We won't find the nukes when minted, so the capability must be destroyed....
David Kay, ex-Iraq WMD chief, explains why inspectors cannot disarm Iran. Intel maven Gabriel Schoenfeld explains why we cannot trust the intelligence community's in-house assessment of Iran's nuclear program status. We need, GS writes, an outside panel to assess the evidence.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, ex-CIA, writes in the Weekly Standard that Israel should strike at Iran's facilities, a move which could destablize the Iranian regime:
What the Israelis need to do is rock the system. Iran’s nuclear-weapons program has become the third pillar of Khamenei’s theocracy (the other two being anti-Americanism and the veil). If the Israelis, whom the regime constantly asperses as Zionists ripe for extinction, can badly damage Iran’s nuclear program, the regime will lose enormous face. Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have said repeatedly that the Israelis wouldn’t dare strike the nation’s nuclear program; if the Israelis do dare, it will be a stunning blow. And military defeats can be deadly for dictatorships—historically, there’s nothing deadlier.
While there is no guarantee that an Israeli raid would cause sufficient shock to produce a fatal backlash against Khamenei and the senior leadership of the Guards, there is a chance it would, and nothing else on the horizon offers Israel better odds. Loyal members of Khamenei’s entourage, like Speaker Larijani, publicly counseled Khamenei not to be too aggressive in the development of the nuclear program for fear of provoking an American military response. Rafsanjani warned the supreme leader and Ahmadinejad about their aggressiveness even more explicitly. (Those public admonitions ended, as did President Bush’s threatening rhetoric, after the 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate asserted, with more confidence than information, that Tehran had stopped its weaponization program in 2003.) It’s one thing to have the “Great Satan” lay waste your program; it’s another thing entirely to have the “Little Satan” do what the senior leadership of the Revolutionary Guards said was impossible. At the very least, the Iranian left, right, and center would rise in umbrage against any Zionist aggression, and Khamenei’s foes and the population as a whole would question the leadership of the men who provoked the Israelis, then couldn’t stop them from blowing up the nuclear program that has taken Iran 20 years to construct.
Too much has been made in the West of the Iranian reflex to rally round the flag after an Israeli (or American) preventive strike. Iranians aren’t nationalist automatons. Compared with Arabs and Turks, who lack an ancient cosmopolitan culture reinforcing their modern identity, Iranians don’t have a jagged and brittle patriotism. They are an old and sophisticated people quite capable of holding multiple hatreds simultaneously in their minds. The Green Movement is an upwelling of 30 years of anger against theocracy. It won’t go away because Israel bombs Iran’s nuclear sites.Iran’s defeat in the Iran-Iraq war did not make Iranians rally to the regime. On the contrary, that defeat by Saddam Hussein helped to unleash an enormous wave of reflection and self-criticism. Without it, we likely would not have seen the rapid transformation of the Islamic Republic’s religious and political culture—a second intellectual revolution, which created the Green Movement. After that transformation, we have a supreme leader whom millions loathe and even more distrust. If the Israelis can make Khamenei look pathetic (and Khamenei has a nearly flawless talent for doing the wrong thing at the wrong time), they can conceivably crack the regime. Jerusalem needs to put the supreme leader under tremendous pressure and see if he can hold it together.
RG adds that we--and Israel--may have waited too long to strike:
It is possible the Israelis have waited too long to strike. Military action should make a strategic difference. If the Israelis (or, better, the Americans under President Bush) had struck Iran’s principal nuclear facilities in 2003 and killed many of the scientists and technical support staff, Khamenei’s nuclear program likely would have taken years, even decades, to recover. Now, by contrast, the Iranians may be sufficiently advanced in uranium enrichment, trigger mechanisms, and warhead design that they could build a device quickly after an Israeli raid, and the attack would have accomplished little. Khamenei could emerge from the confrontation stronger.
RG warns that Iran with nukes poses huge dangers:
Unless Jerusalem bombs, the Israelis will soon be confronting a situation without historical parallel. The Islamic Republic currently has 8,528 uranium-enrichment centrifuges installed at the Natanz facility. Almost 4,000 of these are operational. A 3,000-centrifuge cascade could produce fuel for one warhead in 271 days. Natanz is designed to hold 50,000 centrifuges, which could produce enough fuel for one warhead every 16 days. Ignoring the possibility that Khamenei’s nuclear experts will transfer Natanz’s cascading centrifuges to covert facilities once they figure out how to maintain and array them (hence the urgent need to blow up the facility), uranium production will soon create a command-and-control nightmare. Envision nuclear warheads on missiles and on planes, dispersed throughout Iran to ensure that an American or Israeli first strike couldn’t take them out. Now focus on the fact that the Revolutionary Guards Corps will have possession of these weapons. Khamenei isn’t likely to give command-and-control to “moderate” guardsmen; he’ll likely give it to the folks he trusts most—a nuclear version of the Quds Force, the expeditionary terrorist-and-assassination unit within the Corps that does most of the regime’s really dirty work and has direct access to the supreme leader.
We’re not talking about the stolid (but at times dangerously foolish) Pakistani Army controlling nuclear weapons; we’re talking about folks who’ve maintained terrorist liaison relationships with most of the Middle East’s radical Muslim groups. It’s entirely possible that even with Khamenei in control, an Iranian atomic stockpile could lose nukes to dissenting voices within the Guards who have their own ideological agendas. Now imagine the ailing Khamenei is dead, the Guard Corps has several dozen nuclear devices in its “possession,” and the country is in some political chaos as power centers, within the clergy and the Corps, start competing against each other. The Green Movement, too, will probably rise in force. The whole political structure could collapse or the most radical could fight their way to the top—all parties trying to get their hands on the nukes. Since there is no longer a politburo in Iran to keep control (Khamenei gutted it when he downed his peers and competitors), this could get messy quickly.
In the best case scenario, if things were just “normal” in Tehran, Israel would likely be confronting Cuban Missile Crisis-style brinkmanship on a routine basis. Any halfway successful Israeli raid could transform the Western approach to the Islamic Republic. An Israeli strike could finally prompt the Western powers to think in concrete terms about what it would mean to allow the Revolutionary Guard Corps nukes.
Europe & Mideast Arab states would slip into appeasement mode:
Without a raid, if the Iranians get the bomb, Europe’s appeasement reflex will kick in and the EU sanctions regime will collapse, leaving the Americans alone to contain the Islamic Republic. Most of the Gulf Arabs will probably kowtow to Persia, having more fear of Iran than confidence in the defensive assurances of the United States. And Sunni Arabs who don’t view an Iranian bomb as a plus for the Muslim world will, at daunting speed, become much more interested in “nuclear energy”; the Saudis, who likely helped Islamabad go nuclear, will just call in their chits with the Pakistani military.
Gerecht adds that Iran knows if it retaliates in the Strait of Hormuz (through which 25 percent of global oil passes), America might well be forced to strike at Iran. WSJ pundit Bret Stephens offers several theories as to why Israel has yet to strike at Iran's nuclear targets.
Historian Walter Russell Mead sees a nuclear Iran destroying President Obama's dream of a neo-Wilsonian world order (link added 9 AM EST):
The consequences of the Iranian nuclear drive for the President’s Wilsonian project are deadly; the Iranian nuclear program can fairly be called an existential threat to the Wilsonian ideal. In particular a nuclear Iran will kill the two dreams at the heart of President Obama’s foreign policy and indeed of his view of the world: the dream that the genie of nuclear weapons can be forced back into the bottle and the dream that the nations of the world can build a post-Westphalian international order in which the world’s governments are bound by deepening networks of laws.
WRM sees a resulting arms race undermining nonproliferation goals:
The problem is that Iran’s success means the complete, utter and historic destruction of everything President Obama wants to build.
Make no mistake about it. If Iran gets nuclear weapons on his watch, the dream of non-proliferation comes to an end and Barack Obama will go down in history as the president who lost the fight to stop nukes.
It won’t just be Iran: if Iran defies western pressure to get nukes, every self-respecting country in the Middle East will want and need nukes. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and even some of the smaller fry will have to make their moves. They won’t all get the bomb but enough of them will. This will have a disastrous impact on America’s ability to carry out one of its principle [sic] global tasks and ensure the steady and uninterrupted flow of oil to the great industrial and commercial centers of the world — but that isn’t all. The decisive failure of the nonproliferation agenda in the Middle East undermine nonproliferation everywhere, not only because the Bomb will become even more of a coveted symbol of first class international status than it already is, but because with all those proliferating states buying and selling the technology, it will be harder to stop countries from moving ahead. The global black market in nuclear tech will spread like kudzu; there will be so many sources and so many destinations that the traffic will be harder than ever to stop.
WRM adds that a feckless UN will be fatally compromised:
It gets worse. The collapse of nonproliferation will mark the definitive death of the post-World War Two legal regime, just as the League of Nation’s failure to protect Ethiopia from Italy brought an end to the interwar fling with a law-based world.
If solemn treaties, sacred oaths and decades of patient diplomatic effort can’t stop the spread of nuclear weapons, what can international law really accomplish? What is the Security Council except an exalted talking shop if it can’t summon the unity and the resolve to act effectively in the face of a naked challenge to one of the foundations of international order? If global institutions can’t solve this problem, how can such weak and unpredictable organizations be trusted with any urgent and vital problem? If the treaty on non-proliferation is essentially a dead letter, what treaties still command respect? If countries only obey treaties as long as they want to, and the international system can take no effective action against those who break its most important laws, what becomes of the Wilsonian dream?
A nuclear nation world will lead to "sate sovereignty on steroids."
Meanwhile, Israel completed the final test of its Iron Dome missile defense system, designed to shoot down short-range rockets. The first operational batteries are to be deployed this November; it will take years to deploy comprehensive coverage of potential targets.
Bottom Line. Inspection has never stopped determined nuclear aspirants from crossing the threshold. In the past 15 years we failed in both Iraq & North Korea. Politicized intelligence can be disciplined by knowledgeable outside review. A 1976 "Team B" intel assessment of strategic nuclear intentions of the former Soviet Union came closer to the mark than the in-house CIA Team A: While the Soviets did not seek to initiate a nuclear war, they held that they could potentially fight & win a nuclear war if one broke out. With the US unwilling to strike Iran it increasingly looks like Israel must decide whether to go it alone.Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, 9/11, National Security, Terrorism, Homeland Security, Nuclear Proliferation, Arms Control, WMD, Foreign Policy, UN, Conservative Politics
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