The case for not attacking Iran
British officials accept that there are no easy options for
dealing with Iran. With or without a nuclear bomb, a full-scale
Iraq-style invasion is clearly impossible. Iran is twice the size,
more mountainous, far better armed and with a government, however
unpopular, that enjoys far greater legitimacy among its own people
than Saddam’s ever did. Clandestine efforts to change the nature of
the regime also seem unlikely to work. If Iran’s own reform movement
could not manage it from within, the United States is most unlikely
to manage it from outside.
A bombing raid, perhaps an Israeli bombing raid, on Iran’s
nuclear facilities, before they are ready to produce a weapon, might
sound like the easy option. It would be the least bad if
negotiations fail, and we are determined that we cannot live with a
nuclear Iran. But if one weapons facility can be kept secret, so can
others. Bombing could never hope to guarantee that all the nuclear
sites had been destroyed, and the entire programme had been stopped.
And it would risk killing off all possible hope of reform, and
turning Iran into a genuine outlaw state — something it is not quite
at the moment.
According to Ken Pollack, the highly respected Washington Middle
East analyst, Iran’s current status as a fully-fledged US
hate-object is partly the result of an accident. Since the embassy
hostage-taking in 1979, relations have not been warm. But there have
been several attempts at rapprochement since. And, by Pollack’s
account, Iran only ended up in President Bush’s famous ‘Axis of
Evil’ speech as little more than ‘padding’. Bush’s speechwriters
‘had come up with this great line, and they needed a third country
to make up an Axis’, he quotes one administration official as
telling him.
Unlike Saddam, the Iranians do not have a recent history of
grossly aggressive, reckless behaviour. They have never invaded
another country or launched WMD against their own people. Despite
ample capabilities, they have not been implicated in an act of
terrorism against the West since 1996. Their decision to stop the
practice back then, in response to a serious US warning, shows a
most un-Saddam-like capacity to learn from their mistakes. The
mullahs know that any attempt to pass WMD technology to terrorist
groups would result in their annihilation.
In an episode that deserves to be better known, Tehran even gave
substantial support to the Afghanistan phase of President Bush’s war
on terror. There was genuine sympathy, and spontaneous candlelit
vigils, in the days after 11 September — perhaps the only such
demonstrations in the entire Muslim Middle East. US transport
aircraft were allowed to refuel at airfields inside Iran during the
war against the Taleban, and Tehran weighed in with its Northern
Alliance allies to persuade them that the US was serious about
overthrowing Mullah Omar’s regime.
Much is made in neocon circles of the presence of some senior
al-Qa’eda leaders in eastern Iran, where they fled after the Afghan
war. But the Iranians have offered to hand over these men to the
United States or to a US ally, if Washington agrees to give Tehran
members of a pro-Saddam, anti-Iranian militia, the MEK, whom it
holds in Iraq. So far, this offer has been refused, amid suspicions
that the United States may want the MEK for its own purposes if it
ever gets round to organising some sort of regime change.
And it is in Iraq where Iran has been most important. Tehran’s
conduct there has not been perfect. But it has ordered its various
Iraqi proxies not to obstruct the reconstruction process. And Iran,
with its substantial influence in Iraqi Shia-land, can make the US
occupation untenable if it chooses. It can massively boost the
killing power of Iraq’s Shia insurgents. It has not done so. This,
as much as any other reason, is why, whatever the rhetoric, the
United States will have to be cautious about taking on the Iranians.
In discussions with journalists and British officials over the
last six months, Iran has discreetly made it clear that if it should
be attacked, it has the power to turn the current mess in Iraq into
a Lebanon-in-the-1980s-style calamity, and send a lot more men of
the British and American armies back home in boxes. That is the main
reason why the current policy of negotiation, coupled with threats
from each side to make life difficult for the other, will probably
continue for some time, however tough the rhetoric from Washington.
Ironically, by our pursuit of an unnecessary enemy in Iraq, we
have limited our options for dealing with a rather more dangerous
one in Iran.
Andrew Gilligan is the diplomatic and defence editor of The
Spectator.
| 
