The Foreign Service Journal, June 2007

A year later, despite some movement, Washington’s approach to the Iran issue still has a good chance of fail- ing. President Bush added a potential “poison pill” pre- condition — that the Iranians suspend uranium enrich- ment — before talks could take place. Ultimately, Tehran responded by rejecting any preconditions, defy- ing the U.S.-led demand. At the time of this writing, the United States is pushing for further U.N. sanctions against Iran. Unless Washington offers to put security guarantees and overall diplomatic and economic normalization on the negotiating table, it is unlikely that Iran will decide that the benefits of a diplomatic deal will outweigh the costs. Given the likelihood of failure, then, it is worth evaluating America’s options should the diplomatic approach prove fruitless. The question comes down to this: Would it be better to use military force in an attempt to stymie Iran’s nuclear program, or to accept its acquisi- tion of a nuclear weapon and prepare for a policy of deterrence? The Preventive War Option One possible approach would be to start a war in order to attempt to delay Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear capability. However, there are a host of problems with such a policy. The first problem is intelligence. A presidential com- mission concluded in 2004 that the U.S. intelligence community had “disturbingly little” information on Iran’s nuclear activities, and there’s little reason to believe the picture is any clearer today. It is quite difficult to gather credible data on a country with which America has not had diplomatic relations for more than a quarter-century, and a successful attack against a nuclear program as dis- persed and effectively hidden as Iran’s apparently is would require very good intelligence. The United States learned of startling advances in Iran’s nuclear program in 2002 only after revelations regarding the Natanz and Arak facilities were made very publicly by the opposition Mujahedeen-e-Khalq’s political arm, the National Council of Resistance in Iran. Given that these facilities obviously would rank highly on any list of potential tar- gets, we must assume that the Iranians expect that they would be the first targets of any U.S. air strikes. As Jeffrey Record of the U.S. Air War College has pointed out, “an effective strategy of counterproliferation via preventive war requires intelligence of a consistent quality and reliability that may not be obtainable within the real-world limits of collection and analysis by the U.S. intelligence community.” Even the MEK has issued a slew of “false positive” intelligence reports. The disad- vantages of relying on information from exile groups with a vested interest in regime change should have been illus- trated in Iraq. Although the analysis in this paper is based on open- source reporting, and it is possible that the classified materials contain a systematic intelligence picture of the Iranian nuclear program, it is far from clear that that is the case. Given our apparent information-gathering shortcomings inside of Iran, a preventive-war-as-counter- proliferation policy in that country would be unlikely to produce a decisive outcome. The Question of Escalation Supporters of air strikes simplify a complex situation by assuming that we know where the relevant Iranian nuclear facilities are. Some analysts explicitly point to Israel’s 1981 strike against Iraq’s Osirak reactor as a model. This analogy is strained at best. The attack against Osirak was a targeted strike at one above-ground facility located roughly 10 miles outside of Baghdad in open desert terrain. By contrast, Iran’s known and sus- pected (to say nothing of unknown and unsuspected) nuclear facilities number as many as 70, some of which are in or around civilian population centers. Unlike the Osirak reactor, Iran’s nuclear facilities are widely dispersed. As Anthony Cordesman and Khalid al- Rodhan of the Center for Strategic and International Studies note, “many of Iran’s research, development, and production activities are almost certainly modular and can be rapidly moved to new sites, including tunnels, caves and other underground facilities.” Again, targeting these sites would require an excellent intelligence pic- ture, which no one appears to have. Uncertainty about the scope of the Iranian program, F O C U S J U N E 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 33 Justin Logan is a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute. His primary research interests are nuclear pro- liferation, democracy promotion and U.S. foreign policy toward China, Russia, and South and Central Asia. His writing has appeared in Orbis , The American Conserva- tive , Reason , The American Prospect , the Chicago Sun- Times , the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Wash- ington Times.