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

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.

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.

This article from bloomberg.com has some interesting points. Seems to be a realistic assessment of the situation:

Iran Might Try to Disrupt Hormuz Oil Flow If Attacked by U.S.

By Tony Capaccio

May 5 (Bloomberg) -- Iran may be planning to share the pain of any U.S. attack with the world's oil markets.

A strike against Iran's nuclear program would probably be met with an effort to choke off oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, military planners and Middle East analysts say. The goal would be to trigger a market disruption that would force President George W. Bush to back off.

The Iranians hope the mere threat of such action may lead oil-consuming nations to pressure the U.S. to resolve the dispute short of a military confrontation. About 17 million barrels of oil, representing one-fifth of the world's consumption, is shipped through the strait every day.

Roiling the markets would be part of a broader retaliation that would include terrorist attacks against U.S. forces or other interests in Iraq and worldwide, said Michael Eisenstadt, an Iran expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former Central Command analyst.

``They will not allow us to limit the conflict to `tit for tat' -- us hitting their nuclear facilities, and they restricted to hitting deployed American military,'' Eisenstadt said in an interview.

General John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, said in a written statement to the House Armed Services Committee on March 15 that Iran is expanding naval bases along its shoreline and now has ``large quantities'' of small, fast- attack ships, many armed with torpedoes and Chinese-made high- speed missiles capable of firing from 10,000 yards.

``Iran's capabilities are focusing on disrupting oil traffic through the straits,'' Army Colonel Mark Tillman, a professor at the National Defense University in Washington and former Central Command planner, said in an interview. ``Why else would they have these things?''

Relying on Diplomacy

The Bush administration has said it will rely on diplomacy to persuade Iran to halt its nuclear program, which Iran says is designed to produce electricity but the U.S. suspects is aimed at producing a bomb.

John Bolton, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told Congress on May 2 that those diplomatic efforts so far have been frustrated by Iran's clout as the world's fourth-largest oil supplier.

``The Iranians have been very effective at deploying their oil and natural-gas resources to apply leverage against countries to protect themselves from precisely this kind of pressure, in the case of countries with large and growing energy demands like India, China and Japan,'' Bolton said.

Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, has said his nation won't rule out cutting oil exports in response to pressure over the nuclear dispute.

Rising Prices

Escalation of the dispute has helped to boost oil prices by 17 percent over the past two months. The current price of about $70 reflects potential disruptions over the next six to 18 months, said Jamal Qureshi, lead oil industry analyst for PFC Energy, a risk-analysis firm in Washington.

Even with that, a military conflict would shock the system so ``you'd very likely get a quick spike that could very easily go to $100 a barrel,'' until the U.S. releases oil from its strategic reserve, Qureshi said in an interview. ``It could get messy real quick.''

While Iran probably couldn't close the Strait of Hormuz -- which lies between Iran and Oman and is 34 miles at its narrowest point -- it could cause havoc by threatening or attacking individual oil tankers or terminals, analysts said. Oil from Iran, Iraq, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia is shipped through the Strait.

Iran's Revolutionary Guard-controlled navy ``has been developed primarily to `internationalize' a conflict by choking off oil exports through the Strait,'' Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, told lawmakers.

`Pressure the U.S.'

Kenneth Katzman, a terrorism and Middle East analyst for the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, said that even if Iran can't block the strait, it ``can create a sense of crisis to drive up the price of oil, and presumably'' the nations that consume all that oil ``would pressure the U.S. to stand down or shrink from confrontation or end it quickly,''

Iran supplies China with 4 percent of its oil; France, 7 percent; Korea, 9 percent; Japan, 10 percent; Italy, 11 percent; Belgium, 14 percent; Turkey, 22 percent; and Greece, 24 percent, according to Clifford Kupchan, a director of the Eurasia Group in Washington, a global risk-consulting group.

These figures ``tell me that Iran for the foreseeable future will have considerable `petro-influence' over prospective U.S. allies,'' Kupchan said in an interview.

Terrorist Attacks

Eisenstadt said disrupting world oil markets might not be Iran's ``preferred avenue of response'' if attacked. ``I think they are more likely to respond in Iraq by launching terrorist attacks,'' he said. ``Disrupting oil shipments is a far second or third, but this is something we have to prepare for.''

W. Patrick Lang, formerly the chief Middle East analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said Iran ``could unleash the Shiites en masse in Iraq, and kicking that up would place us in a very different position there. You would have a lot of people out there in the streets with rifles.'' Shiite Muslims make up 89 percent of Iran's population, and are a majority in Iraq.

Rear Admiral Jeffrey Miller, deputy commander of U.S. naval forces in the Gulf, said, the U.S. has ``the capability to keep the straits open and clean them up if that should be required.''

``We understand the importance of keeping all the choke points'' open ``and commerce moving,'' Miller said in a telephone interview May 3 from Manama, Bahrain.

Missiles and Seals

The U.S. has about 45 vessels in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea region, including the USS Ronald Reagan, the Navy's newest aircraft carrier, and five escorts, including the USS Tucson, an attack submarine that can fire new tactical Tomahawk cruise missiles and launch Navy Seal commandos.

Lang said the U.S. military, in a conflict, ``would be all air and naval, with no ground operation.''

``Iran might surprise the U.S. by sinking a tanker in the gulf or something and then the U.S. Navy would beat the bejesus out of them, but they could cause a spike in oil prices for a month or two,'' Lang said in an interview.

To contact the reporter on this story: Tony Capaccio in Washington acapaccio@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: May 5, 2006 00:17 EDT

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