UNTHINKABLE
Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy
Kenneth M Pollack
Simon & Schuster; 536 pages; $30
President Obama is drifting towards an unwarranted and ultimately unwinnable war with Iran, according to the well-known Mideast expert Kenneth M Pollack. With Unthinkable, he hopes to persuade the administration to reverse course.
As Mr Pollack hammers home, Mr Obama has explicitly pledged to prevent Tehran from becoming a nuclear power. And he has flat-out rejected a policy of living with a nuclear-armed Iran. In short, he is threatening preventive war.
Since the election, he has repeated his pledge on several occasions. Administration officials like former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former secretary of defence Leon E Panetta have made equally tough remarks. Some commentators scoffed at the pledge as simply another phony Obama "red line," pointing to his warning last year to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria against using chemical weapons. After Mr Assad crossed that line this spring, Mr Obama's response consisted of nothing more than a small-arms package to Syrian rebels, slowly delivered - though additional military options were said to be under consideration as this review went to press.
However, this argument misses an essential fact: there is a much greater commitment in Washington to stopping Iranian nukes than to unseating Assad. In July, for example, the House of Representatives voted 400 to 20 to sharply increase economic sanctions against Tehran.
Mr Pollack, then, is not just crying wolf. Of course, he doesn't desire a nuclear-armed Iran, but at bottom he feels a war would only temporarily delay Iran's weapons programme, while stirring up a host of other terrible problems in the Muslim world. And so he stumps for living with a nuclear Iran and trying to contain it.
This anti-war stance may shock those who recall that Mr Pollack, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and a former CIA analyst, helped lead the charge for war against Iraq in 2003. Back then, he thought Saddam Hussein was an unchangeably dangerous guy, and in his highly influential book The Threatening Storm, he argued that Hussein couldn't be permitted to inch any closer to acquiring nuclear weapons. Military force, he insisted, was necessary to stop him.
It should be noted that Mr Pollack has not just reinvented himself with Unthinkable. He started moving in a new direction in 2004 with The Persian Puzzle, when he flirted with the possibility of simply containing a nuclear Iran. Now he is plunging further, not because he has been won over by the allures of containment but because he is convinced of the folly of preventive war.
Here is Mr Pollack's case against it: Tehran already has significant uranium enrichment capacity, sophisticated missile technology and other technical requisites. This knowledge and capability can't be bombed out of scientists' heads by either Israel or the US. Even a perfectly executed American attack would delay matters only a few years. Inevitably, Ayatollah Khamenei would reconstitute the programme and make future facilities far less vulnerable.
What's more, Washington would have to expect a sharp spike in Iranian-sponsored international terrorism. And then what? Me Pollack imagines the US would retaliate and escalate with Marines storming the beaches of the Persian Gulf. This prediction is extravagant for my taste, but foreign policy is no stranger to the power of idiocy.
To avoid this nightmare, Mr Pollack looks to the cold war model of containment that was successfully used against the Soviet Union: that is, employ all means necessary to limit a hostile nation's influence until it collapses from within. In Iran's case, this would include economic sanctions, building up regional allies militarily and encouraging internal opposition to the ayatollahs.
Inexplicably, Mr Pollack throws away the best single argument for containment: that it worked against Saddam Hussein. He argues that it failed. The facts say otherwise. Hussein abandoned his nuclear programme after being subjected to economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation and, yes, the threat of American military force.
But the ultimate weakness of Mr Pollack's argument is his pessimism about the possibility of negotiations with Iran. Though he discusses hypothetical deals, like permitting Tehran a very low level of uranium enrichment, he rightly cites the strong opposition any such deals would provoke in both Tehran and Washington. Still, his book was completed before the more hopeful signals that have been coming from both capitals. In Tehran, there is the recent election of Hassan Rouhani, a seeming moderate who wants to alleviate the enormously destructive effects of sanctions on Iran's economy. In Washington, a prominent group of foreign policy thinkers is gently pushing for compromise.
By playing down the chance of negotiations in favour of containment, Mr Pollack ends up proposing too little. Preventive war is as dangerous as he says. But a policy of containment would probably be too fragile to succeed. Soviet leaders were essentially risk-averse. Some present Iranian rulers seem more inclined to take chances that could bring a strong American response. Further, any one of a number of fierce conflicts between the US and Iran could derail containment and jump to preventive war.
Only a truly bold approach has a chance of avoiding the march to war. Everything has to be put on the table: Iranian security and America's, the nuclear programme, sanctions, terrorism, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel. The big questions have to be resolved. Anything less would be treated as too little, too late.
©2013 The New York Times News Service
Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy
Kenneth M Pollack
Simon & Schuster; 536 pages; $30
President Obama is drifting towards an unwarranted and ultimately unwinnable war with Iran, according to the well-known Mideast expert Kenneth M Pollack. With Unthinkable, he hopes to persuade the administration to reverse course.
As Mr Pollack hammers home, Mr Obama has explicitly pledged to prevent Tehran from becoming a nuclear power. And he has flat-out rejected a policy of living with a nuclear-armed Iran. In short, he is threatening preventive war.
Since the election, he has repeated his pledge on several occasions. Administration officials like former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former secretary of defence Leon E Panetta have made equally tough remarks. Some commentators scoffed at the pledge as simply another phony Obama "red line," pointing to his warning last year to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria against using chemical weapons. After Mr Assad crossed that line this spring, Mr Obama's response consisted of nothing more than a small-arms package to Syrian rebels, slowly delivered - though additional military options were said to be under consideration as this review went to press.
However, this argument misses an essential fact: there is a much greater commitment in Washington to stopping Iranian nukes than to unseating Assad. In July, for example, the House of Representatives voted 400 to 20 to sharply increase economic sanctions against Tehran.
Mr Pollack, then, is not just crying wolf. Of course, he doesn't desire a nuclear-armed Iran, but at bottom he feels a war would only temporarily delay Iran's weapons programme, while stirring up a host of other terrible problems in the Muslim world. And so he stumps for living with a nuclear Iran and trying to contain it.
This anti-war stance may shock those who recall that Mr Pollack, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and a former CIA analyst, helped lead the charge for war against Iraq in 2003. Back then, he thought Saddam Hussein was an unchangeably dangerous guy, and in his highly influential book The Threatening Storm, he argued that Hussein couldn't be permitted to inch any closer to acquiring nuclear weapons. Military force, he insisted, was necessary to stop him.
It should be noted that Mr Pollack has not just reinvented himself with Unthinkable. He started moving in a new direction in 2004 with The Persian Puzzle, when he flirted with the possibility of simply containing a nuclear Iran. Now he is plunging further, not because he has been won over by the allures of containment but because he is convinced of the folly of preventive war.
Here is Mr Pollack's case against it: Tehran already has significant uranium enrichment capacity, sophisticated missile technology and other technical requisites. This knowledge and capability can't be bombed out of scientists' heads by either Israel or the US. Even a perfectly executed American attack would delay matters only a few years. Inevitably, Ayatollah Khamenei would reconstitute the programme and make future facilities far less vulnerable.
What's more, Washington would have to expect a sharp spike in Iranian-sponsored international terrorism. And then what? Me Pollack imagines the US would retaliate and escalate with Marines storming the beaches of the Persian Gulf. This prediction is extravagant for my taste, but foreign policy is no stranger to the power of idiocy.
To avoid this nightmare, Mr Pollack looks to the cold war model of containment that was successfully used against the Soviet Union: that is, employ all means necessary to limit a hostile nation's influence until it collapses from within. In Iran's case, this would include economic sanctions, building up regional allies militarily and encouraging internal opposition to the ayatollahs.
Inexplicably, Mr Pollack throws away the best single argument for containment: that it worked against Saddam Hussein. He argues that it failed. The facts say otherwise. Hussein abandoned his nuclear programme after being subjected to economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation and, yes, the threat of American military force.
But the ultimate weakness of Mr Pollack's argument is his pessimism about the possibility of negotiations with Iran. Though he discusses hypothetical deals, like permitting Tehran a very low level of uranium enrichment, he rightly cites the strong opposition any such deals would provoke in both Tehran and Washington. Still, his book was completed before the more hopeful signals that have been coming from both capitals. In Tehran, there is the recent election of Hassan Rouhani, a seeming moderate who wants to alleviate the enormously destructive effects of sanctions on Iran's economy. In Washington, a prominent group of foreign policy thinkers is gently pushing for compromise.
By playing down the chance of negotiations in favour of containment, Mr Pollack ends up proposing too little. Preventive war is as dangerous as he says. But a policy of containment would probably be too fragile to succeed. Soviet leaders were essentially risk-averse. Some present Iranian rulers seem more inclined to take chances that could bring a strong American response. Further, any one of a number of fierce conflicts between the US and Iran could derail containment and jump to preventive war.
Only a truly bold approach has a chance of avoiding the march to war. Everything has to be put on the table: Iranian security and America's, the nuclear programme, sanctions, terrorism, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel. The big questions have to be resolved. Anything less would be treated as too little, too late.
©2013 The New York Times News Service