WarSclerotic

Fail to act now and the West will be haunted by a nuclear Iran

With Iran ever closer to acquiring nuclear weapons, and Western democracies seeking to prevent a fait accompli, a side-debate has opened on whether “prevention” should even be tried.  Serious thinkers – including former President Jimmy Carter and Atlantic Monthly correspondent Robert Kaplan – urge that the West need not prevent a nuclear Iran, but instead can safely “contain” it.

Given the costs and risks of prevention, the appeal of containment is understandable.  After all, containment of a nuclear armed Soviet Union – the West’s grand strategy for several decades – was, in the end, a major success, despite its enormous costs.

More immediately, opting for containment would allow the West to stand down from its tortuous efforts to impose and enforce effective sanctions.  And the burdens of contemplating a military attack on Iran’s nuclear production facilities would, at last, be lifted.

However, a closer look at the requirements, costs, and limits of a successful containment strategy suggests that, in fact, the West should be extremely reluctant to accept a nuclear-armed Iran.

Any such assessment should first define the practices of the Iranian regime that need to be contained.  Simply stated, the Iranian regime has consistently declared, in both words and deeds, that it is an implacable enemy of Western, Judeo-Christian civilization.

Pledged to the destruction of both America and Israel, which it labels “the great Satan” and “the little Satan,” the Iranian government routinely opens legislative sessions and public events with mass cheers of “death to America” and “death to Israel.”

Accordingly, in the 1980s, Iranian terrorist proxies perpetrated, among other things: the 1983 suicide bombing of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, murdering more than 350; the 1985 hijacking of a TWA flight in Beirut, in which they tortured and killed a U.S. Navy diver on board; and kidnapping, and subsequently torturing, several Americans in Lebanon throughout the 1980s.

In the 1990s, Iran directed the 1992 suicide bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina, murdering 29; the 1994 bombing of the Argentine-Israel association offices, murdering 85; and the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia, murdering 19 U.S. airmen and injuring hundreds more.

In the last decade, Iran has been a principal outside supplier of improvised explosive devices and of terrorist training and support for insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, killing and maiming U.S./coalition soldiers.  Its global allies are a gallery of rogue states, including North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela.

It was Iran that created and still supplies Hezbollalh, one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist organizations.  Hezbollah’s 40,000 missiles in south Lebanon lend chilling weight to Iran’s insistence that “Israel must be wiped off the map.”

Iran’s sphere of influence now runs from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush.  It has turned Lebanon and Syria into virtual client states, is fighting for control of Iraq through Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army, and lately has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, the central artery of global oil transport.

The foregoing history shows that even a non-nuclear Iran has not been successfully contained by the West.  The task will only be immeasurably harder after Iran’s leaders have their hands on a nuclear trigger.

An emboldened Iran will almost certainly sponsor more aggression, while the West will face vastly greater risks in checking such a rise.  Guessing when extremist clerics in Teheran might launch a nuclear strike will dominate and constrain such decisions as, whether to force open a closed Strait of Hormuz, or whether to support Israel in a future war of survival against Hezbollah.

Several analysts, including Ted Bromund and James Phillips of the Heritage Foundation, have eloquently detailed the obstacles to successfully containing a nuclear Iran.  Such as:

1) The lack of reliable allies.  In the Cold War, the Soviet empire was ringed by a core group of vigorous democratic allies from across Europe, to Australia, Japan, and South Korea – all supporters of containment.  By contrast, in the Middle East and South Asia, there would be just one such ally: Israel.

2)  Human rights trade-offs.  Even more so than during the Cold War, the frontlines of a containment coalition in the Middle East and South Asia will have to draw upon unsavoury and dictatorial regimes; the price of their support will include overlooking their human rights abuses.

3)  Constrained budgets.  Maintaining a critical mass of allies and a sufficiently serious, deployable military deterrent are enormously costly, and may need to continue for decades as part of an effective containment policy.  Yet the West is in much worse fiscal shape than during the Cold War.

But among the several asymmetries between the challenges of the Cold War era and those of present-day Iran, the following three are especially problematic.

First, the Manichean, religious zealots who govern Iran may be less deterred by threats of force than the former Soviet leadership.  Ten years ago, former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani declared that “application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but . . . would just produce damages in the Muslim world.”

Recall that this same regime, in its war with Iraq, organized tens of thousands of teenage and pre-teen boys, some as young as nine, into the infamous “Basij” martyrdom units, and sent them into Iraqi minefields to act as human mine-sweepers.  Nine of every ten such boys were reported to have died.

Second, unlike the Soviet empire, several of the threats emanating from Iran are carried out by terrorist proxy groups (which gives Iran some measure of deniability).  Hezbollah’s cadre of suicide bombers are effectively immune to deterrence, and their willingness to risk “everything” greatly exceeds the risk tolerance of the former Soviet gerontocracy.

In sum, how will the West contain a Hezbollah suicide bomber with a nuclear warhead – or a radioactive ‘dirty bomb’ – hidden under a tarp on a flatbed truck?

Last and perhaps most important, unlike the Cold War era, the risk of a proliferation cascade is much greater.  It is generally accepted that, if Iran goes nuclear, the other Middle East regimes will rush to try to follow suit.  If we cannot stop Iran, how will we stop its neighbours?

Here lies the true end-game of the containment option:  not just a nuclear Iran, but a cluster of radical Islamist regimes bristling with nuclear weapons.  For the sake of accuracy, it is tempting to strike the word ‘containment,’ and call this the Armageddon option.

How will the West contain that?

Henry Kopel is a counter-terrorism prosecutor with the US Department of Justice in Connecticut. The views here are his own, and do not reflect the views of the Justice Department