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Lee Smith: How Iranian nukes would reshape the Middle East | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Opinion: Points.

President Barack Obama has promised to “do everything that’s required” to keep Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons – but the fact that “engagement” has given way to new catchwords, like “deterrence” and “containment,” suggests that we may well choose to learn to live with an Iranian bomb. In that case, we will probably see the birth of a new Middle East, but not as we have ever envisioned it.

Today, there is an American-backed regional system, and then there are those – from Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Soviet Union to Osama bin Laden and the Islamists – who are eager to create a new Middle East of their own design.

Since 1944, Saudi Arabia, home of the world’s largest known oil reserves, has been the anchor of the American order, with the other Gulf states and Jordan also safely within our orbit. And so, even after all the apparent upheaval of the last eight years – war, a tenuous democracy in Iraq and more war – the essential structure of the Middle East remained the same.

However, an Iranian nuclear program would rearrange the region’s political, economic and cultural furniture. Therefore, what’s most dangerous is not an Iranian bomb but the new Middle East that would issue from it.

If Iran gets the bomb, other regional powers will pursue nuclear programs – if they are not already doing so. Inevitably in a region as volatile as this, there will be a few small-scale nuclear catastrophes, probably rulers targeting their own people. Saddam Huusein gassed the Kurds and slaughtered the Shiites, Hafez Assad massacred the Sunnis of Hama, and mass graves throughout the region testify to the willingness of Arab rulers to kill their own people; in their hands, a nuclear weapon is merely an upgrade in repressive technology.

Still, it’s extremely unlikely the regimes will use these weapons against their regional rivals. Remember, the main reason these states support nonstate terror groups is to deter each other and thus avoid all-out war.

However, the prospect of states transferring nukes to so-called nonstate actors is a nightmare for the United States, which does not fare well against such tactics. Consider that our response to 9/11 was to use our armed forces to democratize the Middle East. Also, consider that the most convoluted reason for making war against the Taliban is to keep the nukes of a neighboring country out of the hands of its intelligence service’s dangerous elements. That is to say, we cannot even deter Pakistan, our ally.

In the hands of an adversary, an Islamic bomb is concrete evidence that Iran’s strategy of “resistance” to the West is a winning one. And this will change the region’s political culture from radical to many times more radical.

At best, this means that even those U.S.-friendly regimes that have much to fear from “resistance” will have no choice but to raise the pitch of their anti-American rhetoric to stay in step with their rivals – and their populations. Consequently, the basing rights that we have throughout the Gulf states are likely to be terminated.

At worst, an Iranian bomb sends a message to the more ambitious actors in the region that they should feel free to make a run at the Americans. If Tehran showed that it is less profitable to play nicely with Washington than it is to extort the Americans and kill their soldiers and allies, why shouldn’t they do the same? We will not be deterring Iran but inviting the rest of the region to shoot at us.

The one ally that shares our interests and is capable of defending them against Iran and its assets is Israel. Containment requires that the superpower persuade its allies that they should put aside local concerns and look at the big picture; but in this case it is Israel that is focused on Iran while the Obama administration has pecked away at the Netanyahu government over settlements. In Cold War terms, that is as though President Ronald Reagan had directed his “tear down this wall” speech not to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev but to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Instead, Reagan put Pershing missiles at Kohl’s back and pointed them at Moscow.

Still, it is worth noting that our position will not necessarily be secured by an Israeli strike on Iran, for there are some things that need to be done by the alpha dog. Soft power, or what used to be called prestige, is effective only in proportion to how much our hard power is feared by enemies and prized by allies. If we leave Iran to Israel, we are enhancing Jerusalem’s prestige at the expense of our own.

At least all the talk of deterrence and containment should remind us why we fought the Cold War: to protect our way of life, a life sustained by oil. Without cheap oil, the life we came to associate with peace would not have been the same. The Persian Gulf was the Cold War’s strategic grand prize, and that we have held onto it for 65 years is a credit to the design of Washington’s policy of preventing any adversary from breaking out with just the sort of game-changing threat that the Iranian nuclear program represents.

In other words, the American order of the Middle East is containment; its unraveling will not allow for a different form of containment but spells the end of our hegemony in the region.

Human history is nothing but the record of nations that have miscalculated their capacity to project power, the willingness (and ability) of their allies to support them, and the determination of their rivals to reshape the world after their own image. As the debate over Iran policy has devolved from strategy to pop psychology – e.g., the discussion of whether the Iranians are acting rationally – the fact is that no regime consciously wishes to bring its own existence to an end.

And yet states and regimes do nonetheless cease to exist. No sane person believes that the United States is suicidal, but if a nation will not or cannot defend its way of life, it has taken the first step toward its inevitable decline, which is tantamount to suicide.

Lee Smith is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington. His book, “The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations,” will be published in January. A version of this column originally appeared at Slate.com.

This entry was posted on December 5, 2009 at 6:08 AM and is filed under Iran / Israel War. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.