Iran: Use Nukes to prevent Nukes?

Sy Hersh's New Yorker piece raises a lot of questions that have no simple answers. Indeed, the logic of preventing a presumed former terrorist like Ahmadinejad to develop a nuke is unassailable. After getting past the obligatory kowtowing to liberal sensibilities by asking what the Pentagon planners are smoking, Hersh gets serious:

The President’s deep distrust of Ahmadinejad has strengthened his determination to confront Iran. This view has been reinforced by allegations that Ahmadinejad, who joined a special-forces brigade of the Revolutionary Guards in 1986, may have been involved in terrorist activities in the late eighties. (There are gaps in Ahmadinejad’s official biography in this period.) Ahmadinejad has reportedly been connected to Imad Mughniyeh, a terrorist who has been implicated in the deadly bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983. Mughniyeh was then the security chief of Hezbollah; he remains on the F.B.I.’s list of most-wanted terrorists.

Robert Baer, who was a C.I.A. officer in the Middle East and elsewhere for two decades, told me that Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard colleagues in the Iranian government "are capable of making a bomb, hiding it, and launching it at Israel. They’re apocalyptic Shiites. If you’re sitting in Tel Aviv and you believe they’ve got nukes and missiles—you’ve got to take them out. These guys are nuts, and there’s no reason to back off."

Under Ahmadinejad, the Revolutionary Guards have expanded their power base throughout the Iranian bureaucracy; by the end of January, they had replaced thousands of civil servants with their own members. One former senior United Nations official, who has extensive experience with Iran, depicted the turnover as "a white coup," with ominous implications for the West. "Professionals in the Foreign Ministry are out; others are waiting to be kicked out," he said. "We may be too late. These guys now believe that they are stronger than ever since the revolution." He said that, particularly in consideration of China’s emergence as a superpower, Iran’s attitude was "To hell with the West. You can do as much as you like."

Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is considered by many experts to be in a stronger position than Ahmadinejad. "Ahmadinejad is not in control," one European diplomat told me. "Power is diffuse in Iran. The Revolutionary Guards are among the key backers of the nuclear program, but, ultimately, I don’t think they are in charge of it. The Supreme Leader has the casting vote on the nuclear program, and the Guards will not take action without his approval."

The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said that "allowing Iran to have the bomb is not on the table. We cannot have nukes being sent downstream to a terror network. It’s just too dangerous." He added, "The whole internal debate is on which way to go"—in terms of stopping the Iranian program. It is possible, the adviser said, that Iran will unilaterally renounce its nuclear plans—and forestall the American action. "God may smile on us, but I don’t think so. The bottom line is that Iran cannot become a nuclear-weapons state. The problem is that the Iranians realize that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend themselves against the U.S. Something bad is going to happen."

The multivalent tendencies of Iran to have several policies at once are well known to Foggy Bottom and other analytic veterans. I have even heard an Iranian-American wish for the US to use nukes, and not because this Iranian was a lover of the Shah.

If Iran uses a nuke, it would probably be in a covert fashion, probably snuck over to Hezbollah, the gents who invented suicide bombers, to employ against Israel by submarine or suicide tractor-trailer.

Why, a rational actor would ask? The chiliastic messianic end-of-days return of the Hidden Imam would suffice, perhaps, in the gleaming eyes of Ahmadinejad. No rhyme or reason, just "rapture" fever.

But Fred Kaplan over at Slate has a good summary of the game-theory options that might be playing themselves out inside the Beltway. And Rick Moran at the RightWingNuthouse gives a nice briefing memorandum, after dousing the moonbats twittering and shrieking with cold water, of the various possibilities out there in the real world, where moonbats imitate the French with pre-emptive surrenders.

Hersh's article ends with quotes from anonymous "diplomats" that a US climbdown to sit at the negotiating table with Iran may be the least bad of the options facing American strategists. This will not go down well with Cheney and Rumsfeld, and I doubt if GWB is amenable to even ping-pong diplomacy in this day and age.