Love of the Land: Can the US Contain a Nuclear Iran?

Can the US Contain a Nuclear Iran?

Emily B. Landau
INSS Insight No. 171
24 March '10

With any hope of a new round of UN Security Council sanctions on Iran now postponed until June, and the understanding that if at all, these will be weak and ineffective measures, Obama's diplomatic initiative is slowly grinding to a halt. Taking into account Iran's steady progress in developing fissible material, its work on producing a nuclear warhead, and its ever-improving missile capabilities -- together with low expectations that anything in this dynamic will impress upon the Obama administration the need to ultimately take military action -- part of the discourse on this topic is changing track. Instead of focusing on the stinging failure to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions, some are arguing that it's now time to move on. They say that in the likely scenario that Iran becomes the next nuclear state, the US will simply resort to its ultimate strategy that has worked in other cases: it will contain a nuclear Iran.

But will the US indeed be able to contain a nuclear Iran? The answer to this question involves two levels: first, US credibility vis-à-vis Iran, and second, what the US will be seeking to contain. On both counts, there is little room for optimism.

Containment (and deterrence) of an adversary necessarily depend on a state's ability to transmit to the adversary credible threats of consequences for certain behavior on the part of the adversary. In this regard, the idea that the US can contain Iran cannot be divorced from what has transpired over the past year vis-à-vis the diplomatic initiative that Obama has pursued from his first day in office. The lesson that Iran has learned from the Obama administration is that while there has been no shortage of threats of consequences, there have been little to no actual consequences. Iran has seen that the US sets red lines and deadlines that in practice are virtually meaningless. The US has undermined its own ability to present a credible threat by saying outright that it has no intention of taking military action because it is overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it has clarified through its actions that broad multilateral agreement is more important than demonstrating resolve to Iran in the economic realm as well. Why should we assume that the US will be any more successful in projecting credibility toward Iran when this state becomes a nuclear state than it has been in the period before Iran crossed this line?

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Love of the Land: Can the US Contain a Nuclear Iran?

Israel Matzav: Iran: Is containment an option?

Iran: Is containment an option?

Former Clinton military analyst Kenneth Pollack believes that it's inevitable that the West is going to have to adopt a long-term 'containment' strategy against a nuclear Iran.

Iran is a very different country and it has a very different leadership, he said.

Iraq's former president "was a reckless decision maker" who did things that were suicidal.

"That is not the kind of person who understands deterrence logic," said Pollack.

Iran is also much larger than Iraq, and a much larger military endeavor would be needed to invade it, he said.

"It might even mean reinstituting the draft," Pollack added.

America, he said, has the military power to crush Iran, but is unlikely to use it. Israel, in contrast, could decide to attack Iran, but it does not have the capability to destroy it's nuclear program.

That depends on how one defines 'reckless.' If anything, the apocryphal Ahmadinejad and Khameni may be even less likely to understand 'deterrence logic' than was Saddam Hussein. And that makes the United States refusal to crush Iran even more frustrating.

At best, what Israel could hope for is to set the program back by a number of years, Pollack assessed. But in so doing, Israel would have to assume that Iran would retaliate through its allies Hamas and Hizbullah, which are armed and stationed on Israel's borders.

At best, Israel could hope to set Iran back by a number of years and get the United States involved in fighting Iran. Will the US actually sit and turn the other cheek if its troops in Iraq are attacked? Maybe and maybe not. Under Obama, one cannot be sure.

The Hamas - Hezbullah threat to Israel is overplayed. Hamas is in no position to attack Israel. It has very limited capability to attack Israel, and if Israel attacks it without the limitations of Operation Cast Lead (and if Hamas attacks effectively, there is no reason to believe Israel won't do that - Goldstone has taught us that there's no point in restraint), Hamas will not last long. The same goes for Hezbullah, which constitutes at least as great a danger to Lebanon as it does to Israel.

But if anything makes Pollack's argument suspect, it's this:

A strike intended to strengthen the opposition could actually undermine the best chance for long-term regime change, said Pollack. After all, an attack could "cause people to rally around the government" led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Similarly, he said, when it comes to sanctions, one must be careful about unduly harming civilians, such as by blocking Iran's ability to important refined petroleum.

I'll be that the Iranian opposition doesn't believe that.

Where Pollack is right is when he argues that sanctions won't be effective. That's not because they could not be effective, but because the West doesn't have the will to impose them.

"We need to think about sanctions in a different way," he said.

The severe trade and financial restrictions, which the UN imposed against Iraq from 1990 and until 2003, were 10 times as harsh as anything that is now being thought of for Iran, said Pollack.

And they did not work.

Pollack said that under former president Bill Clinton he was in charge of the public diplomacy campaign to show people that the Iraqi sanctions were not harming civilians.

"We came up with so many smart ways to get the message out that no one would die, and that it was all because Saddam was taking the money and using it to build palaces," said Pollack.

None of that held water when Iraqis complained that children were dying as a result of the sanctions, said Pollack. Crippling sanctions very quickly become unsustainable, he added.

"Most of the time the people blame the country sanctioning them," he said, and the "international community tires of those kind of sanctions very quickly."

The argument over whether the West has the will to impose sanctions is already irrelevant: It's too late to impose them.

All of which makes it inevitable that Israel will try to take out Iran's nuclear capability when the time is right. Will Israel succeed in at least delaying Iran's deployment of a nuclear weapon? Yes, God willing.... And maybe it will even force the US to get involved enough to put an end to the threat.

Israel Matzav: Iran: Is containment an option?