By Wayne White

I’ve been meaning to write about this report on the multifold human costs of militarily striking Iran’s nuclear facilities and am happy to find that it’s already been noted by Golnaz Esfandiari as well as Gordon Lubold, among others. (Marsha Cohen’s well-read Lobe Log post on [...]]]> via Lobe Log

I’ve been meaning to write about this report on the multifold human costs of militarily striking Iran’s nuclear facilities and am happy to find that it’s already been noted by Golnaz Esfandiari as well as Gordon Lubold, among others. (Marsha Cohen’s well-read Lobe Log post on the same topic was the closest thing to such a study that I’ve come across so far.) “The Ayatollah’s Nuclear Gamble” is sponsored by Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics and was authored by Khosrow B. Semnani, an Iranian-American engineer by training and philanthropist. It will be featured this week at a joint event by the Woodrow Wilson Center and the Iran Task Force at the Atlantic Council. With the study Semnani endeavors to scientifically prove something which seems obvious: attacking nuclear facilities in Iran could have devastating effects on possibly hundreds of thousands of Iranians who would be exposed to highly toxic chemical plumes and even radioactive fallout. Case studies were conducted on the Iranian cities of Isfahan, Natanz, Arak, and Bushehr. In Isfahan, a military strike on the nuclear facility there “could be compared to the 1984 Bhopal industrial accident at the Union Carbide plant in India”:

In that accident, the release of 42 metric tons (47 U.S. tons) of methyl isocyanate turned the city of Bhopal into a gas chamber. Estimates of deaths have ranged from 3,800 to 15,000. The casualties went well beyond the fatalities: More than 500,000 victims received compensation for exposure to fumes.

The environmental consequences would also be wide-ranging:

With the high likelihood of soluble uranium compounds permeating into the groundwater, strikes would wreak havoc on Isfahan’s environmental resources and agriculture. The Markazi water basin, one of six main catchment areas, which covers half the country (52%), provides slightly less than one-third of Iran’s total renewable water (29%) (Figure 26). According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the groundwater discharge in the basin from approximately 155,000 wells, 22,000 channels and 13,500 springs is the primary water source for agricultural and residential uses.106 It is almost certain that the contamination of groundwater as a result of strikes would damage this important fresh-water source.

The report also touches on the unintended consequences of militarily striking Iran, such as a “short or prolonged regional war” and explains, as reputable analysts have, why the Israeli strike on Iraq’s Osirak facility is a “false analogy”:

The Osirak analogy is the fantasy that there will be no blowback from strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. It discounts the complexity, severity, scale, consequences, and casualties such an operation would entail. Iran’s nuclear program is not an empty shell, nor is it a single remote target. The facilities in Iran are fully operational, they contain thousands of personnel, they are located near major population centers, they are heavily constructed and fortified, and thus difficult to destroy. They contain tons of highly toxic chemical and radioactive material. To grasp the political and psychological impact of the strikes, what our estimates suggest is that the potential civilian casualties Iran would suffer as a result of a strike — in the first day — could exceed the 6,731 Palestinians and 1,083 Israeli’s reported killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the past decade. The total number of fatalities in the 1981 Osirak raid was 10 Iraqis and one French civilian, Damien Chaussepied.

According to Greg Thielmann of the Arms Control Association, the report makes a “valuable contribution to “colorizing” the bloodless discussions of the “military option.” Thielmann, who formerly worked on assessments of ballistic missile threats at the State Department’s intelligence bureau, told Lobe Log that he had not seen “a more serious look at the medical consequences for the Iranian population” than provided by this report.

While Thielmann calls the report an “impressive effort”, he also offered criticism. “I take strong exception to the author’s introductory assertion that diplomacy with the Islamic Republic “requires a willful act of self-deception,” and that regime change is the only way to achieve an acceptable resolution to the challenges of Iran’s nuclear program,” he said.

Thielmann was also “surprised” that the strike scenario analyzed in the study includes the Bushehr facility, “which is of much less proliferation concern than the other nuclear facilities mentioned, and which, because of the extensive use of Russian personnel in operating the reactor there, would carry high political costs to attack. ”

“Such an attack would also violate Additional Protocol I of the 1949 Geneva Conventions,” said Thielmann, who provided the following excerpt from Article 56 of the 1977 Additional Protocol I:

1. Works and installations containing dangerous forces, namely dams, dykes and nuclear electrical generating stations, shall not be made the object of attack, even where these objects are military objectives, if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population. Other military objectives located at or in the vicinity of these works or installations shall not be made the object of attack if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces from the works or installations and consequent severe losses among the civilian population.

It will be interesting to see whether the report gets mainstream media attention following the Wilson Center event and if it will spark further examination of this integral — but otherwise barely mentioned — aspect of using the “military option” on Iran.

William J. Broad of the New York Times provides a compilation of quotes from experts on Iran’s nuclear program in his report about the growing list of reasons against militarily attacking the country. In short, bombing Iran will spur a bomb-making spree and “unite what is now a fractious state…and build [...]]]> via Lobe Log

William J. Broad of the New York Times provides a compilation of quotes from experts on Iran’s nuclear program in his report about the growing list of reasons against militarily attacking the country. In short, bombing Iran will spur a bomb-making spree and “unite what is now a fractious state…and build an atmosphere of mobilizing rage.”

“People always assume the bad guys want nukes,” says Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear nonproliferation specialist at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. “But I think there’s usually a hesitation about the balance of risk. My sense is that the threat of military action makes bad guys feel like they need the bomb.”

Pakistan’s foreign minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, seemed to have embodied that kind of determination when he said famously in 1965, “If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own.”

Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior nonproliferation official at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a prominent arms analysis group in London, said in an e-mail interview that it was “almost certain” that a military strike on Iran would result in “a Manhattan-style rush to produce nuclear weapons as fast as possible.”

These analysts maintain that the history of nuclear proliferation shows that attempting to thwart a nuclear program through an attack can have consequences opposite of those intended. Mr. Lewis of the Monterey Institute and other experts often cite Iraq. Israel’s attack on the Iraqi Osirak reactor in 1981, they argue, hardened the resolve of Saddam Hussein and gave his nuclear ambitions new life.

News and views relevant to US foreign policy for Sept. 11

“New intelligence on Iran nuke work”: The Associated Press reports that the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) has received intelligence from the United States, Israel and at least two other Western countries showing that Iran has “moved further toward the [...]]]> via Lobe Log

News and views relevant to US foreign policy for Sept. 11

“New intelligence on Iran nuke work”: The Associated Press reports that the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) has received intelligence from the United States, Israel and at least two other Western countries showing that Iran has “moved further toward the ability to build a nuclear weapon”.

“Nuclear Mullahs, Continued”: Bill Keller responds to reader questions about his column that argues against a preemptive war on Iran’s nuclear program:

Q: You say that after an attack, Iran would have strong motivation to rebuild its nuclear facilities, this time faster and deeper underground. But the Israeli attacks on nuclear reactors at Osirak, Iraq, in 1981 and Al-Kibar, Syria, in 2007 were quite successful in keeping those countries non-nuclear.

A: First, Iran’s multiple facilities, well fortified (especially the centrifuges buried deep in the rock at Fordow, near Qom) present a much tougher target than the reactors in Iraq and Syria. Second, and more important, the Osirak attack, far from stopping Iraq’s nuclear ambitions, hastened them. After Israel bombed the reactor, Saddam Hussein launched an accelerated, covert program to manufacture nuclear weapons. When the First Gulf War ended his ambitions in 1991, that program was well underway. Experts disagree how far Saddam was from having a weapon (estimates ranged from six months to three years) but the Israeli strike in Iraq accomplished what many fear a strike in Iran would accomplish: it gave the nuclear weapons program new life. Third, Israel’s attack on the (suspected) nuclear reactor in Syria was kept secret for a long time, so that Syria did not feel obliged to undertake reprisals against the superior Israeli military. It’s inconceivable that Iran and the world would not know whom to hold responsible for an attack on its facilities, and Iranian leaders would have to lash back, if only to save face. Fourth, what ended Iraq’s nuclear ambitions was a full-scale military invasion in 1991 – followed by an (unnecessary and botched) occupation in 2003. No doubt, occupying Iran would solve the problem of its nuclear program. Anybody up for that?

“Former CIA Chief: Obama’s War on Terror Same as Bush’s, But With More Killing”: Wired reports that Michael Hayden has offered words of praise for President Obama’s counterterrorism agenda after initially criticizing the POTUS’s early comments against programs Hayden helped formulate under George W. Bush, such as the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques and domestic wiretapping:

“But let me repeat my hypothesis: Despite the frequent drama at the political level, America and Americans have found a comfortable center line in what it is they want their government to do and what it is they accept their government doing. It is that practical consensus that has fostered such powerful continuity between two vastly different presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, when it comes, when it comes to this conflict,” Hayden said Friday while speaking at the University of Michigan.

….

But Hayden, in a nearly 80-minute lecture posted on C-Span, said Obama came to embrace Bush’s positions. Both Bush and Obama said the country was at war. The enemy was al-Qaida. The war was global in nature. And the United States would have to take the fight to the enemy, wherever it may be, he said.

“The Deafness Before the Storm”: Vanity Fair’s Kurt Eichenwald delivers a bombshell report in the New York Times on the 11^th anniversary of the September 11^th attacks arguing that the Bush Administration had received multiple warnings prior to August 2001 from the CIA about Osama bin Laden’s intent and capabilities to attack US targets. According to Eichenwald, the White House dismissed the agency’s sources as agents “in” on a maskirovka directed by both Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden:

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.

…

“The U.S. is not the target of a disinformation campaign by Usama Bin Laden,” the daily brief of June 29 read, using the government’s transliteration of Bin Laden’s first name. Going on for more than a page, the document recited much of the evidence, including an interview that month with a Middle Eastern journalist in which Bin Laden aides warned of a coming attack, as well as competitive pressures that the terrorist leader was feeling, given the number of Islamists being recruited for the separatist Russian region of Chechnya.

“Iraqi Spokesman: Al-Hashemi Is ‘Connected Directly’ To Terrorists”: Al-Monitor interviews Iraqi Government spokesman Ali Aldabbagh on the in absentia death sentence against the country’s Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi and the ongoing oil revenues dispute between Baghdad and the Kurdish north. The wide-ranging interview also touched on Iran-Iraq relations, including an oblique reference to reports that the US is pressuring Iraq to do more to undermine Iranian assistance to the Syrian regime:

Al-Monitor:  The US has asked Iraq to inspect Iranian planes flying to Syria to prevent arms and material from reaching the Syrian government. Is this a reasonable request? Will the government of Iraq consider doing so?

Aldabbagh:  The US never asked [us] to do so, but it is our commitment not to allow the flow of arms or fighters to both parties in Syria. We had informed the Iranians that Iraq will never [allow the] use [of] its airspace to do so. Iraq is ready to be part of international efforts to stop any arms to Syria. We protect our borders from [allowing the flow of] any equipment or fighters to or from Syria. Iraq is totally committed to these principles. The US had satisfied with Iraq measures toward Syria.

Al-Monitor:  How do you assess Iraq-Iran relations? Does your relationship with Iran complicate your ties with the United States, as in the case of Syria?

Aldabbagh:  Never, on the contrary. The US understands that Iraq should maintain good relations with Iran, as we [have] been mediating between them. Even with the Syrians, we differ on some issues with US, while we agree and have the same ideas on some Syrian aspects. Such differences never affect our relations — the US respects Iraq sovergnity [sic] in building relations with others.

I haven’t read the book yet, [...]]]> Steven Simon, Adjunct Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Dana Allin, Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Affairs at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, just came out with a new book called The Sixth Crisis: Iran, Israel, America and the Rumors of War.

I haven’t read the book yet, but got an overview from the authors on Monday at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. What seems to be remarkable about the book is that Allin and Simon — from the U.K. and Washington’s establishment think tanks – wrote it.  And their views are eminently reasonable.

Take this statement from Allin: “War with Iran would be a mistake, not just bad or tragic, but a mistake in the sense that it would be worse than not going to war.”

That was just the launching point.

Allin and Simon gave a frank talk — at a Congressionally-funded establishment think tank, no less — about the need to reevaluate the direction of U.S. policy toward Iran. Namely, because war is worse than not going to war, they think that perhaps it’s time to address “containment” as a potential policy.

“The U.S. will have to build and rely on a regime of contaiment aginst Iran, whether or not it succeeds in building a nuclear weapon,” Allin said.

Containment means two things: 1) Living with a potentially nuclear Iran; and 2) making sure the Israeli-Palestinian conflict stops being the gift that keeps on giving for Iran — that is, contra Israeli and neoconservative statements, linkage is very much a concern.

“In thinking about containment, there is an important element of linkage to the Israel-Palestine issue,” said Allin. He quoted Mark Heller, an Israeli researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, who told the New York Times over the weekend that linkage is “a total illusion.” But Allin said Heller’s construction was setting up a “straw man.” Allin responded that if Heller wants to talk about “illusions,” it is also appropriate to speak of “delusions”:

It is a delusion to deny that there are things Israel can do and has been doing that makes the US ‘s challenges in the Middle East more difficult… The building of settlements in the Occupied Territories is near the top of the list.

Containment, as constructed by Allin and Simon, is not some policy of quiescence to all Iranian demands. Rather it’s a multi-pronged strategy of conventional power, nuclear superiority, and political deterrent. As Allin said, their plan is intentionally ambiguous about whether it seeks to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon or using one once it does — because the plan seeks to do both.

However, containment presupposes a rational actor in Iran — something Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with all his blustering about the “tyrants of Tehran” and the “messianic apocalyptic cult” that is the government, might be loathe to accept.

Nonetheless, Simon explicitly does not view Iran this way:

I think I’m speaking for both of us here: We tend to see Iranian foreign policy as essentially cautious and opportunistic… We tend less to see the Iranians as doing something really outrageous. Against this background of caution and opportunism, they can do some nutty things.

Simon went on to say that, obviously, the Israeli calculus is that a nuclear armed Iran will be emboldened to do even more “nutty things.”

“When we talk about an undeterrable, crazy, messianic regime, it is a little scary to acknowledge those elements,” added Allin. “On the other hand, it doesn’t mean that we throw strategic cost benefit out the window.”

And therein lies the rub: Simon and Allin didn’t take on the usual mantra that U.S. and Israeli interests dovetail perfectly — instead, there was a brutally honest discussion of where they diverge, bringing linkage back into the fold.

“The respective issues of Israel and Palestine and what to do about the Iranian nuclear question raise questions about what are the reciprocal obligations of allies,” said Allin. “Jerusalem does not trust Washington when Washington says that a nuclear Iran is unacceptable, particularly because there are now people in this city, like now [Simon] and I, who are writing that the U.S. may have to live with a nuclear Iran.”

“There are differing threat perceptions at work,” acknowledged Simon. “At the end of the day, Iran is simply not as threatening to the U.S. as Israel. This differential threat perception is something that concerns Israelis quite a lot.”

“The second [issue] is a gap between U.S. redlines and Israeli redlines on the Iranian nuclear program. It seems that at the moment, our red line is a breakout capability and their red line is an enrichment capability,” he went on.

Allin added: “We hedge it and we’re mushy in the end, but we do argue that our version of redlines include weaponization” — or taking the actual step of turning a breakout capability into a nuclear weapon.

It’s worth noting the Israeli red line posited here — enrichment — has already been (and continues to be) transgressed by the Iranians. What exactly would drive Israel to act militarily against Iran to enforce an end to enrichment? Or, as Simon put it: “The question is: under what circumstances do they do it?”

“There’s a poster that is ubiquitous in the Israeli Defense Ministry and Air Force (offices) of Israeli warplanes overflying Auschwitz,” he said. ”This is a useful image to have in mind when you think about how Israelis view the stakes.”

The first Israeli consideration, said Simon, would be what the U.S. thought about an attack — it’s not in the interest of any Israelis to “fundamentally alienate the U.S.” That said, Simon acknowledged the possibility that Israel could nonetheless take action that “would disappoint any U.S. administration” — noting that former President George W. Bush opposed an Israeli attack on Iran during his tenure at the White House.

Secondly, said Simon, Israel has its own cost-benefit analysis: “Israelis would have to think that they’re going to get three to five years relief out of a raid. That is to say that they’d push back the Iranian (nuclear) program three to five years before having to go back and mow the lawn.”

But many analysts think an airstrike against Iran’s nuclear facilities would delay the program less than three years, due to the dispersal of Iranian nuclear assets and the difficulty in simultaneously wiping them out. Furthermore, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates noted, an attack on Iran “will make them absolutely committed to obtaining nuclear weapons.” Many analysts think that, absent an attack, the Iranian regime will stop short of a weapon and be satisfied with a breakout capability.

Simon added three further conditions for an Israeli strike: that diplomacy had run its course (in order to protect what’s left of Israel’s international standing); that no one else (i.e., the United States) was going to strike; and that the prospects for regime change in Iran become very dim, meaning so too would prospects for a regime that is less threatening even with bombs.

Simon added, “Historically Israel has acted when it sees its back against the wall. In 1981 (attack on Iraqi reactor) and (a 2007 strike on a Syrian facility) are examples of this. Each of these bold military moves took place when the Israeli cabinet sees their backs as against the wall.” Simon said the U.S. should try to “keep them from feeling this way.”

And how to do this? The aforementioned “containment regime,” for one. But there is also another tack that hasn’t been fully tried — and can’t be tried in ernest amid military threats (despite the latest version of an old canard that Arabs only understand force, as articulated by Netanyahu’s calls for a “credible threat of military action” to back up diplomacy).

“There is an argument you hear made that real game-changing engagement with Iran has not yet been tried,” said Allin. “That might be true. If you wanted real game-changing engagement with Iran you wouldn’t be talking about military options and tightening the noose of economic sanctions.”

The truth is, while hawks portray airstrikes as a kind of magic bullet that can end the Iranian nuclear [...]]]> In his speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Sen. Joe Lieberman made a small concession. “[T]he use of military force is not the ‘ideal way’ to stop the Iranian nuclear program,” he said.

The truth is, while hawks portray airstrikes as a kind of magic bullet that can end the Iranian nuclear program, it is indeed a less than ‘ideal’ plan — it may not work at all.

Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg wrote, in his August story, that even the Israelis are convinced that an attack might only temporarily set back the Iranian program: “[T]hey believe they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years.” Many experts estimate the length of the delay will be even less.

Goldberg cited the 1981 Israeli attack on Iraq’s secret Osirak nuclear facility as an example of a successful attack: “In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting—forever, as it turned out—Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions.” (Glenn Greenwald notes Goldberg made the opposite claim in the run up to the Iraq war: Hussein’s program never ended.)

The “success” of the Osirak attack is a common theme among neoconservatives. The Hudson Institute cited the strike in a January 2010 report urging the U.S. to support an Israeli attack on Iran and to prepare for the resulting wider war.

At the Progressive Realist blog, Louisville professor and blogger Rodger Payne lines up a number of academic and other studies that challenge this conclusion. Here’s an excerpt of one (PDF):

The 1981 Israeli aerial striike on Iraqi nuclear facilities at Osiraq is frequently cited as a successful use of preventive military force, and may be used to justify similar attacks in the future. However, closer examination of the Osiraq attack reveals that it did not substantially delay the Iraqi nuclear program, and may have even hastened it. Attempts to replicate the “success” at Osiraq are likely to do even worse, as proliferating states are now routinely dispersing and concealing their nuclear, biological, and chemical programs to decrease their vulnerability to air strikes. Given the poor track record of preventive attacks in controlling the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, American interests will be best served in the future by embracing other tools of counterproliferation.

Most honest appraisals of a potential military strike against Iran’s nuclear program admit that it may only be a setback for the alleged weapons program — if it works at all.

“Numerous analysts doubt that Israel is capable of carrying out a successful strike,” Matt Duss wrote this summer, lining up experts.

A study by a British think-tank this summer concluded, according to Haaretz, that “[a]n Israeli attack on Iran would be the start of a protracted conflict that would be unlikely to prevent the eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran and might even encourage it.”

Even if the U.S. — as Lieberman wants — carries out a strike with its more advanced weaponry and planes, the results will likely be the same. There’s no reason to expect that U.S. intelligence or technological abilities are so much greater than Israel’s that a U.S. attack on the Iranian nuclear program would be decisive.

This is something Duss and I have harped on as of late: not only would an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities be no “cakewalk,” but like the Osirak attack, it probably will not accomplish its ostensible longer-term objectives.