[Many people who read the NYT might have skipped over this article for the same reason I usually would have, namely that given the headline and the venue, I was almost certain it would be the same pot of mush I've read a dozen times. But it actually turns out to be a very sharp presentation of the Administration's cul de sac. The Busheviks say Iran having a nuclear weapon is intolerable; they refuse diplomacy; and there is no viable military option. The article is unusually clear and detailed about that last part.]
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/politics/12nuke.html
The New York Times December 12, 2004
The U.S. vs. a Nuclear Iran
By DAVID E. SANGER
T his article was reported by Thom Shanker, Eric Schmitt and David E.
Sanger, and was written by Mr. Sanger.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 - The Bush administration says the prospect of
Iran's obtaining a nuclear weapon is "intolerable," and from the White
House to the State Department, officials express considerable
skepticism that Europe's efforts to negotiate quietly an end to Iran's
nuclear activities will succeed.
Yet, though President Bush threatened Iraq before the war there, he
has said almost nothing about the possibility of resorting to military
action in Iran.
That may reflect the fact that Pentagon war planners, reviewing
available options, say there are no good options for Mr. Bush - or for
Israel, which has expressed even greater alarm about a nuclear-armed
Iran if negotiations fail.
Almost unanimously, these planners and Pentagon analysts say there are
no effective military ways to wipe out a nuclear program that has been
well hidden and broadly dispersed across the country, including in
crowded cities. Confronted with intelligence evidence, Iran admitted
to inspectors last year that it had hidden critical aspects of its
civilian program for 18 years, and even today there are questions
about whether all of its nuclear-related sites are known.
The Bush administration has talked about the possibility of going to
the United Nations to seek sanctions against Iran if a recent accord
with the Europeans falls apart, as a similar agreement did last year.
But the Iranians themselves are aware of the whispers about military
strikes, many of them fueled by Israeli officials who view the threat
as much more urgent than the Europeans do.
Even so, such talk may amount to little more than bluffing in a
high-stakes diplomatic game that the deputy secretary of state,
Richard L. Armitage, recently described as "kind of a good-cop,
bad-cop arrangement," with Washington playing the bad cop. But a
senior European official related a conversation in which Iranians
deeply involved in the talks warned that any military action would be
futile.
The official said the Iranians boasted that "they can rebuild the
facilities in six months," using indigenous technology. He also said
they believed that after any military action to slow Iran's program,
they could "develop a weapon as a national cause, with more consensus
than now."
Senior officers and Pentagon officials confirm that war planners, in
particular Air Force targeting teams, have updated contingencies for
dealing with Iran's nuclear ambitions, as they periodically do. But
they immediately emphasize that this does not reflect any guidance
from the civilian leadership to prepare for military confrontation.
Instead, they say, it is part of an effort ordered by Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to begin a constant process of refreshing
contingency planning throughout the world, an effort partly inspired
by the outdated plan for invading Iraq that had to be rapidly dusted
off and radically rewritten before the war there.
"Military planning always continues," said one senior officer based in
the Middle East. "We are constantly updating plans."
But interviews with military planners, Pentagon policy makers and
academic experts drew a unanimous sentiment that the challenge in 2005
would be to contain the situation so that neither the United States
nor Iran took a misstep or miscalculated, bringing on military action.
The Iranians remember Osirak, the site of a lightning Israeli
airstrike against an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 that set back
Saddam Hussein's nuclear ambitions by a decade. American and European
intelligence officials say Iran has taken the lesson to heart,
spreading its nuclear facilities around the country, burying some
underground and putting others in the middle of crowded urban areas.
For example, the International Atomic Energy Agency last year found
centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium, behind a false wall at
the Kalaye Electric Company in a densely populated corner of Tehran,
where there would be no way to conduct a military strike without
causing major civilian casualties. "They are not about to make the
same mistake Saddam did," a senior administration official said.
Thus the military options range from the bad to the unimaginable.
None guarantee success, military planners say. Many risk causing not
only casualties but a political crisis in the Middle East. The
planners, many of them involved in the war against Iraq, argue
vehemently that Iran presents a growing proliferation problem better
approached through diplomatic channels than by airstrikes, Special
Operations missions or an all-out invasion.
"There's no big war plan on the shelf," said one administration
official involved in the planning process.
Part of the caution appears linked to the realization that while
Iran's nuclear facilities are far more advanced than Iraq's ever were,
the administration has yet to prove that Iran is secretly planning to
build a weapon. The country has opened many of its sites to
international inspectors, though there is still wrangling over whether
the agency will be able to visit two military sites that some experts
suspect could house a parallel, secret military effort to produce
uranium.
If such sites exist, they would violate the nuclear nonproliferation
treaty, which Iran has signed and which requires that all of its
facilities must be solely for civilian use. So far, the inspectors
have asked to see only one of the sites, and Iran has not indicated
whether it would provide access.
The director general of the international agency, Mohamed ElBaradei,
has carefully stopped short of declaring that Iran is seeking a
weapon, though recently he noted that Iran "tried to cheat the
system."
But whether it is a civilian program or something more nefarious, Iran
is using an approach to developing nuclear fuel through the enrichment
of uranium that is far easier to hide than the approach that Iraq took
two decades ago.
So there is no central plant like Osirak to bomb.
"Osirak is not a paradigm," said Robert S. Litwak, director of
international studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center here. "It was an
exceptional case, in which all of the conditions for success came
together. Israel had accurate intelligence on the target, collateral
damage effects on the nearby population were judged minimal because
the nuclear core had not yet been loaded into the reactor, and Saddam
Hussein then had no capacity to retaliate directly against Israel."
In Iran today, said Mr. Litwak, who worked on proliferation issues as
a National Security Council staff member in the Clinton
administration, "none of those conditions pertain."
That view is echoed at the senior levels of the military. "Iran takes
great care to protect its technology and production/storage capability
with multiple layers of security, hardening and dispersal," said one
Air Force general with experience in the Middle East. "All this
complicates identification, targeting and execution."
Analysts of the Iranian political scene also point out that many in
the American government view a growing and energized Iranian civil
society, in particular the young and women, as an agent of change
toward a democratic Iran.
News of the energy agency's restrained action helped Iran's stock
market, which had suffered over fears that the nuclear dispute could
result in a military confrontation with Israel or the United States.
Any American military strike on Iran, these analysts say, would cancel
any positive feelings these people have toward the United States, and
probably galvanize support for the more militant Islamic leadership.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company