We may have a winner in the contest for the most distressing op-ed ever run by The New York Times. Benny Morris, a revered left-leaning Israeli historian, explains, in a certain tone, how upcoming Israel-Iran brinkmanship will play out. First, Israel will launch a conventional air strike on Iran’s nuclear sites, probably before the U.S. presidential inauguration. It probably won’t be enough to fully halt Iran’s presumed bomb progress. And Iran will retaliate against Israel, striking cities (maybe with nasty chemical or biological weapons) and egging on terrorists. So, with both countries badly battered, and Iran’s program ongoing — and perhaps hastened — what comes next?
Such a situation would confront Israeli leaders with two agonizing, dismal choices. One is to allow the Iranians to acquire the bomb and hope for the best — meaning a nuclear standoff, with the prospect of mutual assured destruction preventing the Iranians from actually using the weapon. The other would be to use the Iranian counterstrikes as an excuse to escalate and use the only means available that will actually destroy the Iranian nuclear project: Israel’s own nuclear arsenal.
Given the fundamentalist, self-sacrificial mindset of the mullahs who run Iran, Israel knows that deterrence may not work as well as it did with the comparatively rational men who ran the Kremlin and White House during the cold war. They are likely to use any bomb they build, both because of ideology and because of fear of Israeli nuclear pre-emption. Thus an Israeli nuclear strike to prevent the Iranians from taking the final steps toward getting the bomb is probable. The alternative is letting Tehran have its bomb. In either case, a Middle Eastern nuclear holocaust would be in the cards.
No matter what, “Middle Eastern nuclear holocaust”! Sounds great.
That is, unless Iran doesn’t have a leadership corps of, quote, “fundamentalist, self-sacrificial … mullahs” willing to exchange their lives, and those of millions of innocent Iranians, for the sake of destroying Israel. So this ultimately unknowable question—is Iran deterable?—remains the biggest on the table. But if they are, Morris’s first scenario, as unpleasant as a volatile region balanced on the uneasy tightrope of mutually agreed destruction may be, clearly has a lot more to speak for it.
So let’s see a new round of serious press exploration of that topic in both the opinion and hard news arenas. (One template could be this clear-headed look at the true power of President Ahmadinejad vis-a-vis the ruling Ayatollah Khamenei that the Times ran on the eve of the former’s New York visit.) If Morris’s predicted timeline is anything close to right, Americans need the information to make up our minds as best we can. And we need it urgently.
The American NIE says that Iran stopped all work (what little there was) on nuclear weapons in 2003. Iran is currently subject to IAEA inspections both under the NNPT and the "additional protocols" it voluntarily signed. Even if Iran were to work on a nuclear bomb program, it would probably be years before they could test one, and additional years before they had a "hardened" (i.e. secure to ride in a missile) version in any sufficient number of warheads.
I was, and remain, a constant critic of the war in Iraq, but there is a chance that the real reason Iran stopped working on its nuclear bomb was because America invaded Iraq over WMD.
There have been numerous false press reports, usually from unnamed American diplomats associated with the United Nations, about Iranian progress on a nuclear bomb. A couple I recall include swabs of highly enriched uranium (HEU, weapons grade) found in Iranian equipment. Arms Control Today magazine, months later, says that the Iranian and Pakistani explanation, that it was leftover from when Pakistan was using the equipment, is consistent with every other fact and the likely story. Another story, repeatedly trumpeted in the press, was about a laptop with portions of design for a nuclear warhead. I will start by saying that most nuclear work is done in English. But how come there was not one word in Farsi on the whole laptop? There is every reason to be suspicious of this piece of "evidence."
In fact, there hasn't been a new shred of evidence in years except what the Iranians themselves have presented (e.g. a tunnel system, their early 1990s very limited experimentation with plutonium).
Since there isn't one major media outlet which deals with this issue in a sane manner, addressing the facts and the repetition of false allegations from people associated with the administration, and there are media outlets repeating crazy stories about Iran in Venezuela (outside of VCRISIS, that story does not exist), we can only expect that the American people, and the people of the world, will again suffer for the delusions of the American people and their government, delusions pawned off on them by a national media that is one of: stupid, ignorant, duped, or evil.
Posted by JoshNarins![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.cjr.org/nav-commenters.gif)
on Sat 19 Jul 2008 at 05:57 PM