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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: Take a bite out of Iran at your peril You'd have thought the reality of Afghanistan and Iraq might act as a break on the instinctive lunge by hawks to compare apples with oranges as they try to gull us into a belief that war is a doddle. Remember the neo-con parsing of the proposed invasion of Iraq as a ''cakewalk'' - to address the ''mushroom cloud'' that Condoleezza Rice saw in Iraq's non-existent nuclear arsenal and Tony Blair's wild warning that Saddam Hussein could unleash a WMD strike in just 45 minutes? It's the same with Iran now. We are being asked to pair a best-case scenario of going to war (neat, surgical strikes; no blood on the ground; and little or no Iranian retaliation) with the worst-case scenario of allowing Tehran to go its nuclear way (become a reckless regional actor; would seek menacing alliances with the likes of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela; and would pass nuclear technology to terrorists). Despite Barack Obama's warning weeks ago that ''now is not the time for bluster,'' the blustering continues apace - in Washington and beyond. In The New York Times on Wednesday, the Israeli commentator Ari Shavit warns that unless there is a strike against Iran this northern summer - that is, in the next several months - ''Israel will lose the military capability to stop the Shiite bomb''. In a 30-minute lobbying video doing the rounds, the evangelical Christian leader Gary Bauer intones: ''I'll be brutally honest - I don't trust the president …. I think his record on Israel is abysmal.'' But American generals have been war-gaming too, and the results are being leaked to reporters. The Pentagon's sophisticated crisis modelling predicts that an Israeli strike on Iran would spark a wider regional war into which the US most likely would be dragged, with hundreds of Americans dead. An initial Israeli attack would slow Iran's nuclear program by maybe a year. Follow-through American strikes might add another two or more years, it concludes. This is the context in which former Bush-era CIA analyst and author Paul Pillar urges caution, inviting serious consideration of the notion that Western acceptance of a nuclear-armed Tehran is a better deal than the aftermath of combined US-Israeli strikes on Iran. Noting that the bellicosity and political rhetoric of the pro-war lobby rested on a foundation of fear, fanciful speculation and crude stereotyping rather than on the rigorous threat analysis that might be expected when the stakes are so high, Pillar writes in the current issue of Washington Monthly: ''An Iran with a bomb would not be anywhere near as dangerous as most people assume, and a war to try to stop it from acquiring one would be less successful and far more costly than most people imagine.'' The popular denunciation of the Iranian leadership as ''religious fanatics who value martyrdom more than life, [who] cannot be counted on to act rationally, and therefore cannot be deterred'' was at odds with more than 30 years of history that demonstrated Iran's rulers were overwhelmingly concerned with preserving their power. ''They are no more likely to let theological imperatives lead them into self-destructive behaviour than other leaders whose religious faiths envision an afterlife,'' Pillar says of men who, he estimates, are constantly balancing a worldly suite of strategic interests. ''Iranian rulers may have a history of valourising martyrdom … but they have never given any indication of wanting to become martyrs themselves. The principles of deterrence are not invalid just because the party to be deterred wears a turban and a beard.'' Drawing out a more logical oranges-with-oranges comparison, Pillar warns that the worst-case ramifications of military force to deter Iran would be catastrophic - ''a regional conflagration involving multiple US allies, sucking in US forces far beyond the initial assault''. He notes a Brookings Institution war games simulation, conducted two years back, in which Iranian retaliation included multiple missile strikes on Saudi Arabia and Israel and a global terrorist campaign against US interests. The pro-war argument rests in part on the assertion that there was no massive retaliation by Saddam Hussein when Israel bombed a nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981 or by Bashar al-Assad when it bombed an installation in Syria in 2007. This, Pillar argues, reveals the apples-and-oranges inconsistency of the argument. ''According to this optimistic view, the same regime that cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon because it is recklessly aggressive and prone to cause regional havoc would suddenly become, once attacked, a model of calm and caution, easily deterred by the threat of further attacks. ''History and human behaviour strongly suggest, however, that any change in Iranian conduct would be exactly the opposite - that as with the Iran-Iraq War, an attack on the Iranian homeland would be one scenario that would motivate Iran to respond zealously - probably [including] terrorism through its own agents as well as proxy groups, other violent reprisals against US forces in the region; and disruption of the exports of other oil producers.'' Racing through the global economic fallout of such a conflict - ''incalculable, but likely to be immense'' - Pillar arrives at his inevitable conclusion: ''In return for all these harmful effects, an attack on Iran would not even achieve the objective of ensuring a nuclear-weapons-free Iran - only a ground invasion and occupation could hope to accomplish that, and not even the most fervent anti-Iranian hawks are talking about that kind of enormous undertaking.'' And after all that, what might happen to the regional balance of power? Pillar concludes: ''Israel would retain overwhelming military superiority with its own nuclear weapons - which international think tanks estimate to number at least 100 and possibly 200.'' ''A war is no picnic,'' Israel's Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, said in November. But then he too offered the implicit mismatched scenarios, predicting that if Israel were to act unilaterally, any retaliation by Iran would be bearable. ''There will not be 100,000 dead or 10,000 dead or 1000 dead - the state of Israel will not be destroyed.'' After all the blood and treasure spent in Afghanistan and Iraq, that could be read as ''cakewalk'' talk - again. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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