Nuclear Issues

There has been a lot of talk about Seymour Hersh’s article in this week’s New Yorker, which interviews a bunch of anonymous sources within the Bush Administration, the Pentagon, and political circles throughout Washington on the subject of Iran. There are a couple major points. The administration refuses to allow Iran to get nuclear weapons, regardless of what it has to do to stop them. The administration believes that a bombing campaign will endear us to the hearts and minds of Iranians and that 1.2 billion Muslims around the world will not be pissed about this. And (over the violent objections of the Pentagon) they are willing to use tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Iran’s nuclear-production facilities.

This. Is. Bad. Contained within the article is one source’s report that Bush wants to do what no Republican or Democratic president would have the courage to do in the future- effect full regime change in Iran. He supposedly wants this to be his legacy.

Before I go too far here, I should point out that it's a little shaky to base an enormous article full of groundbreaking foreign policy conclusions on a body of sources, of whom 75% insist on anonymity. I was always taught that with every anonymous source, the credibility of your articles goes down a little more. True, these folks probably need to protect their jobs, but if no one is willing to go on the record with their concerns, apparently, no one is too worked up yet.

Obviously the Bush administration came out with guns blazing (in a figurative sense) insisting diplomacy was their chosen track and the crisis could be resolved peacefully. It all rang a bit hollow in the context of Hersh’s article, and it didn’t help that the president of Iran (whose name is totally impossible to pronounce and I feel hypocritical trying to type) had made an enormous speech earlier in the week claiming that his country had “joined the nuclear club,” which I mentioned yesterday.

(If you want a really funny bit of trivia, go back to CNN.com or the AP or wherever and look up some pictures of the Iranian president delivering his “nuclear club” speech. In what I find incredibly hilarious, he’s giving the “we’re a nuclear nation now” speech in front of a mural full of white doves and peace signs. Unbelievable.)

On an immediate level, I get nervous because of the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Whether or not U.S. Navy aircraft have actually been practicing nuclear dive-bombing in the Gulf, there’s something called “the nuclear taboo” in international politics. There’s an unspoken agreement that, since Nagasaki, nuclear weapons should never actually be used. They can be threatened, of course- but they should remain essentially a defensive technology, making the cost of invasion or attack on a nuclear state unacceptable high.

If we break the nuclear taboo, we shatter one of the fundamental tenets of world peace for the last 60 years and permanently undermine the international non-proliferation effort. It would be a case of “do as I say, not as I do” that ended in a mushroom cloud, and America would cement its place on the world stage as an untrustworthy evil empire.

But here’s what spooks me even more than the use of nuclear weapons, on a broader level. There seem to be credible portions of Hersh’s article pointing to a Bush-administration assumption that the Iranians are going to rise up and welcome us as liberators. Never mind that the Shiite majority in Iraq is going to start a civil war (okay, more of a civil war) if we go after Iran. The Bush administration has learned absolutely nothing from their experience in Iraq. Muslim fundamentalists are going to fight us until the entire country is a graveyard and they’ll be thrilled to do it, too.

Most Democrats agree that, even though we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq, we’re going to have to clean up the mess that this administration made. And that’s smart. But I can see a major fight brewing, especially if Congress’s Republican majority gets shaved thinner or even eliminated this fall, when the Bush rhetoric starts to escalate towards action. We cannot afford to go to war with Iran. The rest of the world will go from distrusting us to actively balancing their forces against our military. The international leadership we have accumulated since World War II will crumble before our eyes, and the economy, school systems, and homeland security (which we’ll desperately need) will be under-funded to a laughable extent.

The only chance we have of preventing this from happening (and, at this rate, it will probably happen) is a Congress, either Democratic or moderately Republican, which is willing to stand up to the President and tell him and his advisors that the country is not going to support this. Iran having a nuclear weapon would be extremely, extremely bad. That is true. However, going to war with them to prevent that from happening would destroy the tattered remnants of our credibility in the wider world and strain our relationships with key allies like Britain and western Europe to the breaking point.