The Foreign Service Journal, June 2007

weakest points of the U.S. Navy. The 2000 attack on the USS Cole , in particular, has no doubt been a topic of interest for Iranian strategists. Although the Navy has since in- creased countermeasures to guard against a similar attack, U.S. Admiral Vern Clark remarked after the Cole attack that “it would be extraordi- narily difficult to have ever observed [the attacking boat] in time to do anything to have stopped it.” Doubts that Tehran would close the Strait of Hormuz should not remove fears about the potential Iranian responses to an attack. The essential truth is that Iran has a variety of tactics at its disposal that range from undesirable to quite dangerous. Unintended Consequences The longer-term and unintended consequences of attacking Iran are important to examine as well. First, there is the issue of proliferation. Since the Cold War ended, the United States has embraced a for- eign policy that is seen as inherently dangerous to many countries. Observers point to U.S. military action against Serbia and Iraq and our support for regime-changing “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. In addition, after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush sin- gled out Iraq, Iran and North Korea as members of an “axis of evil.” Of the axis members, the one country Washington suspected had nuclear weapons, North Korea, has remained essentially untouched, while the one country we were certain did not have nuclear weapons, Iraq, was invaded. As Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution notes, “the Iraq example coupled with the North Korea example probably is part of the motivation for some in Iran to get a nuclear weapon.” Bombing Iran would only further underscore the dilemma faced by states that find themselves on Washington’s hit list. Without nuclear weapons, there is no assurance that the United States will not attack — other than supine acquiescence to Washington’s various demands. As Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling has pointed out, the perverse fact is that America’s counter- proliferation policy is a prime driver of proliferation. Other unintended consequences would include the effect of Iranian civilian casualties on our diplomatic standing and the hatred of America that it would amplify in Islamic countries. Any decision to attack Iran should be evaluated in terms of how it would affect the “war on ter- ror.” Footage of civilian casualties would be aired again and again in Arab and Muslim media, providing fodder for anti-American dema- gogues. And starting a war with a third Islamic country in less than than a decade surely would be used as evidence that Osama bin Laden’s predictions about U.S. intentions were correct. As a number of recent U.S. government reports have admitted, the main driver of Islamic extremism is American foreign policy. The Government Accountabil- ity Office concluded in May 2006 that “U.S. foreign pol- icy is the major root cause behind anti-American senti- ments among Muslim populations.” Two years earlier, the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board made the point even more forcefully: “American direct intervention in the Muslim world has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single digits in some Arab societies. … Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom’ but, rather, they hate our policies.” If we are going to fight a war against Islamic terror- ism, it would be wise to take into account the factors that feed it. Policy choices that worsen public opinion of the United States in the Muslim world are strategi- cally relevant, and would be detrimental to the war on terrorism. Undermining the Reform Movement Finally, the implications of a U.S.-Iran war for the prospect of gradual political and economic liberalization — the factors most relevant to the eventual erosion of the clerical regime in Tehran — would be dire. “Any attack on Iran will be good for the government and will actual- ly damage the democratic movement,” Iranian dissident Shirin Ebadi has warned. This issue of undermining the reform movement in Iran is (or should be) at the center of the debate about whether or not to bomb. The logic behind bombing relies on a series of assumptions about the results: first, that it would delay Iranian acquisition of a bomb; second, F O C U S 36 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 7 The issue of undermining the reform movement in Iran is (or should be) at the center of the debate about whether or not to bomb.