War with Iran
Lee Smith
Ever since it announced the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran last month, the Obama administration has flooded the news media with technical details elaborating the many virtues of the proposed framework agreement. Indeed, the White House sent its energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, a nuclear physicist, onto the Sunday shows to helpfully explain the knotty fine points that are likely to be lost on laymen—or anyone who doesn’t celebrate its signal accomplishment.
If you don’t think it’s a good deal, said CIA director John Brennan, you don’t know the facts. The science is in! But like it does with so much else, the White House is using “science” as a smokescreen to obscure its failure in Lausanne. John Kerry and the American negotiating team were supposed to lock down not technical details but political arrangements, like the pace of sanctions relief and inspectors’ access to Iranian nuclear sites. None of these issues has been resolved—nor, says Iran, will it accept White House demands.
As the deans of American foreign policy, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, wrote last week in an important Wall Street Journal article: “Debate regarding technical details of the deal has thus far inhibited the soul-searching necessary regarding its deeper implications.” It’s time then to look at the bigger picture that the proposed deal points to—a new Cold War.
Advocates of the deal make Panglossian assumptions about the nature of the Iranian regime. As Kissinger and Shultz note, to some, a deal would represent “a moderation of Iran’s 3½ decades of militant hostility to the West and established international institutions, and an opportunity to draw Iran into an effort to stabilize the Middle East.”
That’s a pipedream. Iran now boasts of controlling four Arab capitals. Tehran and its allies have fomented war throughout the Middle East, from Beirut and Damascus to Baghdad and Sanaa. The White House’s coordination with Iran in the campaign against ISIS hardly conceals the fact that Iran is targeting American allies, especially Israel, Saudi Arabia, and now Jordan.
Some argue, write Kissinger and Shultz, that “the nuclear deal is a way station toward the eventual domestic transformation of Iran.” The opposite is true. Domestically, a deal strengthens the hardliners who actually manage the nuclear weapons program.
“Some advocates,” Kissinger and Shultz explain, “have suggested that the agreement can serve as a way to dissociate America from Middle East conflicts.” But this is not what happens when a state goes nuclear. Rather, such a state only becomes a bigger threat.
Right now, that means primarily in the Middle East—from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. An Iranian bomb will push Riyadh to acquire one as well, setting off a nuclear arms race that may come to include the UAE, Algeria, Egypt, and Jordan. Accordingly, the regional Sunni-Shia conflagration now embroiling Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon will be funded and fought by two or more nuclear powers.
As a nuclear power, Iran will find new friends eager to sign on to its project of challenging the established order—an order underwritten by American power. In effect, an Iranian bomb will engender another empire in thrall to evil.
Tehran has already seeded assets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. A Defense Intelligence Agency assessment contends that within a year, the Iranians will have a ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States.
The White House argues that the only alternative to its terrible deal is war, but that’s nonsense. Iran has no ability to make war on the United States except as a continuation of the terrorist war it has been waging against us for the last 36 years. As the former prime minister of Israel Ehud Barak and Senator Tom Cotton have argued, the White House is overstating both the nature of the military strike that would bring Iran’s program to a halt and Iran’s capacity to retaliate.
But all that changes once Iran gets the bomb. At that point, as Kissinger and Shultz know only too well, we must contend with the prospect that they will use it. A similar prospect caused the United States and the Soviet Union to engage in a high-stakes struggle on four continents for nearly half a century. Obama’s foreign policy legacy, enshrined by a deal that opens the door to an Iranian nuke, wouldn’t be a historic reconciliation with an adversarial regime, but a return to the nightmare of the Cold War.
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