Patrick Disney, the former Assistant Policy Director for the National Iranian American Council, has written a great piece responding to Ray Takeyh and Steven Simon’s Washington Post op-ed, which Tony Karon described as “a ‘how-to-bomb Iran’ manual.”
(Ali discussed the increasingly hawkish rhetoric coming out of the Council on Foreign Relations in his blog post Monday.)
Disney’s critical analysis of Takeyh and Simon’s article concludes that a bombing campaign of the type proposed by the CFR scholars would have disastrous effects.
Disney writes:
First, there is no military option short of a full-blown invasion and occupation. Even if all of Iran’s nuclear facilities can be located, and even if they can all be destroyed with surgical air strikes, the ruling hardliners will just rebuild them — only this time without the contraints of the IAEA.
Indeed, no proposed air strike would permanently destroy Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions and would probably exacerbate already tense U.S.-Iran and Iran-Israel relations.
He continues:
Secondly, and most disappointingly, Takeyh and Simon’s analysis totally ignores the devastating impact an attack would have on the long-term prospect of democracy in Iran. Iranians last summer took to the streets in the most passionate outbreak of popular dissatisfaction since the 1979 revolution. Those who know their history viewed the events of last year as the latest step in Iran’s democratic evolution — a process that began over 100 years ago with the constitutional revolution of 1906. Although the street protests have died down and the democracy movement is in some disarray, it is clearly still a factor in Iran. Unfortunately, dropping bombs on Iran now is the surest way to uproot any hope for peaceful democratic change in the country. The hardliners will most likely use an act of foreign aggression as justification for a brutal crackdown, and the focus of political discourse will shift away from questions of internal reforms and regime legitimacy toward external threats and the need to rally the nation’s defenses.
While Takeyh and Simon may have the luxury of discussing their hypothetical best-case scenarios for bombing Iran, Disney draws a believably dismal picture of what a U.S. or Israeli military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities might bring.
An Iranian regime which has quit the IAEA, crushed its domestic opposition and turned its nuclear program into a symbol of avenging the countless deaths from an Israeli or American air strike is a frightening thought, but one which — no thanks to alarmists such as Takeyh and Simon — could become a reality.
Disney concludes:
With the anti-Iran rhetoric at a fever pitch in Washington, it’s easy to forget sometimes just how remote of a threat Iran’s nuclear program actually is. According to numerous unclassified assessments by the U.S. Intelligence Community, Iran has not yet decided to pursue a nuclear bomb, and the US and international community still has time to convince them not to. The three to five years an attack would gain now will most certainly not be worth the cost it would incur: a non-democratic Iran with an overt nuclear weapons program and a vendetta against Western powers who attacked it.
And where do you think Russia and China will be when the chips are down. It will be their chance to clear the U.S. out of the East once and for all – The Crusades Live ON.
I prefer to believe, Jason, that we will finally begin to heal after we run out of money.
Lets get the facts straight:
1) If the US and/or Israel attack Iran it is and will be a act of war.
2) Iran will retaliate using everything it has to defend itself including chemical and bio weapons. Iran will not hold back as some suggest, this is what a war is.
3)Russia WILL get involved,of this there is NO QUESTION.
4)China WILL get involved,of this there is no QUESTION.
5)Nuclear weapons will be used…..no question.
6) Anyone who thinks that attacking Iran will not lead to a larger even global war is simply “lost in a state of lunacy”. We need to stop sugar coating the facts about what war with Iran means and face the facts now before the bombing starts because if we are going to allow this to happen then we need to accept the reality of what the aftermath will look like.
Are we all ready for all out war….nuclear war.
A few points:
1. Despite the success of Western propaganda to the contrary – several polls around the world, especially those in Western countries consistently show that Iran ranks along with Israel and USA as one of the top ‘terrorist’ countries, as an aggressive nation, as a pariah, etc., attesting to the huge success of that sustained propaganda – Iran is perhaps the most peaceful countries in the world, not having attacked any other country in the last 250 years (please don’t respond with, “how about the Iran-Iraq war; Iraq attacked Iran on instigation and full cooperation of the Western countries and their clients in the Gulf who drained their treasuries to support that war on orders from their masters and thereby enriched the military-industrial complexes in the Western nations).
2. It is a signatory to the NTP; the IAEA, which monitors Iran’s uranium processing sites round the clock, has been regularly reporting that all the low grade fissile material that Iran makes is accounted for and that Iran has not violated the terms of the NPT treaty. The NIE of the US Intelligence services have stated that they have found no evidence that Iran currently has a nuclear weapons program. Iran has formally and repeatedly stated – such statement issued from the highest level of the government – that Iran was not manufacturing nuclear weapons and that it had no intention of doing so in the future.
3. Iran is a developing country with very limited and rudimentary technological/industrial resources and many other problems that developing countries are prone to. Those limited resources are under added pressure from UN sanctions that severely limit its ability to develop its economy or it’s military. Its military budget is a minuscule of the US Military budget or even that of Israel – Iran’s self-appointed enemy and rival and also, incidentally, the regional military superpower. US and Western military experts have pointed out that Iran’s military doctrine and preparation is oriented towards defense of the country, designed to slow down an advancing aggressor and sue for a negotiated peace. It is reported to have very limited, rudimentary and questionable offensive capability.
4. Given the international pressure Iran was under, Iran agreed to surrender its LEU stockpile for further processing and conversion into fuel rods in France and/or Russia for its small, aging medical/research reactor that was built by the US several decades ago. The fuel for that reactor, which produces isotopes used in radiation treatment of cancer patients – is scheduled to run out in the near future. It offered to do so if provided some guarantees. That agreement was ignored by the West. Later, in a second effort, Iran agreed to the terms put forward by Turkey and Brazil who successfully negotiated such a swap (fuel rods for LEU stockpile – on US instigation and encouragement (Brazil said that it has an official letter from the US President praising the efforts that were being made by Brazil and encouraging it to go ahead). However, to Brazil’s and Turkey’s surprise and disappointment (and that of Iran and many other countries) the West rejected that effort also. Some commentators have stated that the US encouraged the Brazil/Turkey initiative with the belief that it would not succeed but the US could get some free ‘brownie points’ in its propaganda effort to portray Iran as an obstructionist nation bent upon clandestinely acquiring nuclear weapons and would also provide US and/or Israel one more pretext/argument for launching an aggressive war on Iran. But to their chagrin the effort succeeded and Iran agreed to the Turkey/Brazil proposal. Therefore they rejected it in anger.
I agree with Wire Tap. This is not about stopping some fictional “bomb” factory. That is only for the fairy tail stories the nightly news puts out on a regular basis to make the asleep feel better about killing innocent people. Iran, and other countries in the area are victims of new American Colonization …..