Tehran Develops Nukes and Threatens Israel with Annihilation
German foreign policy has a strong accomodationist tendency. The German foreign policy elites do not believe in Berlin’s ability to change the course of history or shape world events. That is why when it comes to the topic of Iran, there is a lot of talk in foreign policy circles about containment. If you cannot prevent the Mullahs from developing nuclear weapons, the hope is to neutralize Iran’s threat as a nuclear power the same way the West countered the Soviet threat during the Cold War – through deterrence.
The storming of the British embassy in Tehran in November 2011 is a stark reminder of why containment might just not work: because Iran is, to put it mildly, an unconventional state actor and certainly not a status quo power. Within the European debate, many voices argue that Iran wants a nuclear program just so it can protect itself against the various forms of American military presence in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf States and Turkey.
So while Iran’s nuclear program might violate international treaties that Iran itself agreed upon, it is understandable from a strategic point of view. The underlying idea of this argument is that Iran, after fulfilling its defensive goals, will not use the bomb aggressively toward the rest of the world.
This is a view that sharply contrasts with Iranian reality. The regime is still full of revolutionary zeal and if one takes a closer look at Iranian activities, especially by the Al Quds (Jerusalem) wing of the revolutionary guards, it is clear that Iran is following a foreign policy that is full of hubris. It would befit a global power, not the emerging middle power Iran actually is.
In addition to its many destabilizing moves in the Middle East, Iran continues to pursue a path of provocation by undertaking projects such as providing African separatists with weapons as well as, according to my sources, exploring the possibility of constructing a missile base in Chavez-controlled Venezuela – as it were, the backyard of the US. Moreover, Iran maintains, with the help of Hezbollah cells, a sizable presence in Europe and Latin America and will soon launch a propaganda TV station in Spanish, HispanTV, to influence Latin American politics.
Iran is a country of global revolutionary ambitions. There is no indication that a bomb will change that. In fact, it will change Tehran’s foreign policy for the worse. Much can be said about Iran’s nuclear program and its intentions regarding Israel. Europeans tend to believe in the pedagogical qualities of the bomb: if you have one, you are forced to behave like a rational actor. This is the European experience from the Cold War. The problem is: unlike the Soviets, the Shiite Mullahs believe in an afterlife or paradise. And they also believe in apocalyptic end-ofhistory designs. There is a strong dose of such thinking in the Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadienedjad. Even former president Aki Akbar Hashemi Rafsandjania, a so-called pragmatist, once contemplated that destroying Israel with the bomb might be worth the costs of the attacking country. As quoted in 2001: “If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.”
So we should not be certain that Iran would not use the bomb against Israel. And if they do not want to deploy nuclear weapons against Israel, they might just as well follow Saddam Hussein’s playbook. As the “Saddam tapes” show, the former Iraqi dictator developed a nuclear program not only to deter and defeat Iran, as was the conventional wisdom of Middle East experts, but also to neutralize the Israeli nuclear threat, making it possible to fight a conventional war of attrition against Israel with a pan-Arab army.
So the strategic fallout of a nuclear program for Iran would be significant, even if the Mullahs do not use it. For decades Iran has been a destabilizing force in the region and beyond as it tried to overthrow neighboring regimes in the Gulf and elsewhere. And it has never hesitated to use terror organizations as proxies. A bomb would of course embolden Teheran to intensify these policies. With a nuclear program, it would be much more difficult to reign in the Iranian appetite for destruction in the region. Iran wants to become the hegemonic power in the area and the bomb would be the shield protecting it against retaliation. Ultimately this would lead to Saudi- Arabia, Turkey and Egypt to develop nuclear programs as well. Middle eastern politics are already highly complicated. Add the nuclear dimension and you can imagine how difficult it will be for the different actors in the regions to justly calculate their moves. This development would lead to a high risk of an accidental nuclear war in the region.
However, in my opinion, the biggest threat will arise when the Iranian regime is eventually overthrown. The Tehran rule is inherently unstable and constantly looses legitimacy in the eyes of the Iranian people. This has been proven by the mass uprising after the rigged presidential elections in the summer of 2009. The regime can stay in power only by using even more brutal force to suppress the opposition. The revolution has taken its course, but now the Iranian people are ready to move on and shed the shackles of clerical rule, which is increasingly beginning to look more like a military dictatorship. The regime cannot last forever. Like the dictatorships of the Arab world, it will eventually be overthrown and if Iran possesses the bomb, this might be the most dangerous scenario of all. This is because the nuclear program is not controlled by the Iranian military, but by the revolutionary guards. They are highly interwoven with the Lebanese terror organization Hezbollah. Iran yields considerable influence over Hezbollah, but Hezbollah also has influence within the revolutionary guards. Once the regime falls, the guards – the bearer of the revolutionary flame – will most likely decide to pass on the bomb to their ideological brethren in Lebanon and then nobody in the Western world will be safe. Hezbollah could detonate bombs in major Western cities without leaving traces that could lead to a state actor that would have to worry about retaliation.
These catastrophic scenarios should make the west join forces and put the utmost economic pressure on a the regime that might one day become the most dangerous rogue state in the world. For this reason we should not prematurely exclude our option of last resort: a preventive military campaign against nuclear installations in Iran.