By Charles Krauthammer
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Either Israel is engaged in the most elaborate ruse since
the Trojan Horse or it is on the cusp of a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear
facilities.
What’s alarming is not just Iran’s increasing store of
uranium or the growing sophistication of its rocketry. It’s also the increasingly
menacing annihilationist threats emanating from Iran’s leaders. Israel’s
existence is “an insult to all humanity,” says President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“Anyone who loves freedom and justice must strive for the annihilation of the
Zionist regime.” Explains the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
Israel is “a true cancer tumor on this region that should be cut off.”
Everyone wants to avoid military action, surely the
Israelis above all. They can expect a massive counterattack from Iran, 50,000
rockets launched from Lebanon, Islamic jihad firing from Gaza, and worldwide
terror against Jewish and Israeli targets, such as what happened last month in
Bulgaria.
Yet Israel will not sit idly by in the face of the most
virulent genocidal threats since Nazi Germany. The result then was 6 million
murdered Jews. There are 6 million living in Israel today.
Time is short. Last-ditch negotiations in Istanbul,
Baghdad, and Moscow have failed abjectly. The Iranians are contemptuously
playing with the process. The strategy is delay until they get the bomb.
What to do? The sagest advice comes from Anthony
Cordesman, military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, hardheaded realist, and a believer that “multilateralism and soft
power must still be the rule and not the exception.”
He may have found his exception. “There are times when
the best way to prevent war is to clearly communicate that it is possible,” he
argues. Today, the threat of a U.S. attack is not taken seriously. Not by the
region. Not by Iran. Not by the Israelis, who therefore increasingly feel
forced to act before Israel’s more limited munitions — far less powerful and
effective than those in the U.S. arsenal — can no longer penetrate Iran’s
ever-hardening facilities.
Cordesman therefore proposes threefold action.
1. Clear U.S. redlines.
It’s time to end the ambiguity about American intentions.
Establish real limits on negotiations — to convince Iran that the only
alternative to a deal is preemptive strikes, and to convince Israel to stay its
hand.
2. Make it clear
to Iran that it has no successful options.
Either their program must be abandoned in a negotiated
deal (see No. 1 above) on generous terms from the West (see No. 3 below) or
their facilities will be physically destroyed. Ostentatiously let Iran know
about the range and power of our capacities — how deep and extensive a campaign
we could conduct, extending beyond just nuclear facilities to
military-industrial targets, refineries, power grids, and other concentrations
of regime power.
3. Give Iran a face-saving way out.
Offer Iran the most generous possible terms — economic,
diplomatic, and political. End of sanctions, assistance in economic and energy
development, trade incentives, and a regional security architecture. Even
Russian nuclear fuel.
Tellingly, however, Cordesman does not join those who
suggest yielding on nuclear enrichment. That’s important because a prominently
leaked proposed “compromise” would guarantee Iran’s right to enrich, though not
to high levels.
In my view, this would be disastrous. Iran would retain
the means to potentially produce fissile material, either clandestinely or in a
defiant breakout at a time of its choosing.
Would Iran believe a Cordesman-like ultimatum? Given the
record of the Obama administration, maybe not. Some (though not Cordesman) have
therefore suggested the further step of requesting congressional authorization for
the use of force if Iran does not negotiate denuclearization.
First, that’s the right way to do it. No serious military
action should be taken without congressional approval (contra Libya). Second,
Iran might actually respond to a threat backed by a strong bipartisan majority
of the American people — thus avoiding both war and the other nightmare
scenario, a nuclear Iran.
If we simply continue to drift through kabuki
negotiations, however, one thing is certain. Either America, Europe, the Gulf
Arabs, and the Israelis will forever be condemned to live under the threat of
nuclear blackmail (even nuclear war) from a regime the State Department
identifies as the world’s greatest exporter of terror. Or an imperiled Israel,
with its more limited capabilities, will strike Iran — with correspondingly
greater probability of failure and of triggering a regional war.
All options are bad. Doing nothing is worse. “The status
quo may not prevent some form of war,” concludes Cordesman, “and may even be
making it more likely.”
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