I don’t usually think much of Charles Krauthammer’s writing, as I often think he’s just a right-wing blowhard.
Today, however, he has a compelling column about the Iran situation. He discusses what comes next for Iran given its continuing intransigence in nuclear weapons negotiations. He uses stark language to describe why an attack against Iran may come, what the costs of it would be, and what the cost of doing nothing would be as well.
On why an attack may be imminent:
In his televised Sept. 11 address, President Bush said that we must not “leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons.” There’s only one such current candidate: Iran.
The next day, he responded thus (as reported by Rich Lowry and Kate O’Beirne of National Review) to a question on Iran: “It’s very important for the American people to see the president try to solve problems diplomatically before resorting to military force.”
“Before” implies that the one follows the other. The signal is unmistakable. An aerial attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities lies just beyond the horizon of diplomacy.
On the terrible cost of such an attack:
An attack on Iran is likely to send oil prices overnight to $100 or even to $150 a barrel. That will cause a worldwide recession perhaps as deep as the one triggered by the Iranian revolution of 1979.
Iran might suspend its own 2.5 million barrels a day of oil exports and might even be joined by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, asserting primacy as the world’s leading anti-imperialist. But even more effectively, Iran will shock the oil markets by closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which 40 percent of the world’s exports flow every day.
Iran could do this by attacking ships in the Strait, scuttling its own ships, laying mines or just threatening to launch Silkworm anti-ship missiles at any passing tanker.
The U.S. Navy will be forced to break the blockade. We will succeed, but at considerable cost. And it will take time — during which the world economy will be in a deep spiral.
On the cost of doing nothing:
In the region, Persian Iran will immediately become the hegemonic power in the Arab Middle East. Today it is deterred from overt aggression against its neighbors by the threat of conventional retaliation. Against a nuclear Iran, such deterrence becomes far less credible. As its weak, nonnuclear Persian Gulf neighbors accommodate to it, jihadist Iran will gain control of the most strategic region on the globe.
Then there is the larger danger of permitting nuclear weapons to be acquired by religious fanatics seized with an eschatological belief in the imminent apocalypse and in their own divine duty to hasten the End of Days. The mullahs are infinitely more likely to use these weapons than anyone in the history of the nuclear age. Every city in the civilized world will live under the specter of instant annihilation delivered either by missile or by terrorist. This from a country that has an official Death to America Day and has declared since Ayatollah Khomeini’s ascension that Israel must be wiped off the map.
Against millenarian fanaticism glorying in a cult of death, deterrence is a mere wish. Is the West prepared to wager its cities with their millions of inhabitants on that feeble gamble?
Weighty issues to consider, indeed. I agree with Krauthammer that the radical mullahs of Iran cannot be trusted with nukes. They have made clear their intentions against America, Israel, and their allies.
Through all of this, though, let’s not forget what precipitated this crisis in no small part: by Bush labeling Iran as part of an “axis of evil” following the 9/11 attacks.
If I was the leader of a country and I heard the most powerful nation on earth target me as part of an “axis of evil” in the wake of terrible terrorist attacks, I’d make haste to develop nukes too, the rest of the world’s opinion be damned.
There is no end to the evil that Bush does and provokes.
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{ 2 comments }
What galls me is the inability of people on the right to accept that the environment today in the middle east is a *direct* result of American policies there over the last five decades. They seem to want to believe that the reason the “islamofascists” (ugh, that felt dirty to type) “hate us” is because they “hate our freedoms”. But if you actually listen to the words of the terrorist leaders, they hate us because we build military bases in their homelands, topple peaceful regimes, and give weapons to people who are threatening them.
“Axis of Evil” is just a tipping point. We’ve done a lot of groundwork prior to that speech to make sure they believe we’re up to no good.
JOhn.
What makes the situation even worse at home is the general unwillingness of the body politic to engage in critical self-examination about the very consequences of prior policy that you describe, John. And again, Bush makes matters worse by suggesting that anybody engaging in such self-examination belongs to the “blame America first” rabble and provides comfort to our enemies.
I haven’t read the article, but I suspect that Krauthammer doesn’t come close to examaining the parallel thrust on the part of Christian millenialists who would also very much like to see the End of Days arrive. When both sides spoil for a fight, a fight is nigh on impossible to prevent.
It’s both troubling and ironic that while the world must do what it can to prevent people with a thurst for mass destruction from fulfilling their wish, perhaps the only nation capable of leading the opposition is the only nation on Earth to actually have used nuclear weapons against a foe. Given the debacle of flawed pre-war intelligence about Iraq, getting the world to go along with us to prevent what might turn out to be the real danger will be an uphill climb.
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