WASHINGTON - Much of the focus at this year's National Council on US-Arab
Relations (NCUSAR), held in the last week of October, was not on United States'
relations with an Arab country, but rather their ethnic Persian neighbor to the
east: Iran.
The question and answer session of a panel on Iraq and Iran was a microcosm of
the chatter which has swirled around Washington all year about the ebbing and
flowing likelihood of a US bomb strike against Iran's alleged nuclear sites.
No one on the panel - a collection of a statesman, military brass, and experts
- thought that an attack on Iran was imminent, or
even likely happen in a longer view, but that did not stop the debate about the
merits and drawbacks of a US strike.
A prime issue that needs to be initially addressed in the bombing scenarios is
assessing the threat from the Islamic Republic, which has had a tense
relationship with the West since the revolution that established it in 1979.
"There are two general problems with Iran: Iran in the region and [an] Iran
with nuclear weapons," said Brent Scowcroft, a former Lieutenant General in the
US Air Force and former national security adviser to two Republican presidents,
referring to Iran's growing power and aspirations in the region and its alleged
covert nuclear weapons program.
But Scowcroft said that one cannot assess the aims of the Iranian regime in
terms of nuclear capabilities or toward neighboring nations like Afghanistan
and Iraq under President George W Bush policy, which was inspired largely by a
neo-conservative worldview of completely isolating countries perceived as
"evil".
The US has several times walked away from Iran at the negotiating table and in
2003 - reportedly at the behest of hawkish Vice President Dick Cheney -
rejected an Iranian overture that could have been the first step to a "grand
bargain" comprehensive rapprochement plan.
"What [the US] can and can't do with Iran is ... pretty much a mystery because
we have not been prepared to explore with them what the possibilities are,"
said Scowcroft.
The lack of diplomacy since the Bush administration began pursuing its
aggressive post-9/11 strategies to remake the Middle East was based at least
partially on the neo-conservative worldview that talking to enemies gave them
credibility, and therefore, put them in a position of strength. Under that view
pre-talk conditions often need to be met before a serious effort at engagement
can be made.
Scowcroft was quick to demur from that tack. "Making discussions subject to
pre-conditions before you sit down and talk to them is not a recipe for
understanding or for finding out what goes on. That is one of the purposes of
talking," he said. "[T]alking in itself is not necessarily a concession."
But with strained relations, some view a strike - or at least the threat of one
- as a potential way for the US to bring the Iranians to the table and to gain
leverage over them.
"The idea is to use the threat of force or some force to compel Iran to allow
inspections, tagging, and shutdown of the [nuclear] program," said Kenneth
Katzman of the Congressional Research Service, a government-sponsored group
that provides analysis to Congress. "One need not necessarily know where every
site is or to strike every site to still potentially be effective."
When discussing merits of a strike on Iran, Katzman based his talking points on
things he had heard from people who "worked on study groups recently".
Indeed, Katzman was a consultant to a task force with the Bipartisan Policy
Center (BPC) which released a report in September touting a "new, robust and
comprehensive strategy" for dealing with Iran that would "incorporate new
diplomatic, economic and military tools in an integrated fashion".
The project was directed by BPC's neo-conservative foreign policy director,
Michael Makovsky, and the report, "Meeting the Challenge: US Policy Toward
Iranian Nuclear Development", was itself authored by hawkish Iran expert and
neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin.
The report calls a nuclear-armed Iran a "strategically untenable" situation and
has been regarded by some analysts as a bellicose document. The diplomatic
recommendations of the report have already been rejected outright by the
Iranians.
Not everyone on the NCUSAR panel was sure that Katzman's attempt at "airstrike
diplomacy" would work out in the US's favor.
"This may be the best example in recent times of a highly coordinated threat of
force against a country to bring about a diplomatic solution ... I'm not sure,"
said Retired Marine Corps General Joseph Hoar, the former head of CENTCOM, the
military command responsible for the whole of the Middle East. "People think
this is serious, [but] I would put it in the utter folly department."
Wayne White, a scholar at the Middle East Institute and a former Foreign
Service official, went even father in his warnings of the potential fallout
from a strike - even a highly selective and targeted campaign like Katzman's
example.
"Once all this has been done - and we're talking about two to three thousand
airstrikes over a period of a week - you're not talking about what some people
in the media refer to as 'surgically taking out Iranian nuclear sites'; you're
talking about war with Iran," he said. "This is going to unleash a titanic
crisis."
White speculated that a strike of any size would harden Iranian resolve to
develop a weapon by a "crash program" - as happened when Israel attacked an
Iraqi nuclear facility in the early 1980s, after which Iraq accelerated its
program - because a nuclear weapon would serve as a deterrent.
"If you go in and beat the hornets' nest, and you damage it, then actually
you're dealing with a wounded animal - something even more determined that it
had ever been before to attain this capability," said White, implicitly hinting
at the air of inevitability around a nuclear Iran.
"[E]ven though it might be rather distasteful, we might be able to live with a
nuclear Iran," White said, telling the crowd at NCUSAR that Iran is unlikely to
be so "incredibly foolish" as to bomb Israel with an assurance of a much more
destructive retaliation.
"Quite a number of Israelis would be unhappy, to say the least, living even
with that small chance of such a horrific scenario," he said. "However, quite
frankly, I'm not Israeli, and I must look at this through an American lens in
keeping with American national interests."
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