[lbo-talk] NYT: The U.S. vs. a Nuclear Iran

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sun Dec 12 05:22:37 PST 2004


[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



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