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Iran and the Bomb
By Carlton S. Coon*
Amb. Coon calls upon his many years of servicein the Middle East and South Asia as a senior U. S. diplomat to assess a developing threat to U.S.-Iranian relations—Tehran's evident move toward acquiring nuclear weapons. –Ed.
Iran is much in the news these days. The Europeans are desperately trying to persuade the Iranian Government to stop its march toward developing an effective nuclear weapons capability, while the US is huffing and puffing in the background, and Israel is maintaining an ominous silence. The Iranians are trying to convince everyone that their hearts are pure, that they are mainly interested in nuclear power, and that they can be persuaded to limit their nuclear development to peaceful purposes if the price is right. Meanwhile, Iranian opposition groups and others are feeding the Western world's intelligence agencies (and press) all kinds of information, and presumably misinformation, to try to prove the Iranians are lying in their teeth, and that they either have the capability already or that they are going full speed ahead to get it. Nobody believes anybody's claims, nor should they. It is not an environment where any sane observer can take any assertions at face value, and any and all evidence has to be examined very carefully before being even provisionally accepted.
Americans tend to assume that the Iranians are the bad guys in this drama, and are just being troublemakers. But if you step back and look at it from Tehran's perspective, you see a different picture. I hope nobody considers me part of the problem for trying to do this. I'm just trying to describe the terrain in which this rather dicey multifaceted contest is being fought.
Iran is a big country with a lot of oil and a strategic location between the Middle East and South Asia. It has a history of independence and empire going back several millennia. When I lived there in the mid-1960s, the country was developing rapidly, and a lot of that development was military muscle we were supplying. The Shah was boasting that by the end of the century Iran would overtake Germany as an economic powerhouse. But then the people, led by the ayatollahs, kicked him out. They did this partly because he was beholden to us, but mainly because he was a dictator who relied on secret police instead of the ballot box, and they wanted more freedom. The ayatollahs disappointed them, and now they are edging toward another regime change, hopefully peaceful, that will let an increasingly worldly-wise population have more of the freedom they want and are ready for.
Iran was relatively isolated geographically until 9/11, but then, quite suddenly, the neighborhood got a bit crowded. We knocked out Saddam, Iran's foe, which was a plus from Iran's perspective, but the advantage was tempered by the fact that our troops didn't go home, they settled in, just west of their border. And US forces had already established themselves just east of their border on the Afghan side. Meanwhile we were forging a new strategic relationship with Uzbekistan and its neighbors, just up to the north. The world's military superpower had been on the other side of the world; now it was sitting in Iran's lap. This might have been tolerable except for the obvious fact that Bush tends to do what Israel's Sharon tells him to do, and Israel is truly hostile, and armed with its own nukes.
The Iranians are not stupid. Given the new regional climate, they figured they needed nukes of their own, and they needed them fast, not to attack Israel or anyone else, but to act as a deterrent against an attack by Israel, with US support. It's the old chicken game known as mutual deterrence--if you nuke us we'll nuke you back. It's the same psychology that drove the Russians in the early 1950's to match our new weapons, and then drove us when we were under the impression the Russians had forged ahead (the famous missile gap). Any nation worth its salt that feels threatened is going to try to do something about it. Isn't this what we are doing with the "war on terror"?
The Iranians know that the process of getting nukes of their own will be very tricky, and there will be a period of maximum danger after they've crossed the Rubicon and before they have an effective deterrent. But they've had a lot of experience with tricky diplomacy over the last several millennia and they're about as good at the game as anyone. Plus there are the internal politics. The ayatollahs have a bear by the tail, in this democracy movement, and they know that the best way to keep their populace in line is by scaring them with an external threat. Sound familiar? So they are not all that averse to risk-taking, as they plot their tricky course through the minefield that lies between their present condition and the acquisition of an effective deterrent. The name of their game is to get the rest of us mad at them, but not so mad that someone actually takes a swat at them.
The Europeans have a pretty good idea of what the stakes are and why the Iranians are behaving as they do. They are old hands at this kind of diplomatic chicken game themselves. They understand that Iran will have an effective nuclear power program come what may, both because the Iranians want it in its own right, and because it's a step toward eventual acquisition of a weapons program. The Europeans also understand that the best way to hold the Iranians back from that next step, from a power program to nukes, is through negotiations. This is a relatively limited objective, and it may work, at least for a while, particularly if the result of the negotiations is to help the Iranians feel a bit more secure. Furthermore, this approach has the major collateral advantage of reducing the external pressure on Iran, and thereby enhancing the opportunities for the democrats to reform the regime.
There's a kind of good cop, bad cop game running now, with the Euros in the good cop role and the Bush administration playing the heavy. Everybody is playing the chicken game with everybody else. If everybody remembers that this is the name of the game, and no one party pushes beyond the limits, we might still come out with the least bad of all possible solutions, namely an Iran that is technologically capable of producing a bomb, but willing to refrain from producing it, at least until further notice. I am reasonably confident the Europeans understand this and will play the game properly. I am less confident about the Iranians. And I am not at all confident that the Bush administration sees its role in this light and can play its part in a sufficiently restrained way.
So far, the Bush administration has been speaking loudly while brandishing the relatively small stick of threats to refer the case to the Security Council with an eye toward imposing sanctions. This is all very well, but what if we do, and the Chinese veto the sanctions resolution? Other evidence suggests an increasingly close relation between the oil-hungry Chinese, and an Iran that would increasingly welcome a large infusion of Chinese consumer goods. [Washington Post, November 17, page A21]. And in any case, the threat of sanctions is probably not enough in itself to deter Iran from trying to get across that nuclear threshold and join the big boys.
The Iranians must, however, be worried that the Bush administration wouldn't stop there, but would follow up with some kind of military option, either directly or through Israel. In this sense, the good cop, bad cop routine might be effective. And the Iranians may be justified. Given the way the neocons in Washington railroaded an innocent America into a senseless war on Iraq, can the ayatollahs in Tehran be sure that America really understands that it is just playing chicken with them, and won't lose patience at some point and strike?
I don't think we need to worry about the worst-case scenario of an outright US invasion of Iran. Our professional military, already stretched painfully thin, will almost certainly veto any such action. So the worst the ayatollahs would have to fear would be an Israeli air strike at their nascent facilities. This would irritate them, and it might set their nuclear program back some, but it would also encourage them to burn their bridges and go for a nuke as fast as they could. The European thrust for compromise would be stymied, the whole region would become less secure, and our erstwhile friends across the Atlantic would have yet another reason to regard us (and our Israeli allies) as the bull in the china shop, the world's number one threat to international peace and security.
October 26, 2004
Revised November 20, 2004
Endnotes
Note *: Amb. Coon was a career officer in the U.S. Foreign Service from 1949 to 1985. Most of his posts were in or involving the Near East and South Asia. He served as ambassador to Nepal from 1981 to 1984. Since retiring he has published Culture Wars and the Global Village (2000) and One Planet, One People (2003). He has previously provided comment to this journal. Back