The Foreign Service Journal, February 2007

the coin in which we would have to pay? We know what Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad wants: a quashing of the investigation into the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, a free hand in Lebanon and pos- session of the Golan without conditions. And we know what Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadine- jad wants: acquiescence in Tehran’s nuclear bomb devel- opment program. Which of these prices are Baker and Hamilton prepared to pay? The unhappy reality is that there is only one way out of Iraq that is not catastrophic: We must fight our way out. By that I mean we must secure the conditions under which the Iraqi government can function and will be the most powerful domestic force, stronger than either the Sunni insurgents or the Shiite militias. To accomplish this, we should implement the administration’s plan, long advocated by Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., to increase significantly the number of troops in Iraq, at least until the situation stabilizes. If this will strain our military capabilities, that is proof certain that our armed forces are just too small. True, our military expenditures already roughly equal the rest of the world’s combined. But aside from the fact that our forces are more costly, in salaries and technology, than anyone else’s, we also shoulder unique responsibilities. In light of the failure of the U.N. to fulfill the function that its founders intended, American power is the fulcrum of world peace. Even with Bush’s defense hikes and the high cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, military spending is running at about 4 percent of our GDP. In the first decade of the Cold War, we spent roughly 10 percent of our GDP on the military, and for the rest of the Cold War, we averaged above 5 percent. If the war against terrorism is indeed a war in much the same sense as the Cold War — as I believe it is, and as the president says it is — then we need to spend whatever it takes to make sure our military forces are adequate to meet any test that this war may entail. Bomb Iran Dicey as our situation in Iraq is, we cannot escape deal- ing with the threat of Iran becoming a nuclear weapons state. Even were we to achieve in Iraq the best imagin- able outcome from where we stand today, that accom- plishment would be negated by Tehran’s gaining an atom- ic bomb. Never mind the threat of a direct (or indirect) nuclear attack by Iran against Israel, or the possibility that Iranian fissile material could find its way into the hands of anti-American terrorists; such weapons would give Tehran a decisive boost in its quest for regional dominance. That would thrust us, willy-nilly, into a new global power strug- gle akin to those we fought against communism and fas- cism. Some Americans may find the prospect of Iran as a rival far-fetched. Despite its oil wealth, the country has only about one-quarter the population of the U.S. But that is not how the Iranian regime sees it. Rather, it notes that there are only one-quarter as many Americans as there are Muslims worldwide. More to the point, the regime sees itself, much as Lenin did, as the spearhead of global transformation. As President Ahmadinejad puts it: “Thanks to the blood of the martyrs, a new Islamic revo- lution has arisen. ... The era of oppression, hegemonic regimes and tyranny and injustice has reached its end. ... The wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world.” By intimidating rivals and stirring the admiration of the Western-resenting masses across the Muslim world, a nuclear bomb could enable Tehran to achieve the role it sees for itself as the leader of that world-spanning revo- lution. Thus would jihadism, with its capacity to inspire loyalty and self-sacrifice, be yoked to the power of a ris- ing state, just as communism was in 1917. The Soviets and the Nazis each demonstrated how a relatively poor and weak state can soar on the wings of a totalitarian ide- ology. In the end, Iranian-led jihadism would not be powerful enough to defeat the United States, just as Nazi Germany and Communist Russia were not, but might cause untold death and destruction before finally being subdued. Doesn’t the chasm between Iranians and Arabs and between Shiites and Sunnis offer an insurmountable impediment to Iranian leadership in the Muslim world? It does not. We saw in the passionate support for Hezbollah that this past summer’s war in Lebanon evoked across the Middle East that Islam can readily unify against a common infidel foe. There is no reasonable hope that negotiations or eco- nomic sanctions can turn Tehran’s rulers away from the dream of great-power status; away from their revolution which its founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, said was not merely an Iranian but a pan-Islamic revolution. The only way to forestall an Iranian nuke — unless a change of regime that appears nowhere on the horizon solves this F O C U S 38 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 7