Defense Secretary Gates points out obvious problems with Iran strategy
Defense Secretary Gates points out obvious problems with Iran strategy.
This past week, a secret memo from the Secretary of Defense to the president, written in January, was leaked to several government officials. In the 3 page memorandum, Gates reportedly expresses his concerns with the lack of viable options regarding Iran’s nuclear program and laments what he sees as a lack of a long term strategy in dealing with the Islamic republic.
The memo was written at a critical stage regarding the issue. In many ways, Iran is in a very strong Geo-political situation. They claim their nuclear program is only for peaceful energy purposes, but the rhetoric and evasions of inspections and controls speak to an alternative use. The Iranian government is playing both sides of the issue, and it is clear that they are attempting to use their capability to produce a nuclear weapon (which analysts say they won’t be able to do for several years) as a deterrence to American attack.
The ambiguity of the Iranian nuclear program echoes the ‘no comment’ policy of Israel, a nation that is estimated to have upwards of 3-4 hundred warheads. With the prospect of a nuclear Iran on the horizon, Israel believes that they face an existential threat. If Iran is nuclear, the terrorist attacks on Israel from Hezbollah and Hamas will only intensify, as any Israeli response would then be tempered by the possibility of an attack from Tehran.
Tehran may just be boasting about their capabilities on the nuclear front when they say they can ‘wipe Israel off the face of the Earth’, a tactic that is akin to Saddam Hussein’s evasion of UN weapons inspectors in the run up to the Iraq war. Iraq didn’t want any of their neighbors to know they no longer held the WMD capability they once held, so they bluffed the UN into thinking they were hiding weapons. It didn’t work out the way they planned it.
But Iran is much different than Iraq. With American forces tied down in two adjoining nations, any attack from Israel or America against the hardened nuclear facilities would be met with a multi-faceted military response that would put those troops in grave danger. Although no options have been ‘taken off the table’, no real military option exists. Even a massively successful strike that pushed back the nuclear program by years would result in major economic and military retaliation.
The reality is that unless there is a regime change in Iran that is very pro-West, the world is probably going to have to accept a nuclear Iran. The extreme improbability of that happening makes any strategy a no-win. A foreign operation to remove the regime would unify Iran and spark a regional war as Iran would use its missile arsenal to disrupt oil shipping and probably attack Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Secretary Gates knows this, President Obama knows this, and so does most of the rest of the world. Sanctions are supposedly on the horizon for Iran, but they will do nothing to stop their march towards the nuclear club. Iran will continue to fight Israel via Hezbollah and Hamas, with a likely hot war sometime this summer in Lebanon and possibly Syria. This gives them more time to produce weapons, or at least make everyone believe they are doing so. But it is a very tight rope they walk. With Israel distracted and continuing to be weakened by constant pressure on all sides, the desperation might set in and they may decide to go it alone and strike Iran before they pass their perceived existential point of no return.
None of the prospects look viable at this point. A lasting Middle East peace treaty would help, but Iranian factions have no interest in co-existing with Israel
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