Thomas Powers is against the use of force to prevent the government Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. After listing some of Iran’s options in retaliation for an air assault on its nuclear programme he says the following;
The next step would be invasion, destruction of Iran’s conventional army, occupation of Iran’s capital, and change of Iran’s regime, which has long been an openly declared policy objective of the United States.
He can relax about this. There is no possibility of the United States invading Iran; none at all. They don’t have enough troops to even contemplate it. He then says,
The military option is a threat; if the threat is carried out it promises widening war and the possibility of failure on the scale of disaster. Why does a policy of courting disaster have to remain on the table?
The military option is indeed a threat and for a threat to work the country that is the object of it has to believe that the country making it might just carry it out and that it would suffer as a result. If it believes that, then there is some possibility that it might alter its behaviour so as to reduce the likelihood of the threat being carried out.
This being the case, there’s nothing irrational about the insistence of the USA and Israel in not ruling out military action and the giving of giving verbal and other signals, like the recent large IAF exercise over the Mediterranean, that they might well be serious about carrying it out. The Iranian regime has to believe that the threat is real if it is to have any incentive to change tack on its nuclear programme.
Powers argument has started weakly and now it’s going to get even less convincing. He says,
More recently the examples of Iraq and Libya have suggested that international sanctions work more effectively than military threats to persuade nations to give up bomb programs.
Iraq failed to develop nuclear weapons because Israel destroyed the Osirak reactor in an air strike in 1981 and because it was later subjected to a sustained bombing campaign by the air forces of the United States and its allies before and during the First Gulf War. The draconian sanctions placed on it after that conflict certainly played a part in preventing Iraq from developing nuclear weapons but it was only possible to impose and enforce them in a context where effective Iraqi sovereignty over its national territory had already been eroded by military defeat.
The case of Libya is even more striking. It was never subjected to sanctions due to its nuclear programme. Such measures as were taken against it all arose about its support for international terrorism and, in particular, for its role in the Lockerbie bombing. And surprise, surprise; no sooner had the Baathist tyranny been overthrown in Iraq than Gadaffi all of a sudden fessed up to his attempts to acquire nuclear weapons, allowed British and American inspectors into the country to check out what sort of equipment he had been able to get his hands on and then allowed them to fly it out to the USA.
Nothing I’ve said here amounts to an argument for an attack on Iran but it’s not necessarily an irrational idea and there are no credible arguments against it it this article. Doing nothing and letting the bearded fascists get their hands on the bomb carries with it considerable risks too
