Iran
attack 'wrong move': Obama
allies By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - While a nuclear-armed Iran
would pose significant new challenges to the
United States and Israel, a military attack by
either country to prevent Tehran from developing a
weapon could well prove counter-productive,
according to a major new report released on
Wednesday by a think tank close to the
administration of President Barack Obama.
While preventive military action should
remain on the table, it should only be considered
if Iran "has made a clear move toward
weaponization", and there is a "reasonable
expectation" that such a strike would set back
Iran's program "significantly", among other
conditions, according to the 55-page report by the
Center for a New American Security (CNAS).
The report, "Risk and Rivalry: Iran,
Israel and the Bomb," also argues that both the US
and Israel should avoid taking any steps
that limit prospects for
a negotiated agreement designed to dissuade Tehran
from "weaponizing" its nuclear program.
In
particular, they should not insist - as Israel and
its backers in the US Congress are doing - that
Tehran end all uranium enrichment on its own
territory as a condition of any negotiated
settlement since such a stance "would most likely
result in no deal at all", according to the
report, whose lead author, Colin Kahl, served as
the Pentagon's top Middle East policy-maker under
Obama until January.
Iran, it argues,
appears to be pursuing a "nuclear hedging"
strategy designed to develop the indigenous
technical capability to rapidly produce nuclear
weapons if its leadership decides to do so, but,
as of now, it would need at least a year - and
probably more - to achieve that goal. It is quite
possible, according to the report, that the regime
will be satisfied with achieving a "'threshold'
capability just short of full-fledged
weaponization".
If, however, it does
develop a weapon, say the report's authors, who
also include Melissa Dalton and Matthew Irvine,
Tehran is "unlikely" to use it or transfer a
nuclear device to terrorists to use against Israel
or any other target.
"The Iranian regime
is not suicidal and is sufficiently rational for
the basic logic of nuclear deterrence to hold,"
the report asserts, although it stresses as well
that a nuclear-armed Iran would probably be "more
aggressive and dangerous than an Iran without
nuclear weapons". Moreover, it would likely
intensify an Israeli-Iranian rivalry and thus
create "some inherent risk of inadvertent nuclear
war".
The new report comes at a key moment
- roughly the mid-point between the second round
of negotiations in Baghdad between Iran and the
so-called P5+1 - the five permanent members of the
UN Security Council plus Germany - and the third
scheduled to take place in Moscow June 18-19.
Iranian officials have expressed
considerable disappointment over what they say was
the failure by the P5+1 in Baghdad to offer key
concessions in exchange for Tehran's suspension of
its enrichment of uranium of up to 20% and the
further possibility that it would ship out of the
country all or part of its existing 20% enriched
uranium stockpile.
In particular, Tehran
is seeking some easing of tough financial and
oil-related sanctions that are taking a growing
toll on its increasingly strapped economy, as well
as formal recognition by the US and its allies
that Iran has the right to continue enriching
uranium to concentrations of up to 5% as part of
its civilian nuclear power program.
While
US and European Union officials have suggested in
recent months that they were open to such
concessions under the right circumstances, they
apparently failed to address them during the two
days of talks.
The apparent impasse has
given heart to anti-Iran hawks in Washington and
in Israel who have argued that Iran is using the
talks to buy time to develop a weapon and who have
insisted that Tehran must be forced to abandon its
enrichment program altogether as part of any
negotiated agreement.
Thus, John Bolton,
who served as Washington's ambassador to the UN
under George W Bush and is currently acting as a
top adviser to the presumptive 2012 Republican
presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, expressed
relief in an op-ed published by the Washington
Times that no agreement was achieved in Baghdad.
Bolton, currently at the neo-conservative
American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has regularly
called for the US to support an Israeli attack on
Iran's nuclear facilities since at least 2008.
The CNAS report is only the latest in a
series of studies and analyses that have warned
against a preventive attack on Iran, particularly
by Israel.
Last month, experts at the RAND
Corporation, a think tank closely tied to the
Pentagon, summarized the findings of two of its
recent reports by concluding that "an Israeli or
American attack on Iranian nuclear facilities
would make it more, not less, likely that the
Iranian regime would decide to produce and deploy
nuclear weapons. ... Such an attack would also
make it more, not less, difficult to contain
Iranian influence."
In fact," a
post-attack Middle East may result in the worst of
both worlds: a nuclear-armed Iran more determined
than ever to challenge the Jewish state, and with
far fewer regional and international impediments
to doing so," the report stated, adding that
Washington "should support the assessments of
former and current Israeli officials who have
argued against a military option".
The
CNAS study sets forth four conditions before a
military strike either by Israel or the US would
be justified, including the exhaustion of all
non-military options; a clear move by Iran toward
weaponization; a reasonable likelihood that Iran's
nuclear program would be significantly set back;
and the existence of a sufficiently large
international coalition to help manage the
destabilizing consequences of such a strike and to
work together in its aftermath to contain Iran and
hinder any effort to rebuild its nuclear program.
The study notes that a unilateral Israeli
attack in the short term would fail to meet any of
those conditions.
"Only the United States
- if it had exhausted all other options and faced
compelling evidence that Iran was determined to
produce a bomb - would have any hope of producing
a significant delay in Iran's nuclear program
while holding together the type of coalition
required for effective post-strike containment,"
according to the report.
Like the RAND
study, the CNAS report stresses that prevention
rather than containment of an eventual
nuclear-armed Iran should be the focus of
Washington's current policy, precisely because of
its assessment that Iran would represent a greater
threat to US and Israeli interests if it had
nuclear weapons.
(Some retired top
intelligence officials, notably Paul Pillar, the
former national intelligence officer for the Near
East and South Asia, have questioned this
assumption.)
But it also asserts that a
containment and deterrence policy toward a nuclear
Iran was feasible. "[T]here is a high probability
that nuclear deterrence between Israel and Iran
would operate much as it did for the superpowers
during the Cold War," it says.
While it
would be desirable for Iran to end all enrichment
activity, according to the report, such a stance
by the P5+1 "would reduce almost to zero the
chances of a final agreement acceptable to Iranian
leaders. [I]insisting on an optimal deal would
likely result in no deal, making either a
nuclear-armed Iran or a military confrontation
with that country more likely."
Jim
Lobe's blog on US foreign policy can be read
at http://www.lobelog.com.
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