WASHINGTON - US Senator Joseph Lieberman's call for cross-border bombing raids
into Iran appears to be the culmination of a two-week campaign by proponents of
war to put the military option center-stage in the US debate over Iran once
more.
The immediate effect of reigniting the let's-bomb-Iran discussions is the
undercutting of the recently initiated US-Iran talks over Iraq, which in turn
will cause the military confrontation with Iran to be
viewed in a new light.
Lieberman out-hawked the administration of President George W Bush on the
television news show Face the Nation this past Sunday by calling for
"aggressive military action against the Iranians", including "a strike over the
border into Iran". Repeating accusations - by now all but abandoned by the Bush
administration - of Iranian complicity in the killing of US soldiers in Iraq,
the Connecticut senator's comments caused a storm on Monday. Suddenly, the
military option against Iran was once more at the center of the United States'
Iran debate.
Last week, Israel's hawkish trade minister and former defense minister, Shaul
Mofaz, had visited Washington to hold strategic discussions regarding Iran's
nuclear program with Bush administration officials. According to press reports,
Mofaz urged the United States to give diplomacy with Iran an expiration date of
the end of the year, after which the military option would be exercised.
"Sanctions must be strong enough to bring about change in the Iranians by the
end of 2007," Mofaz reportedly told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
According to Channel 2 News in Israel, Mofaz went on to declare to Rice
that Israel will bomb Iran's nuclear facilities by year's end if diplomacy and
sanctions fail to persuade Tehran to suspend its uranium-enrichment activities.
A week prior to Mofaz' visit to Washington, Norman Podhoretz, the
neo-conservative editor-at-large of Commentary, published a lengthy op-ed in
the Wall Street Journal titled "The case for bombing Iran". Comparing Iran's
firebrand president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, to Adolf Hitler, Podhoretz accused
Iran of seeking to "overturn the ... international system and to replace it in
the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the
religio-political culture of Islamofascism".
Dismissing both diplomacy and the sanctions track, Podhoretz concluded, "The
plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a
nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force -
any more than there was an alternative to force if Hitler was to be stopped in
1938."
Lieberman's, Mofaz' and Podhoretz' comments all share an air of frustration and
desperation in light of the growing public opinion in the US against any new
military adventures in the Middle East, the loss of key hawks within the Bush
administration, reports of vehement opposition to war with Iran by the new head
of the US Central Command, Admiral William Fallon, and the State Department's
recent shift toward diplomacy.
For the military option to be seriously considered by Washington once more, in
spite of its significant flaws and many unpredictable risks, the diplomatic
track must first be deemed a failure. If diplomacy were to produce positive
results in Iraq, however, it could foreclose the option of bombing Iran's
nuclear facilities for the foreseeable future.
In the worst case, from the perspective of the proponents of war with Iran,
successful diplomacy with Iran over Iraq might force the Bush administration to
reach a compromise with Tehran over the nuclear issue. Such a compromise would
likely entail a small-scale Iranian uranium-enrichment program under strict
International Atomic Energy Agency inspections.
Even though limited uranium enrichment would only pose a minor proliferation
risk in the short term, Iran's acquirement of the nuclear know-how and
mastering of the fuel cycle could pose a devastating long-term proliferation
risk, proponents of this school of thought maintain. In addition, the mere
access to nuclear technology - even if Iran doesn't weaponize - would tilt the
balance of power in the Middle East in Tehran's favor, a development that would
come at the expense of regional powers such as Israel and Saudi Arabia.
As a result, the Bush administration's experimentation with diplomacy with Iran
is viewed with great concern by the advocates of war. Lieberman hinted as much
on Sunday when he told Face the Nation, "If there's any hope of the
Iranians living according to the international rule of law and stopping, for
instance, their nuclear-weapons development, we can't just talk to them."
Whether intentional or not, the vocal push to reignite the let's-bomb-Iran
discussions undermines the very diplomatic process that constitutes the
greatest obstacle to turning the military option into policy.
This debate signals to the ever-so-paranoid decision-makers in Tehran that
their cooperation in Iraq will not cause Washington to abandon its apparent
plans to take on Iran militarily at a later stage. Absent the potential for
such a tradeoff with the US, Iran's incentives to aid the United States in Iraq
will quickly diminish and cause the diplomatic track to fail, a development
that in turn will pave the way for the military option.
Dr Trita Parsi is the author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret
Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States (Yale University Press, 2007). He
is also president of the National Iranian American Council.
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