sentiments completely. Semper Fi!

[semaj]

Run a ship out there and scuttle it. Straits blocked.

Ever heard of demolition nukes? Problem solved.

[snowsislander]

With the crisis advancing and the moment of truth approaching, it is important to begin looking now with unflinching honesty at the military option.

It has been long past the time to look at military options with Iran.

Allowing the appeasement-minded Europeans to dawdle over "negotiations" with the madmen running Iran has been a dangerous strategy in my opinion. The only point of those "negotiations" from the Iranian side has been to buy time for them to advance their nuclear program.