I will admit that I do not know what to do about the possibility of Iran getting nuclear weapons. It would be a terrible thing if Iran got the bomb (consider what North Korea can get away with because it has nuclear weapons). But do we really have the military capability to prevent Iran from getting a bomb? Just because we want to have the capability, doesn’t mean we do. It would be hard. This wouldn’t be like sending a group of Navy SEALs in to kill Osama Bin Laden.
When Israel bombed the nuclear facility Iraq was building in 1981, one of the things that helped Israel was surprise. Surprise was also very important in Israel’s attack on a Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007. At this point, there will be no surprise in any attack on Iran, which would make the attack that much harder, and which has given Iran a chance to prepare for such an attack.
Also, even if we really could do it from a purely technical point of view, what are the diplomatic costs and other ramifications of doing it? Obviously, diplomatic costs aren’t the only factor, and they don’t get to decide the question by themselves, but they are a factor and they need to be considered. What would be worse, a world in which Iran had nuclear weapons or a world in which we forcibly stopped Iran from getting nuclear weapons and countries and people throughout the Middle East turned violently against us? I don’t know. The future is a hard place to predict, and one should not assume the answers are easy.
But regardless of what we decide to do, perhaps my biggest concern is that we are going to find out that Iran has nuclear weapons before we decide what we want to do.
On September 11, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told CBS’s “This Morning” program that once Iran makes its final decision to develop nuclear weapons, the US would have a year to stop them:
"‘It's roughly about a year right now. A little more than a year. And so ... we think we will have the opportunity once we know that they've made that decision, take the action necessary to stop (Iran).
[The United States has] pretty good intelligence [on Iran]. We know generally what they're up to. And so we keep a close track on them.’"
But Secretary Panetta’s confidence is in intelligence agencies that thought East Germany was a Communist success story right up until the Wall came down and we learned the truth about the decay in the East. Did the intelligence community that Secretary Panetta has so much confidence in with respect to Iran tell President Obama to expect all of the chaos that has occurred in Libya since Colonel Gaddafi was ousted?
More specifically, consider intelligence on Iran. In December of 2007, the intelligence agencies issued a National Intelligence Estimate (“NIE”) saying that, in 2003, Iran had halted its “nuclear weapons program” (as opposed to its efforts to enrich uranium, an important distinction – see the next paragraph).* While the NIE said it had “high confidence” that Iran had halted these efforts in 2003, it also said it only had “moderate confidence” that the program had not been restarted.* In other words, in 2007 the intelligence community told us what happened four years previously with “high confidence” but only had “moderate confidence” about what had happened more recently.
In addition, consider the NIE’s conclusion that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program. What the 2007 NIE meant by “nuclear weapons program” was only designing nuclear weapons and building them (a/k/a “weaponization”). As indicated above, the term “nuclear weapons program” did not include uranium enrichment. And as Admiral Michael McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, said at the time, actually making nuclear weapons is easier than enriching uranium.* Once you get the uranium enriched, the nuclear weapons are easy. In early 2008, in response to a question by then-Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, Admiral McConnell agreed that it would be very difficult to know when Iran restarted its “weaponization” program.* And yet, Secretary Panetta tells us now, with apparent certainty, that we will know Iran’s schedule for completing the building of nuclear weapons with a year to spare.
A final example: It was these same intelligence agencies that Secretary Panetta has so much confidence in that assured President Bush in 2002 that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It was a “slam dunk” one of them said. But it turned out not to be true. Those who don’t like President Bush claim that there was intelligence in 2002 saying that the opposite about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and President Bush didn’t believe it.
Actually, neither view of what happened in 2002 gives you any confidence that we will have a whole year to react to any final Iranian decision to build a nuclear weapon. If President Bush was told by his intelligence officials that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction (when they didn’t), why should Secretary Panetta be so confident that we are getting our information about Iran right today? On the other hand, if there was contradictory intelligence in 2002 and the answer wasn’t clear then, why should anyone think the answer as to what Iran is doing will be clear today?
Given our history of intelligence failures, how can Secretary Panetta be so sure that our intelligence agencies are getting it right this time? And that they will get it right with a whole year to act? The fact is that we don’t know and we can’t be sure. Secretary Panetta’s belief that we do is seems naïve.
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* “Iranian Nuclear Rewrite,” The Wall Street Journal, February 8, 2008.
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