If you recall, [...]]]>
]]>If you recall, Matthew Kroenig and Colin Kahl, both recently-departed Obama administration officials, noted that if Iran were to install advanced centrifuge designs in the deeply-buried Fordow facility, then Western officials would need to consider taking military action against that site. Kroenig said such a move by Iran would mean “the United States must strike immediately or forfeit its last opportunity to prevent Iran from joining the nuclear club.”
I viewed this as an unreasonable redline to draw, since Iran is already operating next-generation centrifuges at its other enrichment facility and that moving IR-2m or IR-4 machines into Fordow wouldn’t fundamentally alter the nature of Iran’s nuclear weapons potential in the same way that, say, a decision to start stockpiling weapons-grade uranium would. But I then got to thinking: wouldn’t more advanced centrifuges at the Qom site mean Iran could breakout quicker — possibly even in the 2-3 months between IAEA inspections? That would, after all, fundamentally alter the state of play on the nuclear issue, and probably would necessitate some deep thinking in Washington and Tel Aviv.
So let’s figure out what we’re really dealing with here.
In his latest entry, Disney recounts a classroom visit from James Woolsey, the [...]]]>
In his latest entry, Disney recounts a classroom visit from James Woolsey, the neoconservative former CIA chief, who called engagement with Iran “worse than worthless.”
Woolsey hauls out the “appeasement” argument — saying the United States must choose between being Chamberlin or Churchill, implicitly casting Iran as Hitler. Never-you-mind that Winston Churchill said, in 1950, that “appeasement has its place in all policy.”
Nonetheless, Woolsey calls for regime change in Tehran by “total, worldwide sanctions” that will turn the population against its leaders.
Disney replies that it’s unlikely sanctions will do anything other than eventually lead to war between the U.S. and Iran.
Here’s Disney’s version of events:
]]>James Woolsey, speaking with a group of Yale students last week, said that engagement with Iran’s current rulers is “worse than worthless.” The former Clinton administration official and current Jackson Institute senior fellow explained that the only way to resolve the conflict over Iran’s nuclear program is to impose “total, worldwide sanctions” that completely isolate Iran’s financial and banking sectors. ”You have to break the regime,” he said.
Woolsey cited a column he wrote for the National Review last June in which he compared the Iranian regime to Germany from 1933-39 — the period during which Hitler’s Nazi Party rose to power.
- We may still have an opportunity to keep “engagement” from becoming the “appeasement” of our time, a synonym for “weakness leading to war.” The key determinant is whether our leaders decide to use Chamberlain or Churchill as their model of statesmanship.
Even a worldwide sanctions regime would likely not cause Tehran to change its mind about the nuclear program, he admitted, but it could lead to an uprising that sweeps away the ruling system. ”I would be much less concerned about the nuclear program if the nature of the regime were changed,” he told our group of students.
Speaking only for myself, I found Woolsey’s stubbornness about diplomatic engagement with Iran short-sighted. He set as a precondition for American diplomacy a fundamental change in the nature of Iran’s regime. Yet his proposed alternative – heavy sanctions — would likely do nothing more than put the United States and Iran on a collision course toward the worst of all possible outcomes.
The MEK, which, along with its political front group, the National Council for Resistance in [...]]]>
The MEK, which, along with its political front group, the National Council for Resistance in Iran (NCRI), had representatives at the presser, claims it discovered the site through an “internal network of sources” in Iran.
But the source of the information — the MEK is listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department — and the group’s affiliation and promotion by U.S. neoconservatives pushing hard-line policies towards Iran are reasons for skepticism. Both the State Department and independent experts have raised several alarms about the reliability of the MEK’s claims.
While in the past, official U.S. sources have been willing to confirm information made public by the MEK, the State Department today told Fox News it would “study” the information, which included satellite images, and noted the MEK’s mixed record. “The MEK has made pronouncements about Iranian facilities in the past — some accurate, some not,” State spokesman P.J. Crowley told Fox. Indeed, the MEK was the first to reveal the existence of an Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz.
Some independent experts are also skeptical. While the MEK claims that the site has been under construction for five years — to the tune of $100 million — with tunnels being built for centrifuges. One expert, speaking to the Washington Post‘s “Checkpoint” national security blog, noted that underground facilities are not synonymous with centrifuge work:
“We saw nothing in the images that suggests a centrifuge plant,” said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security. “There are many underground facilities in Iran.”
At his new blog, former National Iranian American Council assistant policy director Patrick Disney lays out a host of reasons to be skeptical about the new claims about Iran’s nuclear program from the MEK. (Disney’s piece is worth checking out in full.)
Far from being a “leading Iranian opposition” group — as the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, in its article about the new revelations, called the group — Disney casts doubts on the MEK’s ability to cultivate its “network of sources” in the Islamic Republic:
Long recognized as a terrorist entity, the MEK has been responsible for the killing of numerous Iranian and American civilians since the 1970s. Its cult-like membership maintains close to zero support among the Iranian people — a consequence of the group’s siding with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War. Thus, it is unlikely that the MEK’s networks in Iran are extensive enough to obtain credible evidence of any such nuclear facilities.
As for the Iran Policy Committee, the group has long called for U.S.-sponsored regime change in Iran, but with the caveat that such an effort be led by Iranians, specifically the MEK. The plan is something akin to the neoconservative emphasis on using the now-disgraced Ahmad Chalabi (since accused of being an Iranian spy) and his Iraqi National Congress exile opposition group to install a new government in Iraq.
Raymond Tanter, who founded and co-chairs the IPC, is a former fellow of the Hudson Institute and a current adjunct scholar at the AIPAC-formed Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Tanter has, for years, lobbied power-centers in Washington — with some success on Capitol Hill – to remove the MEK from U.S. terror lists and use them to conduct a cross-border insurgency against Iran from Iraq, where the MEK has been based.
Another IPC director is retired Gen. Thomas McInerney, who chairs the group’s advisory committee. An über hawk, McInerney has argued, among other things, that the U.S. ought to invade Syria in order to find the weapons of mass destruction that he alleges Saddam Hussein smuggled there before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. McInerney, a Fox News analyst who also sits on the military committee of Frank Gaffney‘s neocon Center for Security Policy, was recently exposed by Talking Points Memo as a supporter of the “birther” conspiracy that alleges, despite replete evidence to the contrary, that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. and is therefore ineligible to be president.
Is this unlikely marriage of accused terrorists and neoconservatives — both with mixed-if-not-poor records on intelligence in the Mid East — really where the U.S. wants to be getting its information about developments in Iran?
]]>Abedin writes:
]]>A top priority for the IRGC high command is to respond so harshly and decisively so as to deter the Americans from a second set of strikes at a future point. The idea here is to avoid what happened to Iraq in the period , when the former Baathist regime was so weakened by sanctions and repeated small-scale military attacks that it quickly collapsed in the face of American and British invading armies.
The range of predictable responses available to the IRGC high command include dramatic hit ad run attacks against military and commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf, the use of mid-range ballistic missiles against American bases in the region and Israel and a direct assault on American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. All these options are likely to be used within 48 hours of the start of hostilities.
What is less predictable is the response of the IRGC Qods Force, which is likely to be at the forefront of the Pasdaran’s counter-attack. One possible response by the Qods force is spectacular terrorist-style attacks against American intelligence bases and assets throughout the region. The IRGC Qods Force is believed to have identified every key component of the American intelligence apparatus in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan. They are likely to put this information to good use, especially since the Qods Force suspects that the CIA had a hand in last October’s Jundullah-organised suicide bombing targeting IRGC commanders in Iran’s volatile Sistan va Baluchistan province.
The IRGC navy will also play a key asymmetrical role in the conflict by organising maritime suicide bombings on an industrial scale. By manning its fleet of speedboats with suicide bombers and ramming them into American warships and even neutral commercial shipping, the Pasdaran will hope to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which nearly 40 percent of world crude oil supplies pass.
The combination of these asymmetrical forms of warfare with more conventional style missile and even ground force attacks on American bases in the region will likely result in thousands of American military casualties in the space of a few weeks. The IRGC has both the will and wherewithal to inflict a level of casualties on American armed forces not seen since the Second World War.
Even if the United States manages to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and much of the country’s military assets, the IRGC can still claim victory by claiming to have given the Americans a bloody nose and producing an outcome not dissimilar from the Israeli-Hezbollah military engagement in the summer of 2006.
The political effect of this will likely be even more explosive than the actual fighting. Not only will it awaken the sleeping giant of Iranian nationalism, thus aligning the broad mass of the people with the regime, it will also shore up Iran’s image in the region and prove once and for all that the Islamic Republic is prepared to fight to the death to uphold its principles. Suddenly Iran’s allies in the region – particularly non-state actors like Hezbollah and Hamas – would stand ten feet tall.
(Ali discussed the increasingly hawkish rhetoric coming out of the Council on Foreign Relations [...]]]>
(Ali discussed the increasingly hawkish rhetoric coming out of the Council on Foreign Relations in his blog post Monday.)
Disney’s critical analysis of Takeyh and Simon’s article concludes that a bombing campaign of the type proposed by the CFR scholars would have disastrous effects.
Disney writes:
First, there is no military option short of a full-blown invasion and occupation. Even if all of Iran’s nuclear facilities can be located, and even if they can all be destroyed with surgical air strikes, the ruling hardliners will just rebuild them — only this time without the contraints of the IAEA.
Indeed, no proposed air strike would permanently destroy Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions and would probably exacerbate already tense U.S.-Iran and Iran-Israel relations.
He continues:
Secondly, and most disappointingly, Takeyh and Simon’s analysis totally ignores the devastating impact an attack would have on the long-term prospect of democracy in Iran. Iranians last summer took to the streets in the most passionate outbreak of popular dissatisfaction since the 1979 revolution. Those who know their history viewed the events of last year as the latest step in Iran’s democratic evolution — a process that began over 100 years ago with the constitutional revolution of 1906. Although the street protests have died down and the democracy movement is in some disarray, it is clearly still a factor in Iran. Unfortunately, dropping bombs on Iran now is the surest way to uproot any hope for peaceful democratic change in the country. The hardliners will most likely use an act of foreign aggression as justification for a brutal crackdown, and the focus of political discourse will shift away from questions of internal reforms and regime legitimacy toward external threats and the need to rally the nation’s defenses.
While Takeyh and Simon may have the luxury of discussing their hypothetical best-case scenarios for bombing Iran, Disney draws a believably dismal picture of what a U.S. or Israeli military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities might bring.
An Iranian regime which has quit the IAEA, crushed its domestic opposition and turned its nuclear program into a symbol of avenging the countless deaths from an Israeli or American air strike is a frightening thought, but one which — no thanks to alarmists such as Takeyh and Simon — could become a reality.
Disney concludes:
]]>With the anti-Iran rhetoric at a fever pitch in Washington, it’s easy to forget sometimes just how remote of a threat Iran’s nuclear program actually is. According to numerous unclassified assessments by the U.S. Intelligence Community, Iran has not yet decided to pursue a nuclear bomb, and the US and international community still has time to convince them not to. The three to five years an attack would gain now will most certainly not be worth the cost it would incur: a non-democratic Iran with an overt nuclear weapons program and a vendetta against Western powers who attacked it.