WarSclerotic

Pierre Atlas: All anxious eyes on Iran | The Indianapolis Star | indystar.com.

Iran’s determination to acquire the technology to create nuclear weapons poses a global threat. While it may be “rational” for Iran to want nuclear weapons — given its geography and the presence of U.S. forces in the region — the extreme belligerence of the Islamic regime makes any such desires highly dangerous and destabilizing.

According to last month’s report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran has conducted computer simulations of nuclear explosions and has been developing designs for nuclear detonators and for attaching nuclear warheads to missiles. Given Iran’s extensive uranium enrichment and nuclear research and development programs, and its years of duplicity toward the IAEA and the international community, it is highly likely that Iran is seeking the capacity to build nuclear weapons. The idea of Iran armed with “nukes” makes many people nervous.

From the moment the Islamic Republic of Iran was founded in 1979, it has identified Israel as its enemy. Iran funds, arms and trains Hezbollah in Lebanon and is a major source of support for Hamas in Gaza — militant Islamist groups that are committed to Israel’s destruction. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is well known for his outrageous threats to remove Israel from the map. Even if his words are just empty rhetoric, given the tense atmosphere, they feed into the belief in Israel and elsewhere that Iran seeks to acquire nuclear weapons in order to attack the Jewish state. Israel views Iran as an existential threat, and that is why the current as well as previous Israeli governments have contemplated the possibility of military strikes to prevent — or at least delay — Iran from acquiring nukes.

Israel is not the only country in the region that fears a nuclear Iran. Many Sunni Arab leaders believe that Iran’s radical Shiite regime is trying to establish a “Shiite Crescent” across the Arab world, stretching from the Persian Gulf and Iraq to Lebanon. As bad as Saddam Hussein was, Iraq had been the main deterrent to Iran. As a retired Jordanian general asked me in Amman several years ago, “Who is going to deter Iran now? Is the U.S. going to stay in Iraq forever?” Today, with U.S. forces withdrawing from Iraq, the general’s apprehension rings even more true. Sunni fears of Iran sparked Saudi Arabia’s decision a few months ago to send troops into Bahrain (which is 70 percent Shiite) to help Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy crush the largely Shiite pro-reform movement there. A nuclear-armed Iran would be all the more intimidating.

It is widely believed that Israel has possessed nuclear weapons since the mid-1960s. This decades-old reality has not caused instability in the region. But should Iran come closer to acquiring nuclear weapons, major Arab states and perhaps Turkey may all seek to start their own nuclear weapons programs for deterrence, leading to a nuclear arms race in one of the world’s most volatile and dangerous regions.

Israeli or U.S. military action would only delay and not eliminate Iran’s geographically dispersed nuclear project. Should Iran be attacked, that country’s pro-democracy forces would be marginalized and the main beneficiary would be the regime’s hard-liners. Iran could respond by having its ally Hezbollah launch a new war against Israel from Lebanon — and Hezbollah is now armed with thousands of Iranian-supplied long-range missiles. Iran could blockade the Straits of Hormuz, through which flows 90 percent of Persian Gulf oil. The resulting spikes in oil prices could cripple the global economic recovery.

The best way to avoid such dangerous scenarios is to impose targeted, debilitating sanctions that will make the costs of Iran’s nuclear project economically and politically prohibitive. So far Russia and China have opposed United Nations Security Council sanctions, but as Iran’s bellicosity — and its international isolation — steadily increases, persuasive diplomacy by the U.S. and Europe might convince those two powers to come around. An Islamic Republic of Iran armed with nuclear weapons is against every country’s interests, including Russia’s and China’s. If robust, international sanctions are not imposed, then a risky nuclear arms race in the Middle East — and, possibly, military strikes that could destabilize the region and damage the global economy — might result instead.

Atlas is an associate professor of political science and director of The Richard G. Lugar Franciscan Center for Global Studies at Marian University. Contact him at patlas@marian.edu.

This entry was posted on December 8, 2011 at 10:39 AM and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.