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February 21, 2007
Iran and the Bomb - Can they Be Stopped?
There are those who take a "what me worry?" approach to Iran.
Like Newsweek, for example. Their cover-story "Rumors of War" is an exercise in denial that will please many a liberal heart. Take this passage, quoted by Victor Davis Hanson on NRO
The secret history of the Bush administration's dealings with Iran is one of arrogance, mistrust and failure.
By Newsweek's account, Iran helped stabilize Afghanistan after the US invasion. To Iranian "reformers", "9/11 was a blessing in disguise". All these many years, you see, they "wished to offer an olive branch to the United States."
To Newsweek authors Michael Hirsh and Maziar Bahari, there are no problems that cannot be negotiated away. The Iranian leaders wish us no harm, and "have reason to feel paranoid" because "senior American officers have condemned Tehran for providing training and deadly explosives to insurgents"
Apparently agreeing, Sen Clinton now demands the President Bush get Congressional approval before using any force on Iran. Her husband had no such qualms, bombing Serbia in 1999 without either approval from Congress or the UN.
Blech.
Back to the real world. The Financial Times has a must-read piece in which the authors say that it may be too late to stop Iran from obtaining the bomb
Iran will be able to develop enough weapons-grade material for a nuclear bomb and there is little that can be done to prevent it, an internal European Union document has concluded.
In an admission of the international community’s failure to hold back Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the document – compiled by the staff of Javier Solana, EU foreign policy chief – says the atomic programme has been delayed only by technical limitations rather than diplomatic pressure. “Attempts to engage the Iranian administration in a negotiating process have not so far succeeded,” it states. ...The admission is a blow to hopes that a deal with Iran can be reached and comes at a sensitive time, when tensions between the US and Tehran are rising. Its implication that sanctions will prove ineffective will also be unwelcome to EU diplomats. Only yesterday the bloc agreed on how to apply United Nations sanctions on Tehran, overcoming a dispute between Britain and Spain over Gibraltar.
So it would appear that those who believe that negotiations and sanctions will convince Iran to give up it's nuclear program are wrong.
It's hard to overstate the danger of a nuclear Iran. In a previous piece I outlined what I thought would happen if we let Iran get the bomb. I laid out three scenarios. In the first, there was no general war, but other countries in the region went nuclear and everyone held their breath. The other two involve war, one more severe than the other.
has two excellent articles on ths subject that appeared in the Jerusalem Post recently. In the first, Daniel Elfrati explains the the financial costs of an IDF attack on Iran, and in the second, Anshel Pfeffer, lays outthe cost to the IDF of maintaining a nuclear deterance.
Unfortunately, most of the current talk about Iran focuses on the extremes; negotiations and sanctions or a direct military attack. There are many measures inbetween these that we should be pursuing. I laid out a whole range of options in a post last September.
There was one that I seem to have missed. I heard this from Glenn Beck last week:
Vice-President Cheney visited Saudi Arabia last November. There was a meeting of the OPEC ministers shortly thereafte. At this meeting other countries wanted to drop production to raise the price, but the Saudis said no. Rather, they boosted production and of course prices went down, if only slightly. For geological reasons Iranian oil is expensive to drill for and pump out. It requires sophisticated equipment which is hard to obtain.Obviously we won't sell them what they need. We persuaded Canada and Japan to forgo sales to Iran also.
All of this means that Iranian oil is only profitable to drill is the price of oil is high.
Given this, Iran knows that their time is limited. They're accelerating their work on the bomb. They're going to Russia fcor help. The Russian NSA advisor met with their top Ayatollah/ or a top Ayatollah. With a lagging economy,Russia wants no part of sanctions on Iran.
I don't have time to do much research this but, did find one article that lends credence to Beck's theory. I certainly hope so.
We need to stop Iran, and there are more options than the extremes of negotiations/ sanctions and direct military attack. Serious people can disagree on what exactly we need to do, as long as we agree that our current strategy doesn't stand much chance of success and that it is imperative that we do stop Iran. What we don't need are Newsweek articles like the one cited above.
Posted by Tom at February 21, 2007 9:00 PM
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Comments
Remember when the world was a much safer place when the USSR was around? Nixon warned us that he was not concerned about the Soviets and nuclear war, he was always concerned about the US and our allies caving into nuclear coercion from a rouge state. Now we have Iran. How trenchant Nixon's insight is when applied to what is happeneing today. One thing that should be analyzed, what if we did not liberate Iraq? Would the Iranian nuke program have progressed so far, especially if the world was not watching. The answer is yes. However, the spotlight is now on Iran. And when compared to the Soviets, when we knew what it was doing and how, we could prepare, plan, react. Now that we know Iran has the bomb or will have the bomb, we can prepare, plan and react.
The world was much safer when it was just us vs. the USSR.
Posted by: patd95 at February 22, 2007 9:48 AM
I think Beck is full of it. It is well documented that Halliburton has been and continues to work in Iranian gas fields:
--..in January, Halliburton won a contract to drill at a huge Iranian gas field called Pars, which an Iranian government spokesman said "served the interests" of Iran.
"I am baffled that any American company would want to have employees operating in Iran," says Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. "I would think they'd be ashamed."
Halliburton says the operation — videotaped by NBC News — is entirely legal. It's run by a subsidiary called "Halliburton Products and Services Limited," based outside the U.S. In fact, the law allows foreign subsidiaries of U.S. corporations to do business in Iran under strict conditions. ---
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7119752/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6982444/site/newsweek/
Even FOX News was aghast that Cheney's old company (while he was CEO) worked in Iran, even with US sanctions in effect:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,126507,00.html
FOX also quotes Cheney as having said of Iran:
--The former defense secretary complained in a 1998 speech that U.S. companies were "cut out of the action" in Iran because of the sanctions.
At an energy industry conference in 1996, Cheney said sanctions were the greatest threat to Halliburton and other American oil-related companies trying to expand overseas.
"We seem to be sanction-happy as a government," Cheney said. "The problem is that the good Lord didn't see fit to always put oil and gas resources where there are democratic governments."---
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,134836,00.html
One day Cheney is willing to work with any Mullah to get work for the company, the next day he is 'standing by his principles' and Beck is only too willing to parrot total hypocracy. Tom, as you often point out it was this oil baron/realism that got us in this mess in the first place: we have cozied up to these regimes to get their oil, all in the name of stability and profit, and Cheney was at the trough with the rest of them. Business contracts one day, bombs the next. Snarling Cheney is a wild card, you can't tell what he really stands for.
Here's another jem from those pinkos over at NewsMax:
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/6/24/80648.shtml
Posted by: jason at February 22, 2007 6:31 PM
Well...yes and no, patd95
Yes the world was safer as long as MAD worked. As totalitarian as the Soviets were, at the end of the day they wanted to live. Besides straight-out nuclear war, the risks of a conventional war going nuclear was also a huge deterrant. So barring a "Failsafe" incident the world was safe.
On the other side, if MAD had failed, it would have failed in the worst possible way. Each side had for the most part targeted the others cities using a "countervalue" strategy.
But I understand your, and Nixon's, point. And I do think that the possibility of a general war in the Middle East involving nuclear weapons breaking out in 3-6 years is a lot higher than I'd like.
jason, I'll check out your links later when I have some time.
Posted by: Tom the Redhunter at February 22, 2007 8:45 PM
Just sitting back and hoping for the best isn't going to do the trick. I think that is what folks like Clinton really want to do. Can Iran be stopped. The answer is yes they can be stopped. But with the bickering and in-fighting we are doing here inside the US, I don't think we can accomplish much of anything.
Posted by: Debbie at February 24, 2007 1:54 PM
