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December 6, 2005
The Next War
If Mohammed al Baradei is correct, and Iran is really less than a year away from even a rump nuclear weapons capability, the next war will be in Iran, and it will be soon. (via Officers' Club)
IAEA chairman Muhammad ElBaradei on Monday confirmed Israel's assessment that Iran is only a few months away from creating an atomic bomb.If Teheran indeed resumed its uranium enrichment in other plants, as threatened, it will take it only "a few months" to produce a nuclear bomb, El-Baradei told The Independent.
On the other hand, he warned, any attempt to resolve the crisis by non-diplomatic means would "open a Pandora's box. There would be efforts to isolate Iran; Iran would retaliate; and at the end of the day you have to go back to the negotiating table to find the solution."
(note: the full article does not repeat the summary)
If indeed Iran is months away from a nuclear capability, the pressure on Israel to strike at Iran will be immense. It is literally a matter of short-term national survival for Israel: Iran has pledged, recently, to "wipe Israel off the map" and, a while ago, that their first nuclear test would be in Israel. Israel is tiny; unlike the US, Israel could not absorb a nuclear blow and continue to exist more or less unchanged. And this means that Israel is likely to strike first. But how? As Officers' Club notes:
Will the Israelis use nuclear weapons preemptively or will they go conventional? Will America join them? Or will the U.S. act on its own accord? How would a joint U.S.-Israeli attack on an Arab state fare in the Middle East? Would it help or hurt democratic progress in that region?Unfortunately -due the Iranian refusal to play ball with negotiators- we may be hearing the answers to those questions more sooner than later.
It is unlikely that Israel could mount a sufficiently-destructive conventional strike on Iran's nuclear program, because of the distance from Israel and the characteristics of the critical nuclear sites (some of which are deeply buried). This means that either the US will strike with Israel or to keep Israel from striking, or the Israeli strike will be nuclear. And at that point, we will have lost the third conjecture's bet, and it's possible we'd be well down the road to losing the second.
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Comments
In case you missed it:
Posted by: Brian Medcalf at December 7, 2005 12:01 AM
While it is of little consequence to the discussion of what to actually DO about Iran's nukes (and who should do it), Rush had a very enlightening observation last week.
Both Iraq and Iran were vehemently anti-western, anti-US autocracies. In the case of Iraq, the Bush doctrine was employed to deal with the problem. And while the final results have to be tallied, there is every indication that the idea of freedom and self-determination do indeed sit well with the vast majority of the Iraqi people... and will continue to do so into the future.
Iran, on the other hand, has been "handled" in the more nuanced manner of the internationalist left and its premier adherents, John Kerry, Howard Dean, Kofi Annan, and the "old" European leadership. A manner consisting mostly of negotiation from a position of plaintive pity, and alternatively, sophisticated groveling.
As Rush points out, the two sets of results could not be more starkly constrasted. While Iraq gives every indication that it is about to enter a substantial economic and political renaissance, Iran, by the reluctant admission of el-Baradei, of all people, is about to produce its first nuclear weapons, quick on the heels of reiterating its official view that Israel should be destroyed, and threatening the entire region (according to the very knowledgeable Mr. Mansoor Ijaz) with exactly the sort of virulent high altitude EMP attack recently described by Frank Gaffney in his new book “War Footing: 10 Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World.”
Of course, as I noted above, all this will have little impact on the coming decisions of what to actually do about Iran. To those on the left, even a nuclear weapons attack by Iran will not force them to re-examine their position, but will instead merely confirm in their mind that they were correct all along, and that it was the western warmongers that forced the Iranian's hand. To those of us on/in the Right, the voices of Kofi, Kerry, and Jacques Chirac were all full of crap anyway, and Iran is merely one more mess to be cleaned up while trying to ignore those on the left whose sensitivities are offended at the idea that we really can't "all get along."
Posted by: Bat One at December 11, 2005 12:51 AM