"An American bombing campaign would surely rally the Iranian people behind the radical Islamic government and the nuclear program, with those effects multiplied exponentially if the Pentagon itself resorted to nuclear weapons in the name of trying to stop Iran from building nuclear bombs."
The New York Times | Editorial/Tuesday 11 April 2006
Iraq shows just how badly things can go wrong when an administration rashly embraces simple military solutions to complicated problems, shutting its ears to military and intelligence professionals who turn out to be tragically prescient. That lesson has yet to be absorbed by the Bush administration, which is now reportedly honing plans for airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
Congress and the country need to ask the administration just what is going on, and just what it hopes to accomplish by this latest saber rattling.
If the administration's real goal is to change minds in Iran and energize diplomacy, it is not going about it in a very smart way. If, instead, it intends to proceed with a bombing campaign when and if diplomacy fails, Congress and the public need to force the kind of serious national debate that never really took place before the American invasion of Iraq.
Routine contingency planning goes on all the time in the Pentagon, but the discussions on Iran seem to have progressed beyond this level, with high administration officials pushing the process and dropping indirect hints of possible future American military action in language that sometimes recalls statements made before the invasion of Iraq.
The Washington Post reports that two main options are being seriously considered - a limited strike against Iranian nuclear-related sites or a broader campaign against a wider range of military and political targets. The planners are also looking at ways America could use tactical nuclear weapons to penetrate Iran's heavily reinforced underground uranium enrichment complex at Natanz. The British government is said to take Washington's planning exercises seriously enough to have worked out security arrangements for its own diplomats and citizens in the event of American air attacks.
War with Iran would be reckless folly, especially with most of America's ground forces tied up in Iraq, where they are particularly vulnerable to retaliation from Iran and its Iraqi Shiite allies. Nor is there any guarantee that such a conflict would remain limited to airstrikes. Bombing alone probably cannot destroy all of Iran's nuclear facilities, some of which are underground and fortified, and possibly others in unknown locations.
In fact, Iran already has much of the material and know-how to make nuclear bombs, and is believed to be about 10 years away from building them. The best hope for avoiding a nuclear-armed Iran lies in encouraging political evolution there over the next decade. It is important to make clear to the Iranian people that they have no need for nuclear weapons and would actually be better off without them.
Years of frustrating diplomacy have not managed to deflect Iran's nuclear ambitions, but American airstrikes are not likely to either. The best they could hope to achieve is delay, but that result would be far outweighed by the likely consequences.
An American bombing campaign would surely rally the Iranian people behind the radical Islamic government and the nuclear program, with those effects multiplied exponentially if the Pentagon itself resorted to nuclear weapons in the name of trying to stop Iran from building nuclear bombs.
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